The Last Train to Zona Verde

  At the hotel, assuming I was someone he’d met the day before, a Namibian man — a Herero, he told me later — invited me to a party to watch the Rugby World Cup final, France against New Zealand.

  The rugby party was a raucous, boozy crowd, screaming at a wide-screen TV in one of the hotel lounges. The Namibians cheered for the New Zealand team, known as the All Blacks; the whites cheered for France; and when New Zealand won by one point there was an eruption of hilarity rather than pandemonium.

  The Namibians were not uniformly black, nor were the whites uniformly white. They were so mixed, from such obviously different racial groups, that they were unclassifiable, and because of such differences they could not make any racial assumptions. This made them easygoing, nonconfrontational, somewhat friendly, and mild-tempered.

  I sat drinking beer, watching the brutal back-and-forth of the rugby match, and fell into conversation with the man in the next chair, who said he was from Huambo, in central Angola. He was an Ovimbundu, uprooted by the long Angolan civil war, and he went home only now and then. He praised his country: “It is more lively than Namibia. The people are so happy.” His name was Neto.

  “I’m thinking of going to Angola by road.”

  He smiled at me, as though at a child’s innocent misstatement. “No. The road is bad. There are many flights from Windhoek.”

  “But I want to go over the border and see the south of Angola.”

  “There is nothing but bad roads.”

  When was the last time he’d been there?

  “Many years ago.”

  “Maybe the roads have been fixed.”

  He considered this, tapping his teeth, distracted by a run in the rugby match. “Maybe. But anyway, Luanda is better. Much bigger than Windhoek.”

  I saw that I would get nowhere with him on the subject of overland travel to his country, and mentioned that I planned to go the next day to Swakopmund.

  “Small, but it’s okay.”

  I said I’d opted for the bus over the train, at least for the way down to the coast.

  “That’s better,” he said, and though he was as black as anyone I was to meet in Namibia, he added, “Only black people take the train.”

  Under a cloudless sky, the bus, with its load of Namibians and foreigners, left tidy Windhoek and passed through freshly painted provincial towns along the way — orderly Okandjia, tiny house-proud Karibib, and dignified Usakos, with stucco houses in pink and yellow pastels and thick-steepled Lutheran churches, the settlements surrounded by hot bright dust. I remembered what Karl had said about visitors being disappointed because none of this seemed like Africa. But I liked its unexpectedness; it was all new to me, and so well built and maintained. Descending to the coast, we rode along level savanna, through grassland and an immensity of gravel, then across pale stony desert.

  The mountains in the distance, some as sharp as blades, were the Erongoberg, according to my map, and the pyramidal peak beyond the strange colonial town of Usakos might have been Spitzkoppe, a place I wanted to go for its rock paintings.

  A big, dark chacma baboon crept through tall grass and appeared between withered clumps at the roadside. He hesitated, flinging his arms in confusion, opening his jaws wide and looking fierce. On back roads and riverbanks in Africa, I have had various encounters with troops of baboons and found them fearless and unreasonable, with terrifying teeth. Even the wisest book on the subject of baboons, The Soul of the Ape, by the South African naturalist Eugene Marais, does not reassure me.

  I mentioned this to the man in the seat next to me — Cleo, a Namibian. He said, “They can be troublesome. They steal fruit from the farms.”

  I looked into the enormous empty spaces of Erongo, the broken rock and rubble that stretched for miles, and wondered aloud what other animals might be there.

  “There are ostriches. There are jackals,” Cleo said. “Even leopards you can find them.”

  Swakopmund was a small Germanic seaside town of right angles on a grid of streets, bright but chilly from a brisk wind off the Atlantic. The old railway station, dating from 1901, had been turned into an elegant hotel, but otherwise there were no big hotels, only small inns and guesthouses. The many villas and well-built houses were where many Europeans — mostly Germans — spent the winter. I met a man from Hannover who had spent every winter for the past thirty years in Swakopmund. Some of those years would have been a time of civil war and turmoil in Namibia, yet he had found his annual sunshine and beer and schnitzel. He said he would have bought a house and retired here except his wife couldn’t stand it. His name was Friedrich, and parting from me he said, as a farewell, “As Germany is to Europe, Namibia is to Africa. Hard-working. Wealthy. Sensible. It is heaven!”

  He recommended the Hansa Hotel, so I stayed there. It was small and hospitable and served good food. The other guests were from Germany and Holland, with a few Italians and Africans, all tourists, because there was no business in Swakopmund except tourism. The uranium mines were distant, as were the diggings for gems — tourmalines, garnets — which were mined somewhere in the desert. Had I wished, I could have stayed at the Burning Shore, ten minutes south of Swakopmund at Langstrand, a lodge that advertised itself as the place where the actress (and humanitarian, her biography adds) Angelina Jolie had brooded for a few months in 2006 before shuttling to the Cottage Private Hospital, now also on the map as a result of the birth of her child there. The Burning Shore lodge was a newish but fairly ordinary set of walled-in buildings by the beach, and the whole of it had been commandeered and occupied for the prologue to the birth. The discovery of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Swakopmund had been an event of greater significance to the world than the discovery in the same year of a vast deposit of uranium that became the Langer Heinrich uranium mine, near the town.

  The promenade in Swakopmund, like its long wooden jetty, its neatly planted palms, its villagy look, and most of all its many villas with walled gardens, made the town feel like a bourgeois refuge from the world, which in fact it was, and had been for a hundred years, hugging the shore, its back turned to the desert.

  But I did not sneer at the efficiency, the order, the mildness, the streets that had no litter. Such qualities were so rare in an African city or town — certainly I had seen very few like it — I felt they should be celebrated. The dining room at the Hansa served Wiener schnitzel and carpaccio of kudu, game dumplings and springbok loin. Yet it made me restless. The whole time I was there I felt I was on vacation, an intimation that made me feel uncomfortable and frivolous and lonely.

  What I had seen of Namibia, and Swakopmund, was tame. The tourists seemed fastidious, and the smooth walls of the buildings — the old German ones and the newer villas — looked prim, as if they’d been exfoliated.

  After a day of walking around the town, I hired a man, Linus, of the Damara people, to take me into the desert, thinking that the wilderness might lift my spirits, but bumping along the moonscape in the Land Rover among the weird vegetation depressed me. Linus plucked medicinal plants and explained their properties, but these dusty shrubs seemed just another example of desert lifelessness.

  Aloe, he said. Welwitschia. Stinkbush. Thorn scrub. Tiny mold-like growths and crumpled lichens. And the rest — for miles — sand and gravel.

  We continued up the Windhoek Road back to Usakos and then to Spitzkoppe, to hike to the rock paintings. The stone mountains all stood alone, some like recumbent animals, others like creatures breaking through the desert, surfacing from beneath the earth, still others like the toothy lower jaws of predators.

  “My people live here,” he said, but he meant the Damara people, not the San who had done the paintings a few thousand years ago, and had dispersed.

  More stinkbush, more spiky plants, and a singular rugged tooth rising in the desert, Gross Spitzkoppe. We left the vehicle, walked around the bare mountain of rock, and climbed up a steep side, clinging to a fixed chain. We came to an overhang, Paradise Cave. It was just the sort of shallow cave
you see in the cracked and reddened stone canyons around Sedona, Arizona, and similarly serving as a sheltered gallery for petroglyphs and paintings.

  “They are in bad shape,” Linus said without much interest.

  The images had been vandalized, rubbed, and scraped, but even smudged, they were impressive. It is impossible to see a whole coherent shape carefully drawn in ancient stone — by an artist setting down a vision, or a dream, or the memory of a beast — and not think back to the people who had flourished in this landscape, all of them now gone, having left behind these animated figures.

  Rhinos, elephants, great cats, animals with curved horns, others with tails, and — in a row — human figures wielding bows and arrows, a troop of clearly painted hunters. The vitality, the movement, in this art — none of it was static — was striking: the figures leaped across the wall in a spirited panorama of bravado and companionship.

  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 a
nd 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.”*