Preparing to Meet the Himba People

The next day Chris and I got up early and went for a walk to find some coffee. We passed the bar we had first drank at the night before and I stopped to take a photo of the pile of empty beer bottles where the Herero women sat, leaning up against the wall that advertised ‘Tafel Lager’ and ‘Windhoek Draught’. I did a 360 degree turn on the spot and saw four giant billboards all advertising beer, as well as the biggest building across the road with one whole wall painted in the ‘Tafel Lager logo’. How fitting for a town that obviously has a drinking problem!

There are only two paved roads running through the centre of town. When a breeze lifted, the dust was so thick it choked us. And on that breeze we could smell the Himba women, a unique and undeniable smell of the animal fat they lathered on their skin. It reminded me of the old cooking oil in some of the dirty deep-fryers I had worked with in café kitchens, mixed with the human odours of sweat from bodies that by tradition are not meant to bathe for their whole life (why men could bathe and women couldn’t I will never understand). When we passed a whole group of Himba women my stomach would churn just a little.

A Himba woman pushed her children in front of us and begged us to take their photo for N$10, the kids struck a pose they had done many, many times before.

Some Themba women followed us all the way to the coffee shop, rattling beads of jewellery in our face; they even took the bracelets straight off their legs and arms in desperate hope of making any sale.

More and more people walked beside us, I had no idea what they were saying, I could only assume they were asking for money.

At the coffee shop Chris and I tried to deconstruct our opinions on the tribes so far.

Chris said that when he was in Germany he saw a documentary on the Himba people. It was so romanticized it made them look exotic and beautiful, showing them all dressed up, cooking food together in their family circles, whilst the children ran around happily chasing chickens. But now, he said, he sees what it is really like. That when those film makers turned the camera off the Himba asked them for money to buy alcohol.

I showed him the photo of the woman and her children I had just taken and said:

“I could put this photo on Facebook and underneath it write ‘this woman asked me to take a photo and proudly showed off her children, then she gave me a piece of her jewellery – how lovely they all are’. I could wait for all of my friends to comment and then later post the same picture and write ‘this woman demanded I take her photo and giver her money. She tried to sell her children’s image for more money still, then she forced some jewellery on my arm and demanded I pay $30 for it. She needed to buy more beer’”.

Chris had arranged to meet a guy he had met last night who offered to show us ‘the heart of Opuwo’. He was there with his friend and they took us through the market place, which was a cluster of maybe 60 little shade covers balancing on stilts built from tree branches. Perched on the dirt in the small relieving patches of shade were a couple of hundred people. Some of them were selling things, such as sweets, home made alcohol or animal carcasses dangling from the roof of the hut, covered in dirt, dust and flies.

It was only midday and already half of them were drunk. I asked our guide what people do here all day “they just sit and drink and talk too much” he replied.

Every second person wanted money, as soon as we said ‘no’ they completely lost interest in us, turned their backs and pretended we weren’t there. I tried smiling at people, waving to them, but they just stared back with blank, un-moving faces.

Our guide took us into the village where many people lived. Some of the huts were made of mud and clay, some were just made of sticks, and many people lived in typical 2-man camping tents. The people there also just stared at us, or asked for money, our guide informed us that no white people ever go into that part of town.

Two or three times in the span of five minutes our guides sighed, exasperated and lamented that it was too hot. I took up the hint and suggested we have a drink.

“Is there anywhere we can go to sit in the shade and just have a soft drink?” I asked, not wanting to be around anymore drunk people.

“No just bars” and they led us to the closest one.

Chris went to the bar and bought two cokes for us and two beers for our guides. More drunk people loitered around us demanding money, and as usual when we said no we were flashed looks of annoyance or even anger.

As soon as our drinks were finished we kept on walking to the only side of town we hadn’t seen yet. “What is up there?” I pointed in the direction we had not been yet “more bars” our guide answered. We kept walking anyway, even though ‘more bars’ was the last thing I felt like seeing. But as we kept walking we reached a hotel advertising rooms for nearly half of what we were paying for our hut. We asked to look at a room and it was twice as big, twice as nice, had an en suite, a fridge and free tea, coffee and internet. We told the guys we had to leave them there and swap hotels. “What will you do now?” I asked the guides. “If you give us money we will drink beer” they replied. So I gave them N$30 and ran off.

That afternoon Chris was texting another guy he had met the night before. I wondered how distracted I had been by all of the girls fighting over me, for me not to have noticed Chris meeting all of these useful men. He assured me that this one, Jeckey, was a good guy. I agreed to go with Chris to meet Jeckey for a beer.

It only took five minutes of talking to him to realise that Chris was right, Jeckey was a gem! He was a Himba man, though fully modernized and working for an NGO in town. He said his uncle lives in a Himba village and would give us a place to sleep for a couple of nights, so that we could have a ‘real Himba experience’. He said we just need to present gifts to the chief of the village, not money, but useful things like maize, oil, tea, sugar and tobacco. He warned us that we would be sleeping on hard floors “and…” he paused “… white people aren’t used to the Himba smell so you might…” he imitated someone gagging and then vomiting, and we burst out laughing. He went on to joke that when a man has sex with a Himba woman everybody knows about it – “he is smeared in red and can’t wash the smell off for weeks”. Chris and I had been pretending to be husband and wife (it makes it remarkably easier) and so I made a show of nudging him and declaring that no matter how hard he tried to hide it I would always know if he cheated on me!

Another drunk guy approached us but this one was Jeckey’s friend. His name was Collin and he offered to take us to the village, to be our translator. We took him up on the offer, we would have rather had Jeckey as our translator, but he had to work, so this guy would do. He would meet us at 1pm the next day and we would hitch a ride to the village.

Another very drunk man pulled up a chair and sat in our huddle. He was sweet and harmless, though at first annoying.

“See that building there!” he slurred as he motioned to a half-built house across the road. “My building… Me… I’m the boss… 8 days I have to have it finished…. 8 days!”

As Jeckey and Collin explained, that house was going to be the first two-story building in Opuwo, and was soon the be the pride of the town. Two years they had been working on that building and still it wasn’t finished. This drunk man beside us was responsible for it, and he had just been told he had to finished it in 8 days or else he lost his job.

I considered the lifeless shell of a building and thought that not even a miracle would get that building done in 8 days. “You better swap that beer for a hammer” I said. Collin leant in to me and whispered “the whole town thinks it will fall down soon anyway”.

The conversation kept flowing but every now and then the drunk man would interrupt “hold, hold, hold!” We would all pause to listen to what he had to say.

“But the building!” he would cry and wave his arms in the vague direction of the construction pile across from us. The first few times I rolled my eyes, but then I found it quite amusing. This poor guy was so distressed, but really, it was quite funny.

Jeckey was real ‘marriage-material’, he was honest, kind, hard-working. I asked about his parents. “My mother died when I was 15, my father died 5 years after that.” I asked what they died from “No one knows” he hesitated “some people say they were cursed by a witch”. My guess is they died of HIV/AIDS but I dared not share that.

After two beers Jeckey announced that it was time to leave, that he had to get up early for work the next morning. He insisted on walking us home because his parents had taught him that if ever something happened to your guests on the way home it is on your conscience. Told you he was marriage material!

In the hotel room Chris and I laughed a happy, relieved, elated laugh. How nice it was to finally meet a Namibian who wasn’t just using us for money, but who seemed to genuinely just want to be our friend, help us, chat with us. We were stoked that we had found everything we had gone to Opuwo looking for. We were giddy with excited nerves at the thought that the next night we would be lying under the stars in a Himba village.

Everytime I see this picture I think about how sad they look. I wonder if I noticed it at the time?

The Tribes of Opuwo

The next day we only had to stand on the side of the road for an hour before we got a lift. We were lucky, because the closer we got to Opuwo, the more empty the roads were. One of the only bits of traffic we passed was a mini bus that had smashed into a cow. I wanted to cry, the poor big thing lay there on her side obviously suffering. The front half of the bus was pancaked and everyone stood around looking quite stupefied. I wanted to get out and help the cow somehow (it isn’t unusual for me to be more worried about animals than humans) but our driver refused to stop. He said that sometimes it is a ploy to get cars to pull over so you can attack and rob them. I thought... how did he explain the battered cow getting in on that act?

But that accident was by far the most populated event on those desolate roads and I wasn’t too eager to join the pack of abandoned passengers waiting in the heat for the next generous ride.

Our driver’s name was Harald, he was from Norway and working in Northern Namibia on a ‘development project’ that he chose not to share the details of. But he was a useful resource of knowledge, he gave a good introduction to the tribes of the north that we were about to meet.

He explained to me the various tribes – the Herero, the Damara, the Kavango, the Themba and of course, the famous Himba.

He explained that the Himba have managed to hold onto their traditions because even the missionaries didn’t make it this far until the late 1960’s. Tar roads were only built in the north in the last decade and the only other interactions the tribes had were with Angolans who crossed to boarders to swap Himba cows for cases of beer. The Himbas have no real concept of money which makes them vulnerable to exploitation. On top of that, alcoholism had begun to run rampant amongst tribes, especially in Opuwo which is the town we were heading to, the last town this far north and the centre for all the various tribes.

He warned me that some traditions were positively remarkable – such as the women covering their bodies head to toe in a mix of animal fat, dung and clay, yet other traditions were not so positive, mainly wife beating and wife swapping (against a woman’s will – as a form of trade between men).

As we neared Opuwo I got a little hopeful - would I see one of these enigmatic tribe people? What would they look like? What would I say or do if I did see one?

The town snuck up on us…. And so did the sight of its people.

I didn’t spot one or two of these people… the entire town was teeming with them!

Chris and I became animated with excitement. Astounded and thrilled I wanted to leap out of the moving vehicle. On the one hand it was so surreal… the sort of images I had only seen on national geographic. On the other hand it was totally intimidating. And on the third hand (if I had three) I was simply blown away.

Of course there are a lot of people in Western clothes, particularly men, but the different tribal people were so fetching that they held my attention. The Hereros and the Himbas were easiest to spot - and yet so vastly different from each other.

Herero women wore brightly coloured Victorian-style dresses with a matching head piece in the shape of a bull’s horn.

The Himba women wore cow-skin skirts and were the same ochre colour as the dust under their feet. Their hair was dreaded but caked in clay and their bodies were adorned with extravagant heavy iron and leather jewellery.

Then there were the Themba women who wore cotton skirts and layers of jewellery around their waists, necks, ankles and arms, but theirs was made of brightly coloured beads.

Harald dropped us at the cheapest lodge in town which for a clay hut with nothing but two single beds and some torn up mosquito nets it was over-priced but we didn’t care at that stage, we wanted to hit the streets.

The town was bustling as it neared dusk. It was dirty and dusty and the edges of the road were lined with rubbish – mostly empty beer bottles. The brick houses that were actually shops or bars were old and run-down, and the make-shift tin shacks looked like they were only ever intended to be temporary.

But I loved it. I loved how gritty it was. I loved how raw the people were. I loved the energy. I LOVED that Africans did their business on the streets, not behind closed doors - it makes far more entertaining tourism.

Opuwo is quite small. It had a market place that had already closed up for the day, a bakery, a supermarket, a few banks and one café. It had plenty of bars though. And none of them seemed to be wanting for business.

We got stared at the whole time… of course! But we were staring back just as intensely. Many people came up to us, and spoke to us, but very few spoke English. It was hard to know at that stage if the greetings were friendly or hostile.

We stopped in front of a very large brick bar, full of people. Squatting against a wall was a group of a dozen Herero women, in their beautiful bright robes plonked down on the dusty ground in a pile of empty beer bottles. We watched in awe, as they passed around bottles of beer, belched and wiped the snot from their face with the sleave of their elegant satin robes. The sight was so contradictory it was exceptionally peculiar.

I suggested to Chris we have a beer at the bar. He hesitated, as I wanted to, but I forced myself forward. Every eye in the place followed us all the way to the bar and then all the way back out the door again to the outside where we perched on the step to devour our beer, and the best view in town.

Within seconds an old Herero woman in a bright yellow dress stumbled up to us and leant down to rest her elbows on my shoulders. In my ear she slurred something in words I didn’t understand. Her eyes couldn’t find a focus and she reeked of alcohol, but she was in a damn good mood and her toothless smile spread ear to ear.

She indicated that she wanted us to move over and she fell down between Chris and I.

Her head lolled from side to side and occasionally she stretched her arms out in front of her face and waved them around like she was dancing.

Shortly after we were surrounded by a swarm of drunken women. They all started running their fingers through my hair, poking at me and grabbing my beer to swig from it. It was hard to see who was playing with Chris, I was literally trapped in the circle of women. They all talked at once and then pulled me up and over to the dance floor.

I kind of awkwardly shuffled along with the girls and tried to imitate their dancing style. They stuck their bums out and shook it, while they held their elbows up and out to the side. It is a very bum-heavy dance that I was not used to and I felt a great sense of relief when Chris appeared at my side, shaking his arse to the beat. The girls loved it and I am believed their laughter was in good jest. The dance floor attracted a very entertained crowd.

Then this girl staggered up to me, she was so drunk I was impressed that she managed to stay reasonably vertical. She started grinding up against me, touching my breasts and my face and she wedged her thigh between my legs. I kept backing away until I hit the wall. I sent Chris ‘help me eyes’ but he shrugged in a ‘what the hell could I do’ kind of way.

I was too careful not to be rude. I didn’t yet know what was and wasn’t culturally appropriate, but I wanted her to back off.

Finally one of the girls that had pulled me to the dance floor marched over and pulled her off me. But that didn’t go down too well and a fight broke out.

The full-on drunk girl’s friend stomped over and started yelling and then four more girls appeared and the fight was on. Chris and I stood there helpless and dumbfounded. It would have helped if we knew what they were saying.

The girl who had first saved me grabbed me by the arm and yanked me out of there. Chris shuffled close behind. Her name was Elsie and her English was quite good. Her posse followed us to the next bar a few doors down.

It didn’t take long for the drunk girl to hunt us down again, this time she wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her body against me “don’t you want me?” she slurred in my ear.

“What the hell was happening here?”

 I was so confused at that stage. If a girl did that to me in Sydney I would have had an inkling into what it was she wanted… but in the farthest reach of Northern Namibia could this girl actually be gay?... And open about it! Or was it simply a matter of confused cross-cultural communication and language barriers?

I wriggled free and told her she needed to go home and sleep. Chris just stood there and laughed as she tried to embrace me again.

Again Elsie came to my rescue and heaved her off me. This caused an even bigger fight. It was mostly verbal except for a few pushes and shoves.

Elsie and her friends won the fight again and the drunk girl and her friends sulked off. Mostly I was afraid that they all knew I was gay then, and afraid of any repercussions it could bring.

We all move on to the next bar and I bought Elsie and her friends a beer for saving me. They dragged me up to the dance floor again and yet again a crowd of gawkers gathered around. Chris and I must have been a sight though. The girls did their best to make my awkward body bounce around like theirs.

Another horribly trashed woman stormed up to Chris and demanded money. He said “no sorry” and she stepped over to me and in the same aggressive growl she demanded money. She poked a finger between my eyes and I stared back at her and said nothing. For a third time that night poor Elsie came to my rescue and for a third time that night she got into a fight doing so.

I was over it then, exhausted and overwhelmed. Elsie suggested we go to another bar, I suggested we went home.

As we left I saw the drunk girl number 1 watching me (the sleazy one) and I knew that leaving was the right decision.

We all headed out of there together and were walking down the street when Elsie yelled “police!” She grabbed Chris’ bottle of beer from his hands and hid it under her animal-fur mid-riff jacket.

The paddy wagon pulled up and three cops in camouflage crawled out. I couldn’t understand the words but it was plain to see that the cops were not happy with Elsie and her bottle of beer. She tried to object and all of her friends were protesting flustered. One of the cops walked around to the back of the car to open the wagon door. In Australia it is a fairly empty threat, but I could see the panic rise in the girls and I got fearful for them.

I stepped up and grabbed the beer from Elsie and emptied its contents out.

“It was my beer” I told the cops. “I am sorry I didn’t know the rules, she is my friend, she was just helping me… see no more beer, my mistake”

The main cop stared me down, he stared at the girls and back at the other cops. There was silence as we all waited with held breath. Finally they all got back in their car and drove off.

We kept on walking and I saw that Elsie was literally shaking, her teeth were even chattering. She didn’t even get slightly scared in the other three fights she faced that evening and I only just realised what a close call it had been. Perhaps in Opuwo the cops didn’t just parade around in pathetic attempts to look macho like they did in Australia, maybe in Namibia their threats were real.

Back in the silent hut I exhaled fully for the first time since getting dropped off in Opuwo. No more watchful eyes on me, no more dodging drunken bodies, no more people sticking their open palm out in my face demanding money… at least not for another 8 hours anyway.

That pile of beer was where the Herero women were sitting

two herero women

A himba family