The Last Train to Zona Verde (14 page)

In spite of the deterioration and neglect, what I saw was more than a mural depicting a glimpse of human life from the Neolithic; it was a language. It occurred to me that Chinese characters are
based on pictures. So are hieroglyphics, and so are the lines of glyphs carved into the Rosetta stone. These cave paintings served as words too, the whole wall of pictographs.

I had not realized that this cave art was closer to written language than to the mere sketching of animals. Something was shown, but more important, something was being said. Taken together, it was a statement about hunting — terrors and stratagems, the rows of images set out like sentences.

“There is a Damara village near here,” Linus said. “I can take you. It is traditional.”

But darkness was falling, and I hated African roads at night. I asked him where he lived.

“Mondesa,” he said, and explained that it was a township just outside Swakopmund.

“Let’s go there tomorrow.”

“We don’t have a tour,” he said.

“But you can show me where you live and where other people live.”

He laughed, because the concept of township tours had just recently begun in Namibia, so it had yet to become an established sightseeing feature as it was in South Africa. It seemed a pure novelty to Linus. But he said, for a fee, he would take me.

The following morning, we drove to the far end of Swakopmund, where the edge of town met the desert and the industrial area. On bare ground were rows of square, flat-topped cinderblock huts, dusted brown from the blowing grit. Beyond these cement huts were clusters of cobbled-together shacks and shanties. After spick-and-span Swakopmund this large settlement of about thirty thousand people was a dose of reality, a place of obvious poverty.

“This is Mondesa, the black township,” Linus said.

“Are there others?”

“Tamariskia. It is colored.”

Like most African townships, Mondesa had begun as a shantytown.
This was in the strictly segregated 1950s, when Swakopmund needed domestic workers and manual laborers but did not want them living in the white town. “In the desert on the northern edge of [Swakopmund] are the shanties of the Africans,” Jon Manchip White wrote in 1971, and went on, “ ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ The tag [from Plautus] was much on my mind at Swakopmund.” Segregation had officially ended with independence in 1990, yet the racial division had continued, with further subdivisions. Mondesa was carved up along tribal lines, with some streets occupied by Damara people, others by Herero or Oshiwambo people. The rutted dirt streets were lined by low, squarish, two-room huts. Some of the huts had indoor plumbing, but not many, Linus said. Public toilets and bathhouses stood on street corners.

We passed a forlorn building he identified as an orphanage, and some others, looking like holding pens, he said were kindergartens that operated on handouts. One of the more ambitious educational projects in the township, called Mondesa Youth Opportunities, had been started by an American in 2003 and was mainly run by non-Namibians and funded by foreign donations. All of this poverty and disorder and charity was a far cry from the brisk Teutonic discipline and spotless streets and five-course meals in Swakopmund, which I now found more and more misleading.

Linus’s house was much like the others, built of cinderblocks but slightly enlarged to accommodate his extended family — his nephews and other relations, all of them (so he said) unemployed.

“Your neighbor is doing some serious work on his house,” I said.

I could see the beginnings of a sheltered area, a projection of beams over the dirt yard, and a picket fence.

“He wants to turn his house into a shebeen, to make more money.”

Just what you want on your street in the edge-of-desert Mondesa township — a beer joint, with loud music, shouting, and the occasional drunken brawl for which shebeens are well known. No visual
relief brightened the place, no grass anywhere, no trees. The playing fields were mere rectangles of dust and gravel, and over the whole sprawling settlement hung a chilly air of desolation.

Tamariskia, an adjacent township named for the tamarisk tree (though none grew here), was a step up — larger houses, also of cinderblock but many of them painted. They were bigger than the ones at Mondesa, and some had garages, and cars parked in driveways.

“Just coloreds here?”

“Just coloreds,” Linus said, and pointed. We were walking toward a main road. Before we crossed the road we passed Cottage Private Hospital, where Linus proudly said that Angelina Jolie had given birth. Then he pointed to the other side of this road, at bigger, brighter houses, some of them two-story bungalows with tile roofs, and many with landscaped grounds, bushes and palm trees behind the perimeter walls. “That is Vineta.”

Vineta, nearer the ocean, Linus said was “white mostly, and some colored.”

These three communities existed within a one-mile radius: the whitest nearest the shore, with the best houses and stands of trees; the darkest and most tribal inland, at the bleakest fringe of the desert. As they said in South Africa, you could take one look at a person here and tell precisely where he or she lived. And the inhabitants of the communities worked in the half-dozen mines, either in management or digging in the open pits, scooping the uranium oxide that was sifted, treated, and carted away, to be sold to countries with nuclear reactors. (There was only one in Africa, at Koeberg, near Cape Town.)

The sight of these subdivisions, and especially the long look at Mondesa township, took the bloom off my rosy view of Swakopmund, the town of German retirees and European snowbirds and tourists from all over.

Linus said that some of the schools in Mondesa were partly staffed
with volunteer teachers from Britain and America; that some offered programs to combat teen pregnancy and to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, which infected a fifth of Namibia’s population. If you stood facing the ocean, or strolled under the fan palms along the Arnold Schad Promenade (named for a nineteenth-century merchant) or down Am Zoll by the strand, it was easy to convince yourself that it was the desirable waterhole of the brochures. The reality was bleaker; it was an oasis surrounded by unemployment, poverty, neglect, and disease.

But everyone I encountered, including the ones I questioned about the bleakness, was friendly, and many — locals and foreigners both — were optimistic about the future. Pierre, a man of fifty or so, was a bookseller. His business was slow but not bad. His shop in the center of the town was also a café. He had known much worse times. He was South African, from a farming family, and in the mid-1970s his parents decided that life in South Africa was growing dangerous, so they migrated to Rhodesia, where they had relatives. They bought some land in the south of the country, near Victoria, built a house, and planted various crops — maize, wheat, alfalfa — and as Pierre’s mother was a gardener, she laid out an elaborate formal garden, for the pleasure of the flowers, roses mostly. They had fled uncertainty in South Africa only to arrive in Rhodesia at the beginning of the Bush War.

“The war started to heat up,” Pierre said, speaking of the independence struggle, the guerrilla soldiers of the liberation movements and the Rhodesian army sniping at each other. “It surprised my parents, the violence of it, but they kept farming. Life was precarious, but they could feed themselves — and mother had her beautiful garden.”

After independence, Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe, Victoria renamed Masvingo, Pierre’s parents went on farming. But they began to be pestered by men who wanted portions of their land — men sent by President Robert Mugabe. The men called themselves war
veterans, but in reality they were landless people from overcrowded villages. Pierre’s father made concessions, signed over corners and margins of their farmland to the squatters, who put up shacks and planted vegetables. This went on for fifteen years, the farm chipped away by more and more men, some pleading, others threatening.

“Then my parents were served an eviction notice by the government,” Pierre said. “This was round about 2000. ‘Get out or else.’ ”

His mother called him in South Africa — now, after its own upheaval, being governed by Nelson Mandela — and asked him to come immediately and help them pack. They were losing the farm, the house, the crops in the fields — being thrown out, without compensation; a cabinet minister high up in the Zimbabwe government would be taking everything.

“I went,” Pierre said. He took a deep breath and gazed into the middle distance. “The sight that I cannot forget — and the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life — was my mother, on the day she left her house forever, standing with a hose in her hand, watering her garden. Knowing she would never see it again. Standing there on that sunny day, spraying the hose on her flowers.”
^*

Another man I met, Michael, who had a shop near Pierre’s, had migrated from Germany in 1986. Namibia was better then, he said — no crime, you could leave your door open. But now, with high unemployment, petty theft was common. And he was dismayed by the parsimony of the tourists. Of the tens of thousands of Germans resident in Namibia Michael said, “They never spend money, my countrymen.” He was looking forward to Oktoberfest, a big celebration in Swakopmund and Windhoek, with music and dancing and drunkenness.

“I keep my German passport.” Nodding toward the street, as though at all the other Germans, Michael added, “They do the same. There are no Namibians in this country. There are Herero, Damara, Oshiwambo, Afrikaners, Basters — that’s what they say first, if you ask. Then afterward they say, ‘Oh, yes, I’m also Namibian.’ ”

There was something colonial about Swakopmund, and perhaps it was this that the Germans liked. The old buildings still stood, some of the town looked much as it had a century before, there were no high-rises, and — owing to the hard-up townships — there was no servant problem. There were many good restaurants, the wine lists were lengthy, the prices were reasonable, the hospitality was convincing. Every evening when I returned from my forays, Herr Wacker, the general manager of the Hansa Hotel, greeted me warmly.

“You must stay longer,” he said.

I would have, but I had a train to catch.

It wasn’t easy leaving the hotel. As all the other guests were filing into the dining room, I made my way by taxi to the now obscure railway station, the driver reminding me of the all-night journey through the desert and repeating that, for a hundred dollars or so, he would whisk me to Windhoek in the morning.

But I had resolved to ride the train, and the more it was denounced (“Only black people take the train”), the greater my desire to see it. Like much in Swakopmund — many houses, the banks, some hotels, the layout of streets — the railway, too, was a hundred years old.

I found a seat that canted back and would allow me to sleep. Among my fellow passengers, some were burdened with bundles, some with small children, family groups already settling in for the night. Across the aisle was a great fat Afrikaner reading a newspaper in his language. He was sitting alone, and his entire bulging midsection was swathed in a heavy bandage, as if to prevent him from exploding.

In the seat ahead, a German, Klaus. He said he was ill. “I passed a bad night,” he explained. And he made the vomit gesture, his hand mimicking a flow from his wide-open mouth. “It was the biltong [cured meat] I ate.”

Then we left the station, and when the lights in the coach went out, the desert was lit, and glittered for hours in the light of the cold moon.

6
The Bush Track to Tsumkwe

A
N EARNEST, HIGH-MINDED
, well-funded, foreign-sponsored event — the sort I always either avoided or mocked — was being held in Tsumkwe, a small town in the remote northeast of Namibia. Much less than a town, Tsumkwe was a village crossroads in the Kaokoveld, a region in the center of Nyae Nyae, which was eighteen thousand square miles of infertile, drought-prone, famine-haunted, thinly populated bush — an unpromising area, it seemed, for such an expensive and scholarly effort. Yet I knew such places to be the beating heart of Africa.

The event would be a full day’s program of talks and films, billed as “World Day for Celebrating Audio-Visual Heritage in Namibia,” organized by the Windhoek office of
UNESCO
. You cannot hear such a pompous title without imagining a long hot day of yawning and paper shuffling and protocol, discussion groups, noble projects (“We could start a workshop … form a committee … apply for a grant”), and endless talk—the jargonized gabbing about plans that would never amount to anything more than words on the wind. You think: What’s the use?