The Last Train to Zona Verde

  I said, “Grace, tell me, where can I find some fun in Otjiwarongo?”

  “There is no fun here!” she said, laughing, and Mr. Khan, who was from Pakistan, agreed: “No fun, sir.”

  With this bargain phone in my hand I called home, and for many weeks after that, all I needed to do was dial the number, say “Call me back,” and I could talk to the loved one I had left behind. Occasionally, in the most unlikely place — on a bus, in a thatched hut, in a chicken shack, slapping at tsetse flies or kicking through the dust — I would feel a buzzing in my pocket against my thigh: Hawaii on the line.

  Grootfontein was a hundred miles up the road, still in the Waterberg region of smooth-featured hills, sun-bleached plains of grass and stubble, and stony swales. The landscape was immense and simple — no forests, no water, few villages. This emptiness and apparent simplicity is the glory of Namibia and a consequence of its small population. The number of people in the country in 1904 was tiny—perhaps a few hundred thousand in this region — so it seems an even greater crime that the Germans, not satisfied to share, were intent on extermination to the last woman and child, to have the whole desert colony to themselves.

  Nowadays, most people go to Namibia to see the animals at the waterholes in Etosha Pan (part of Etosha National Park) and nothing more. But this northeasterly part of the country, lovely as it was, and rich in bird life, was not on that route and not visited much. Grootfontein, the site of a significant German defeat in 1915, was more famous for its object visible from space, the Hoba meteorite, a blocky, sixty-six-ton slab of iron enshrined in a nearby field. The town existed to serve the cattle ranches, the game farms, and the small township population. As with many of the bush towns I saw in Namibia, it seemed a place fighting for survival, a pit stop for anyone headed north to Angola and the Caprivi Strip or traveling northeast on the gravel road to Tsumkwe, neither of them well-traveled routes.

  The center of activity in Grootfontein was the supermarket on the main road. It was a place of loungers and panhandlers and little old Afrikaner women in long, faded, 1930s-style frocks, holding umbrellas against the bright sun, strange, yellowish, Dutch-faced ladies, like artifacts from an earlier time. I approached two of them with questions, but they smiled and murmured, “Mynheer, ek verstaan nie.” Unlike the Herero and Ovambo, these isolated Afrikaners spoke only their own language.

  A troupe of nine young singers, Herero perhaps, were performing at the edge of the parking lot — dancing, harmonizing, while a small boy passed a hat for contributions. They represented an evangelical church in Grootfontein, they were shouting gleeful syncopated hymns, and they seemed at home among the streetside beggars, fruit hawkers, and basket sellers, reminding me that much of the commercial activity in rural Africa resembles a medieval market. How people live in market towns in the bush is how people once lived in Europe — congregating to flirt, to sell their wares and show off their animals, to dazzle onlookers, to make music, to find a wife or husband.

  The only place that offered meals was a corner of the supermarket with chairs and tables that sold meat pies and chicken schnitzel and fried potatoes. Tony and I sat down with our food and I chatted with the server, who was also the restaurant manager — Helena, a thin, sallow-faced woman with bony bitten fingers and lank hair and a sad, slightly exasperated manner. She seemed harassed, obscurely burdened, and a glaze of melancholy showed in her pale gray eyes.

  “There’s no fun in Otjiwarongo,” I said, teasing. “Where’s the fun in Grootfontein?”

  “No fun here,” she said with that jaw-twisting Afrikaner yeauh for “here.” “No life. No life at all.”

  She said she’d been born in Grootfontein, with a gargle on the Groot, and knew what she was talking about.

  “What about the weekends?”

  “Well, the Golf Club. It’s mainly drinking.”

  “I’ll buy you a drink, Helena. All I ask is that you tell me about growing up in Grootfontein.”

  “I don’t need you to buy me a drink,” she said, defiant but smiling. “I’ve got me own money.”

  “Tell me about the club.”

  “It’s just whites at the club,” she said, not so much stating a fact as suggesting an atmosphere. “It’s not bad — it’s okay.”

  “We could talk. Unless you’re spoken for.”

  “I’m single,” she said, and hesitated, looking distressed, and I feared what was coming next. “My husband died six months ago. I’m all alone now.”

  Tony winced and shook his head. I had talked too much, and now felt terrible, and tried to be sympathetic. But it was too late. She was a poor, small, bereaved woman in a remote and dusty cattle town in the middle of Namibia — well known for its thievery, I was to learn. So I regretted being facetious, and tried to ease my conscience by giving her a large tip and asking her some ignorant questions about Tsumkwe.

  She sighed at the thought of Tsumkwe and said she had never been there. She added, “But I know one thing. It’s hot there. I saw on the telly — it was forty-two up there yesterday.”

  “That’s over a hundred Fahrenheit,” Tony said when we were back in the car.

  It was 107 degrees in the shade.

  Thirty miles up the paved road we came to a turnoff, a narrow track of whitish gravel, and then we were clattering on loose stones in dry earth, traveling through low yellow bush for the rest of the afternoon, slowly bumping and sliding, the windows coated with the grime of risen dust. No other cars, no people, no animals, no settlements, not even any paths, nothing but sand and the tangle of dark thornbush.

  “The Vet Fence,” Tony said, peering ahead and slowing down after about three hours of driving.

  No fence was immediately visible to me, though I could see a wall of high dusty trees and a metal barrier across the road. A man mopping his face with a white rag was apparently guarding it. Closer, I could see a wire fence strung on widely spaced poles that stretched to the horizon.

  “This fence goes entirely across the country,” Tony said. “Amazing, eh?”

  Now the khaki-uniformed guard, yawning in the heat, approached our car and began to frown at us through the side window as he sedulously examined the back seat — for what? For contraband?

  He yawned again, sweltering in a hot depression in the road.

  “You have milk? You have meat?”

  “No milk, no meat,” Tony said.

  “Where you are going?” The man chewed on his white rag.

  “Tsumkwe.”

  “It is too hot there. It is too hot here too. What is your country?”

  We told him. He was friendly. We chatted a little. He said he wanted to go to Chicago. He raised the iron bar and let us through the fence. On the other side we were in a different Africa.

  I saw at once that the Veterinary Fence, also called the Animal Control Fence, put in place in the early 1960s to prevent the spread of disease, was much more than a cordon sanitaire. The original problem had been a rinderpest pandemic that was being spread by the wild southern savanna buffalo. This heavy, dangerous, thick-horned beast was a favorite of hunters (for its ferocious aspect as a mounted head on a wall) and poachers (for its meat). The erection of the fence, which traversed all of northern Namibia and on the east the frontier of Botswana, contained the wildlife and the infected cattle, preventing them from going farther south into the heart of the country.

  The fence that had solved some problems had also created others. Certain species, specialized feeders such as roan and sable antelopes, unable to get to waterholes during droughts, were trapped and died of thirst. At all checkpoints in the Vet Fence it was routine to confiscate milk and meat from inspected cars entering and leaving. The entrapment and confinement of wildlife had caused a subsequent decline in their numbers, as well as the creation of new ecosystems and patterns of settlement.

  But, crucially, the Vet Fence was a distinct cultural frontier, separating people, creating division. Beyond the wire was the more familiar Africa of skinny, hungry-look
ing children wincing in sunlight, of men drinking beer under trees, of straggling villages and frantic chickens and cattle wandering on the roads, of blowing paper and flimsy plastic bags snagged on trees, of piles of castoff rags and trampled beer cans, the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch. This was an Africa unknown in the Teutonic order of downtown Swakopmund and Windhoek, and quite different even from the small-town haplessness of Grootfontein, which was only a few hours away. The landscape across the fence was different too — bumpier, haphazardly plowed and planted, irregularly divided, in all ways like a new faltering country. It was also, strangely, more affecting, more hospitable, more congenial.

  The fence that isolated animals also isolated people. Nothing behind this thousand-mile barrier remotely resembled anything I had seen in the south of the country. The texture of life was different here on the far side, poorer, meaner, but — the word “authentic” seems patronizing — more human and real. If you didn’t cross the Vet Fence, you would have no idea what a struggle it was for the rural poor in Namibia — probably the majority of the population — to stay alive. The Red Line, as it was less often called, might be a better name, for being appropriately dramatic.

  Down the bumpy road, a signboard with an arrow indicated a Ju/’hoansi village. We turned onto a narrow track and traveled slowly through foot-deep unforgiving sand for several miles, occasionally becoming mired in it. We briefly lost heart, started back, then resumed the search for the village.

  We came to a clearing: on one side a traditional village with thatched huts and twig fences, on the other side a new village of shacks. The traditional huts were for show, like the teepees displayed for tourists of Plains Indians; the shacks were where the San people actually lived.

  Three small men trotted toward us, smiling, gesturing. I was always irrationally moved and felt tender toward anyone I saw running fast in Africa.

  One of the men spoke haltingly in English — hospitable words. “Please — welcome — yes, yes.”

  It was for me like encountering three unicorns. They were the first I had seen of the folk — !Kung-speaking San — who called themselves Ju/’hoansi, the Real People. Though they were dressed neatly in short-sleeved shirts and long pants, I beheld their unusual, friendly faces with a kind of rapture, as though gazing upon mythical ancestors. It is said that the features of these people are a combination of all the racial characteristics of the world — Asian eyes, African faces, European skin tones — and if there was a human synthesis of all the world’s ethnic groups, the resulting example would probably be a Ju/’hoansi person. They were small-boned, short of stature — no more than five feet tall — and eager to show us their village. We asked for details.

  “But it is too late,” the man said.

  He meant it was after four, too late in the day. This, my first glimpse of the San, gave me the wild thought that they looked like extraterrestrials — the narrow chin, the hooded eyes, the large, domelike, well-formed cranium. I knew I was in the presence of our oldest living ancestors, and they radiated a kind of innocence and kindliness. It was no illusion. Everyone who had studied these people had remarked on their gentleness, that they don’t fight, don’t raise their voices, don’t steal, never scold their children.

  When Francis Galton encountered such people south of here — Hottentots, he called them — he characterized them in a different manner, remarking on “the felon face” and explaining: “I mean that they have prominent cheek bones, bullet shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy sensual lips, and added to this a shackling dress and manner.” Later he found some other related people with “remarkably pleasing Chinese-looking faces.” At least that part was true: the faces of the men also had an Asian cast.

  I said, “We’ll come back.”

  “Buy something, please. There.” He indicated a path that led to a small clearing.

  In the clearing a twig fence was hung with trinkets, bead necklaces and bracelets, clusters of feathers, leather pouches, wooden pipes, and the pierced and polished fragments of ostrich shells. No one was hawking them; the artifacts were dangling like wind chimes or Christmas ornaments, with prices inked on paper tags. It was the honor system, appropriate to people in whose culture theft was unknown. “Stealing without being discovered is practically impossible in !Kung life, because the !Kung know everybody’s footprints and every object. Respect for ownership is strong, but apart from that, ‘Stealing would cause nothing but trouble. It might cause fighting’ ” (Lorna Marshall, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae). You chose the trinkets you wanted and left your money in a box.

  We had arrived in Tsumkwe at dusk, described by the San as “the hour when everything is beautiful.”

  7

  Ceremony at the Crossroads

  IN ITS SMALLNESS, frying in the desert heat, torpid, disheveled Tsumkwe illustrated in the simplest manner a number of African economic and demographic dilemmas. In the nearby bush, village life was sustainable but oldfangled, and access to water was a problem. The irregularly settled town, growing larger by the year from people leaving the bush, was a picture of filth and futility and bad management. Tsumkwe had a police station, two churches, and a school. The school educated hundreds of students, but it was hard-up, the teachers were poorly compensated, the students needed to find money for fees, and what lay at the end of their education in this severely unemployed country?

  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 settle
ments 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.