Himba village

Dec 15-17
Northern and southern Namibia are divided by a 3 m fence, designed to prevent Foot and Mouth Disease from moving with livestock or wild animals. In colonial times (20 years ago), when Namibia was still Southwest Africa, whites owned enormous cattle ranches in the arid southern region and were able to export cattle free of FMD; blacks had communal land where rainfall was higher north of the fence, but per capita land area was small. This pattern still largely holds, although the government is attempting redistribution of land through a “willing seller, willing buyer” program: the government buys farms when they are up for sale and selects new black owners. We’ve crossed the fence northward a couple of times en route to seeing elephants, crocs, and hippos in Chobe National Park (Botswana) with Alan’s older kids, and to pick up day-old chicks for our class experiment at the Polytechnic. But in mid-December we had an altogether different experience of the fence, as we spent several days living right next to it.

Uapindi Kazahe, one of our students at the Polytechnic, grew up literally just north of the fence as it wends its way westward through mountains to the edge of the Namib Desert. When his exams ended, he joined us for 3 weeks on the coast – he had never even seen the ocean before. Then we visited his home when we dropped him off. It was a profoundly interesting experience. Traveling with Uapindi gave us a much more intimate and authentic interaction with rural black Namibians than at any time during our year here. We had lunch with an older man who walked across a rugged rocky landscape on bare feet the size of dinner plates, and who had never before had a meal with a white person – he almost refused to join us, because his previous experience with whites involved beatings. Uapindi translated (the man spoke a home language and Afrikaans, but not English) and also indicated that he had some of the best natural history knowledge in the entire area.

To reach Uapindi’s mother’s house, we turned off the “main” dirt road onto a winding track that passed through the fence at a small border crossing, then entered a stunning valley of always-flowing water and giant makalani palms before branching back up the hill to the half-dozen stick-and-manure houses at our destination. The area is part of a locally-managed conservancy that stretches from the fence north along the western edge of Etosha National Park – Hobatere Lodge, where we traveled with my parents in June, sits in the middle, although we’re not sure if their concession is from the government or from the conservancy. Every km or so was another group of houses. Uapindi’s mother has some 40 cattle and 30 goats and lives in a Himba culture where a person’s wealth is measured in animals (primarily cattle) – by this metric, she is quite well-off and can sell some cows each year (albeit at a lower price because she’s north of the fence) for other purchases. Still, among the half-dozen adults and dozen kids, there was not a single writing instrument, book or ball. We had anticipated that this would be a place to make a difference while we lightened our load of luggage for the return to the U.S.: we left books, pens, balls, cots, camp chairs, sleeping bags, tent, and food. (Uapindi recommended flour, sugar, tea, macaroni, and biscuits [cookies], plus a bag of sweets to hand out to kids. Wherever we have traveled in rural Namibia, gifts of store-bought food have been really appreciated.) In return, a goat was slaughtered for our visit, Uapindi’s grandmother gave me a necklace that she had carved herself, with the distinctive orange color and earthy scent of traditional Himba women, who paint themselves with a concoction partly made of that wood, and we were offered a cow on departure!

The fence provides dramatic results of an unreplicated experiment: on the south side, where few people live close by, the grass is tall and starting to green with summer rain, and the shrubs are full and diverse. On the north side, the ground is rocky and bare, with just a slight wash of green as grasses germinate. It’s clear evidence of the importance of herbivores (from an ecologist’s perspective), and obvious overgrazing (from an agriculturalist’s). The goats and even cows slip through holes in the double fence and graze on the non-FMD side, herded back to their home kraals in the evening. But even with this semi-permeable barrier, the difference in vegetation between the two sides is perpetually evident. The cows also have easy access to the stream of running water – although older water diversions and tanks indicate that stock may have been watered differently in the past, presumably on a larger farm with more infrastructure investment. So the water is eutrophic and smelly. The Red Cross has installed several water pumps for people to use – for instance, every 2 or 3 days, water is fetched by hand at Uapindi’s mother’s house. On an afternoon donkey cart ride down the river, Katie and I drank water from one of these pumps and spent the next day with crummy tummies and diarrhea (fortunately, we were traveling back roads to our next stop at Etosha, so we could stop the car at a moment’s notice in relative privacy). Alan wisely avoided the water. I guess I had become too accustomed to clean water from Namibia’s taps, plus was assured that water was clean and abundant, and believed in the filtering power of soil – anyway, it wasn’t a pleasant result, but could have been a lot worse. The donkey cart ride itself was an experience, with a harness constructed of bits of tire and wire, some chain and metal poles. We had a flat tire on the way, where we learned the “African way” of fixing a flat – on the tube in the tubeless tire, take a handful around the puncture and wrap with a strip of rubber cut from another tube! The 3 small donkeys suffered from this rig, plus carrying 6 people in an unbalanced cart through gullies and over rocky ground. They were fast on the downhill, but I preferred to walk the last stretch.

We observed but didn’t understand the cultural quilt in this area: it’s Damaraland, so many Damara people, but some Himbas interspersed with more cattle than goats, and San people doing most of the work.

We left Uapindi with professorial admonitions to put his theoretical agriculture knowledge to work: this past year, he has learned to calculate stocking densities, build a chicken coop and balance rations to improve chicken production (the chickens roosted in trees at night and had a high rooster:hen ratio), and design a better donkey harness. All of these ideas, put into practice, should raise the health and well-being of the plants and animals in the region. But, of course, they also take some time and capital investment.