The Last Train to Zona Verde (13 page)

Pondering the night train versus the day bus to Swakopmund, I walked back along Bahnhof Street and around the small city center, breathless in this mile-high place. Windhoek looked the way Harare, in Zimbabwe, had once looked: a colonial capital and market town with streets wide enough to allow an ox wagon to make a U-turn. Harare was now a desperate ruin on the verge of bankruptcy, but Windhoek had grown larger without having lost its character, was well kept, proud, as solid as ever, and invested in. The uniformity of the fat squat German architecture — churches and municipal buildings and bungalows — was unmistakable and looked bombproof, built to last, as though on a street in Berlin instead of in this distant plateau in the Namib Desert. “This uniformity derives from the sense of fitness and superiority of the German outlook,” Jon Manchip White wrote in his 1971 account of his journey through this country,
The Land God Made in Anger
. White, who traveled the area in the early 1960s, provides marvelous summaries of the history and culture, though he sometimes overeggs his descriptions, even of mild, dull Windhoek, asserting that the city gives the traveler “a sense of necromancy … The African mystery is omnipresent. The deserts press round him as pitilessly as the jungle at Kinshasa.”

No “African mystery” now; only brisk, self-important Namibians busily talking on cell phones. I wandered into a shop and asked a man where I might buy a phone. He said they were easy to find and
inexpensive, and he gave me the name of an electronics store where I could sign up for one.

The store was on a side street, a rack of sample cell phones in a display case, and at the counter a woman was waiting on a customer. In the corner, at the edge of the counter, a small boy sat on a stool, his arms folded.

Seeing me, the woman clerk said, “Go there,” and gestured to the child.

I smiled and hesitated, and the boy said nothing. Then I saw that the child, about the size of an eight-year-old, was actually a grown man, with San features and bat ears and tiny hands.

I said hello.

“I am Jakob,” he said.

He was polite and patient. He’d seen me hesitate, on the point of ignoring him, taking him for a child. But here he was in a responsible job, explaining what I would have to do to get a cell phone that worked in the country. And though the phone he showed me seemed very cheap, I decided to buy it some other time.

I thanked Jakob and went away, wondering what miseries he had suffered. There were people of small stature all over Central Africa, in the Congo and in southern Angola and northern Namibia, who called themselves the Twa, or Batwa (“Twa People”). I knew of scattered groups of them in Uganda, where their villages were close to the Congo border. They gathered on the road to Bundibugyo, waving at passing cars. When a car slowed down, they called out, “Me pygmy. Take picture,” and demanded money. The Twa, who are part-time hunter-gatherers, tend to live near other peoples in a semidependent way, trading and negotiating, but have their own customs — one of which allows a woman whose husband has committed adultery to strangle the woman who presumes to be her rival. (The man is not punished.)

Jakob could have been a Twa, but I didn’t raise the delicate subject
because the one trait that unites the Twa is that they are despised by whomever they live among. And even if Jakob had not been a Twa, he would probably have been identified as one of these pygmoid people who live at the margins of the country.

I spent my time in Windhoek outfitting myself with supplies. Since I was headed to the bush after my trip to the coast, I needed more Malanil, a daily dose against malaria. This being southern Africa, I could buy the drug cheaply without a prescription, as I could my gout medicine and certain antibiotics. I found a Namibian pharmacist who helpfully described dosages. I bought batteries, insect repellent, a hat, spare socks, an elephant-hide belt, and a padlock for my bag.

Windhoek was so rich in safari gear I could have outfitted myself for an ambitious hunting expedition — safaris do not get more elaborate or bloodier than in Namibia. The abundant waterholes and low bush make it a prime destination for shooting animals, not just the Big Five (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino) but the great horned plains game too, like kudu, oryx, and eland. These animals are gunned down on concessions in the bush operated by safari companies, which also take care of stuffing and mounting the dead beast — the object of the whole ridiculous charade being the trophy.

There were hunters at my hotel, easily identifiable by their funny hats, new khaki clothes, and rifle cases — like oversized Boy Scouts — and by the way they walked in small groups, warily, keeping to themselves except when they were traipsing after their local guide. The guide was the key man in the whole enterprise. He was the arranger, the facilitator, the hirer of cooks and trackers and camp staff, the man who would drive them to the hunting concession or game ranch and bring them to within easy shooting distance of the animals, for which they’d bought licenses to kill. It was safari tourism, trophy hunting for dummies.

At the hotel, assuming I was someone he’d met the day before, a Namibian man — a Herero, he told me later — invited me to a party to watch the Rugby World Cup final, France against New Zealand.

The rugby party was a raucous, boozy crowd, screaming at a wide-screen TV in one of the hotel lounges. The Namibians cheered for the New Zealand team, known as the All Blacks; the whites cheered for France; and when New Zealand won by one point there was an eruption of hilarity rather than pandemonium.

The Namibians were not uniformly black, nor were the whites uniformly white. They were so mixed, from such obviously different racial groups, that they were unclassifiable, and because of such differences they could not make any racial assumptions. This made them easygoing, nonconfrontational, somewhat friendly, and mild-tempered.

I sat drinking beer, watching the brutal back-and-forth of the rugby match, and fell into conversation with the man in the next chair, who said he was from Huambo, in central Angola. He was an Ovimbundu, uprooted by the long Angolan civil war, and he went home only now and then. He praised his country: “It is more lively than Namibia. The people are so happy.” His name was Neto.

“I’m thinking of going to Angola by road.”

He smiled at me, as though at a child’s innocent misstatement. “No. The road is bad. There are many flights from Windhoek.”

“But I want to go over the border and see the south of Angola.”

“There is nothing but bad roads.”

When was the last time he’d been there?

“Many years ago.”

“Maybe the roads have been fixed.”

He considered this, tapping his teeth, distracted by a run in the rugby match. “Maybe. But anyway, Luanda is better. Much bigger than Windhoek.”

I saw that I would get nowhere with him on the subject of overland
travel to his country, and mentioned that I planned to go the next day to Swakopmund.

“Small, but it’s okay.”

I said I’d opted for the bus over the train, at least for the way down to the coast.

“That’s better,” he said, and though he was as black as anyone I was to meet in Namibia, he added, “Only black people take the train.”

Under a cloudless sky, the bus, with its load of Namibians and foreigners, left tidy Windhoek and passed through freshly painted provincial towns along the way — orderly Okandjia, tiny house-proud Karibib, and dignified Usakos, with stucco houses in pink and yellow pastels and thick-steepled Lutheran churches, the settlements surrounded by hot bright dust. I remembered what Karl had said about visitors being disappointed because none of this seemed like Africa. But I liked its unexpectedness; it was all new to me, and so well built and maintained. Descending to the coast, we rode along level savanna, through grassland and an immensity of gravel, then across pale stony desert.

The mountains in the distance, some as sharp as blades, were the Erongoberg, according to my map, and the pyramidal peak beyond the strange colonial town of Usakos might have been Spitzkoppe, a place I wanted to go for its rock paintings.

A big, dark chacma baboon crept through tall grass and appeared between withered clumps at the roadside. He hesitated, flinging his arms in confusion, opening his jaws wide and looking fierce. On back roads and riverbanks in Africa, I have had various encounters with troops of baboons and found them fearless and unreasonable, with terrifying teeth. Even the wisest book on the subject of baboons,
The Soul of the Ape
, by the South African naturalist Eugene Marais, does not reassure me.

I mentioned this to the man in the seat next to me — Cleo, a Namibian. He said, “They can be troublesome. They steal fruit from the farms.”

I looked into the enormous empty spaces of Erongo, the broken rock and rubble that stretched for miles, and wondered aloud what other animals might be there.

“There are ostriches. There are jackals,” Cleo said. “Even leopards you can find them.”

Swakopmund was a small Germanic seaside town of right angles on a grid of streets, bright but chilly from a brisk wind off the Atlantic. The old railway station, dating from 1901, had been turned into an elegant hotel, but otherwise there were no big hotels, only small inns and guesthouses. The many villas and well-built houses were where many Europeans — mostly Germans — spent the winter. I met a man from Hannover who had spent every winter for the past thirty years in Swakopmund. Some of those years would have been a time of civil war and turmoil in Namibia, yet he had found his annual sunshine and beer and schnitzel. He said he would have bought a house and retired here except his wife couldn’t stand it. His name was Friedrich, and parting from me he said, as a farewell, “As Germany is to Europe, Namibia is to Africa. Hard-working. Wealthy. Sensible. It is heaven!”

He recommended the Hansa Hotel, so I stayed there. It was small and hospitable and served good food. The other guests were from Germany and Holland, with a few Italians and Africans, all tourists, because there was no business in Swakopmund except tourism. The uranium mines were distant, as were the diggings for gems — tourmalines, garnets — which were mined somewhere in the desert. Had I wished, I could have stayed at the Burning Shore, ten minutes south of Swakopmund at Langstrand, a lodge that advertised itself as the place where the actress (and humanitarian, her biography adds) Angelina Jolie had brooded for a few months in 2006 before
shuttling to the Cottage Private Hospital, now also on the map as a result of the birth of her child there. The Burning Shore lodge was a newish but fairly ordinary set of walled-in buildings by the beach, and the whole of it had been commandeered and occupied for the prologue to the birth. The discovery of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Swakopmund had been an event of greater significance to the world than the discovery in the same year of a vast deposit of uranium that became the Langer Heinrich uranium mine, near the town.

The promenade in Swakopmund, like its long wooden jetty, its neatly planted palms, its villagy look, and most of all its many villas with walled gardens, made the town feel like a bourgeois refuge from the world, which in fact it was, and had been for a hundred years, hugging the shore, its back turned to the desert.

But I did not sneer at the efficiency, the order, the mildness, the streets that had no litter. Such qualities were so rare in an African city or town — certainly I had seen very few like it — I felt they should be celebrated. The dining room at the Hansa served Wiener schnitzel and carpaccio of kudu, game dumplings and springbok loin. Yet it made me restless. The whole time I was there I felt I was on vacation, an intimation that made me feel uncomfortable and frivolous and lonely.

What I had seen of Namibia, and Swakopmund, was tame. The tourists seemed fastidious, and the smooth walls of the buildings — the old German ones and the newer villas — looked prim, as if they’d been exfoliated.

After a day of walking around the town, I hired a man, Linus, of the Damara people, to take me into the desert, thinking that the wilderness might lift my spirits, but bumping along the moonscape in the Land Rover among the weird vegetation depressed me. Linus plucked medicinal plants and explained their properties, but these dusty shrubs seemed just another example of desert lifelessness.

Aloe, he said. Welwitschia. Stinkbush. Thorn scrub. Tiny mold-like
growths and crumpled lichens. And the rest — for miles — sand and gravel.

We continued up the Windhoek Road back to Usakos and then to Spitzkoppe, to hike to the rock paintings. The stone mountains all stood alone, some like recumbent animals, others like creatures breaking through the desert, surfacing from beneath the earth, still others like the toothy lower jaws of predators.

“My people live here,” he said, but he meant the Damara people, not the San who had done the paintings a few thousand years ago, and had dispersed.

More stinkbush, more spiky plants, and a singular rugged tooth rising in the desert, Gross Spitzkoppe. We left the vehicle, walked around the bare mountain of rock, and climbed up a steep side, clinging to a fixed chain. We came to an overhang, Paradise Cave. It was just the sort of shallow cave you see in the cracked and reddened stone canyons around Sedona, Arizona, and similarly serving as a sheltered gallery for petroglyphs and paintings.

“They are in bad shape,” Linus said without much interest.

The images had been vandalized, rubbed, and scraped, but even smudged, they were impressive. It is impossible to see a whole coherent shape carefully drawn in ancient stone — by an artist setting down a vision, or a dream, or the memory of a beast — and not think back to the people who had flourished in this landscape, all of them now gone, having left behind these animated figures.

Rhinos, elephants, great cats, animals with curved horns, others with tails, and — in a row — human figures wielding bows and arrows, a troop of clearly painted hunters. The vitality, the movement, in this art — none of it was static — was striking: the figures leaped across the wall in a spirited panorama of bravado and companionship.