The Last Train to Zona Verde (17 page)

The shanties of indigent newcomers to the place were scattered on one side of the crossroads, and on the other side, beyond the shops, were two stinking shebeens where drunken men squatted on the dirt floor, drooling over their home-brewed beer, while a haggard woman ladled more of it into tin cans from a plastic barrel. Outside under a tree, a man in rags, either drunk or exhausted, lay in a posture of crucifixion. Nearby were seven stalls made of
rough planks. Two sold used clothes, and one sold new clothes. One offered vegetables, another milky tea and stale bread rolls for the schoolchildren. In a butcher’s shack the stallholder hacked with a machete at the black, flyblown leg of a goat. The last and most salubrious stall, labeled
Real Hair
, sold wigs and foot-long hair extensions. Near the shops was a shade tree under which a dozen women and about ten children sat in a friendly chatting group, some of them pounding ostrich shells into small discs, while others, using homemade tools, drilled holes in the middle, and still others threaded the punctured discs into bracelets and necklaces to sell to tourists.

But I saw no tourists in Tsumkwe; few travelers or stragglers made it to this distant and forlorn place. I now knew why: Tsumkwe lay 180 miles down a dusty gravel road through the bush that shimmered in the heat; and the nearest town, Grootfontein, was nothing much — a supermarket, a bank, a gas station, some back streets, and a sports club that, as Helena suggested, had a largely white membership and hosted weekend keggers and crapulosities.

To the north of Tsumkwe was the border of Angola and the Caprivi Strip, a narrow panhandle that protruded east neatly on the map and contained one road to the riverside border of Zambia. (This oddity was a concession to the German colonizers, who drew the border in 1890 and wanted access to the Zambezi River and what was then German East Africa.) To the west was desert, to the east about eighty miles more desert, and Botswana — some Ju/’hoansi settlements and the small town of Nokaneng, at the edge of the Okavango Delta, a lush water world rich in game where wealthy tourists, paying thousands of dollars a day, were flown in private planes to luxury camps. At one of these camps you could splash through the swamps on the backs of elephants, in what was one of Africa’s most expensive safaris.

Tsumkwe, a crossroads, had always been negligible. What we know of the place is due almost entirely to the writing of the
Marshalls. In
The Old Way
, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas described how the waterhole was selected as the spot for a government agency to monitor the movements of cattle, to prevent poaching, to protect the area against incursions by diamond prospectors, and to allow the raiding by Boer farmers of Ju/’hoansi settlements for farm workers — treated as little more than slave labor. The government post was established in 1960, and the area was designated a “Homeland for Bushmen” in 1970. Tsumkwe got a police station and jail in 1975 when it was deemed a crime for local people to hunt or start bush fires.

The crossroads appeared more boldly on the map at the time the South African Defense Force built an army post there. This was in 1978, when the South African government, which administered South-West Africa as a colony of white domination, was vainly attempting to suppress the well-armed Namibian liberation struggle. Some !Kung were co-opted by the South African army, which used them as trackers and spotters and even as regular gun-toting recruits. After the success of the struggle, and Namibia’s independence in 1990, this apparent collaboration with the enemies of the nationalists tainted relations between the !Kung and the Namibian politicians who saw their desperate bid for employment as the treachery of counterrevolutionaries.

This being Namibia, the people in and around Tsumkwe were probably not particularly healthy.
USE
A
CONDOM
was painted in brightly colored foot-high letters in two languages on the outside wall of the Tsumkwe community center, and for anyone who missed the point or might be illiterate, a condom was also drawn on the wall, five feet long, like a large and flapping windsock.

The only sounds in the Ju/’hoansi villages were the crackle and screech of insects. At the Tsumkwe crossroads the prevailing sound was the shout and thump of rap music. Rap and hip-hop now dominate African pop music. Much of it is imported unchanged from the United States, some of it comes from Brazil or is adapted locally,
all of it blasting at full volume from car radios or from inside bars, even in this tiny place.

Because it is predictably fogeyish — and useless in any case — to object to loud music, especially the music of the young, I merely wondered, in a sour and squinting way, about the appeal of this semiliterate music here. And not just here: rap music is played all over sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly every country has its own rap groups. When I inquired, I discovered that Namibia alone had more than twenty hip-hop singers or groups, with names such as Contract Killers, Snazzy, L’il D, and, in the small town I had just passed through, Otjiwarongo, a group called Krazie D. Obviously something in this music speaks to the urban African, who is typically unemployed, overlooked, idle, very poor, lonely, and alienated from village traditions and pieties.

Rap is the howl of the underclass, the music of menace, of hostility, of aggression. Intentionally offensive, much of the language is so obscene that it is unplayable on radio stations. So naturally you wonder what is in the heads of the young here who have adopted these songs as their anthems. Are they merely idle, their minds colonized by the alien lyrics? And along with the music is a whole style of dress. Any Tsumkwe youths who could afford to buy clothes wore brand-new rap-themed T-shirts and shorts. Faded ones were also available at the used-clothes stalls, courtesy of Americans who offloaded their kids’ old clothes, giving them to charities and perhaps never guessing that the T-shirt with the portrait of The Notorious B.I.G. or Heavy D or Snoop Dogg, or the one lettered
Thug Life
in homage to the murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, was just what they wanted. And they now had the music to match it. They had the words, too, and could say, with Caliban in
The Tempest
, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.”

In countries where baseball was unknown, the most common headgear was a baseball cap. Hip-hop music has inspired skateboarding, break dancing, and graffiti. A skateboard is unusable on
an African road, but I sometimes saw break dancing in villages or townships, and it was a rare public wall in Africa that had not been tagged with graffiti. The sound of urban Africa is not the harmonious and hypnotic rhythm of a drum, but the shout of rap and its opposite, the hoarse hymn singing of evangelicals — both sorts heard in remote Tsumkwe.

The community center with the windsock-sized condom painted on the side was officially designated the Captain Kxao Kxami Community Learning and Development Centre. (To clarify, words like Kxao, #Oma, !Kung, and /’hoansi each convey a specific sound — a tsk, a click, a tongue-suck, or a cluck mimicking the clopping of a horse or the cheek-suck a rider uses to command a horse to giddyup — four distinct “velaric suction stops” that no written phonetic form can begin to approximate.) Far from being a Namibian government effort, the center had been built in 2006 with funds from the Namibia Association of Norway (
NAMAS
), which also supplied it with computers and an Internet connection. This Norwegian group was also deeply involved in village education and health projects. The Redbush Tea Company chipped in with money, and a charity in South Africa donated books. In 2009, the Texas chapter of the Explorers Club collected money to construct the seminar room where I was to deliver my talk.

On the face of it, Tsumkwe — solitary, remote, poor — was the classic example of a hard-up outpost in Africa, adopted by foreigners as a recipient of funds and the idealistic efforts of outsiders to improve education and health. The three churches there also played a role, though I did not discover how successful they were.

Tsumkwe had been neglected, if not ignored altogether, by the Namibian government, though two ministries — water and agriculture — had offices near the crossroads. For this reason, and its poverty and need, Tsumkwe had become a cause and a rallying point for the virtue industry, in which for a few days I was playing an active part. The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans
was the sort of thing I had always criticized. The Norwegians had been at it for thirty years, funneling money into the place and producing extensive and scholarly self-financed surveys of the hardships and goals of the local people.

And this was a lesson to me, because my first impression of Namibia, from the border to Windhoek and the coast, was of a place that did not need anyone from outside the country to tell the people how to live their lives, that Namibians themselves had set an example in development and decorum. But that was a snap judgment, from before I crossed the Vet Fence.

At the lodge in Tsumkwe, which was actually a little camp, Tony and I met the
UNESCO
people: Jaco, a South African; his coworker, Andrea; and Werner, a German, head of the Namibian archives in Windhoek. We each had a small cabin — Tony’s was next door to mine — and we observed the subdued routine of campers. Sunset was sudden, the nights were hot, and the generator went off at ten, plunging the whole place into darkness and silence. The first night, though, I heard a pattering that in seconds became a torrent of rain. A phantom downpour, it seemed. In the morning there was no sign of dampness anywhere, only pockmarked dust and withered plants.

We gathered at the Captain Kxao Kxami Community Learning and Development Centre in the morning for what was billed as the opening ceremony. The room filled with officials, chiefs and their retinues, advisers, people from the Ministry of Education, the governor of the region, the delegation from Windhoek—of which I was one — and some clergymen. There were about thirty of us altogether, the women in bright dresses, and all the men — except for me — wearing ties and dark suits.

We began by singing the Namibian national anthem (“Namibia, land of the brave / Freedom fight we have won …”) and the African Union anthem (“Let us all unite and celebrate together / The victories won for our liberation …”), and then the oldest of the clergymen led us in a prayer in the !Kung language and in Afrikaans. I
caught the word “Moses,” and at the end, in English, “We all belong to God.”

This was followed by messages and remarks about the importance of Audio-Visual Heritage Day, though I wondered what meaning “audio-visual” had here; no one had mentioned that Tsumkwe was a place without television, without a movie theater, and with only irregular Internet access.

With great formality and chiefly protocol, the attendees were introduced, and the governor gave his keynote address.

“I must also welcome myself!” Governor Kamehozu of Otjozondjupa said teasingly, after his solemn welcome to the visitors. He went on, “This is one of the remotest areas of Namibia. But Tsumkwe has its own beauty, and we must take advantage of the opportunities our heavenly father has given us. We are lucky in many ways. Our elephants are bigger than elephants elsewhere. Our lions are also bigger …”

Speaker after speaker took the podium, making remarks, ponderously handing over historic photographs to the Namibian National Archives, declaiming messages of congratulation, reading introductions, until the closing homily of Chief Tsamkxao #Oma. I kept reminding myself in this hall — with windows too high to see through — that all this talk and ceremony was taking place at the end of a gravel road in a distant bush settlement at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.

That was just the morning I had feared, rarefied and overformal. But after lunch (sandwiches and fruit punch under the thorn tree) the event acquired greater meaning. In the first session students from the nearby school filled the room. They were only in their early teens, yet they looked well developed, and the heavy-bosomed schoolgirls seemed on the verge of womanhood. They were all polite, fluent in English, well behaved, and responsive, in their intensity reminding me of the hopeful, hard-working students I had taught almost fifty years ago in Malawi. They sat attentively
in neat uniforms, as my own students had done, the girls in white blouses and dark skirts, the boys in white shirts and dark trousers.

I gave my talk. I explained — because they said they didn’t have a clue — the meaning of the words “audio” and “visual” and “heritage.” Then I launched into my assigned theme, “Preserving a Cultural Heritage.” My message to the students was simple enough: talk to the oldest people in the village; ask them about their experiences and skills and folktales; write them down. Gathered together, these stories were the history of the region. This was something I wished I had done long ago in Malawi. Though I had talked to villagers and written down some of their stories, I should have been more methodical, using a tape recorder, interviewing all the elders I could find. The ones who were over sixty, and there were many, would have had memories of the nineteenth century, of the earliest colonials, of their first glimpses of missionaries, travelers, and white settlers; they might have heard family stories of the Arab slave trade. Oral history of this kind was invaluable, and that, in brief, was my pep talk on cultural preservation.

Afterward, the lights were dimmed. John Marshall’s short film
Children Throw Toy Assegais
(1974) was shown. It was a glimpse into the recent past, six or seven boys, no more than ten years old, practicing the throwing of a shortened spearlike weapon, some of them succeeding in making the sharp thing penetrate a tree. The boys were gleeful, competing to see who would succeed as the best shot. The assegais were mere toys, but this play had a serious intention; when a boy grew older, his assegai would be a blade hafted to a throwing stick and used to kill animals. So it was not just competitive play — it was preparation for their lives as hunters.

None of the boys in the film wore more than a perfunctory wrap around his hips, and the sight of them half naked made the neatly uniformed schoolchildren giggle, if not in embarrassment, then in awkwardness. Although the Ju/’hoansi wore very little, they were averse to displaying their bodies to outsiders. Some of the women
were prominently steatopygous — huge-buttocked — but “we were unable to observe to what extent steatopygia existed among the women in the Nyae Nyae area,” Lorna Marshall wrote, “because the women there flatly refused to take off their karosses [antelope-hide capes] from around their backs.” The schoolchildren watching the film squirmed because we outsiders were present, but they were excited, too, with this glimpse into their animated history.