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?