NAMIBIA – Timeless Eden
Namibia is big sky country. There is so much space here that even time gets lost.
Namibia’s endless desert shoreline stands immeasurable and barren against an equally
immeasurable Atlantic Ocean and, inland, beyond the great dunes, the red rocky
mountains erupt like carbuncles from immense yellow plains all set against an immense
blue Namibian sky that vaults heavenward from the horizon, curving upward, overhead
and around like an enormous inverted cosmic fishbowl. During the heat of the day, the
sky turns white, wiping away the deep ochre and yellow landscape and transforming it
into a washed out, shimmering and unforgiving wasteland. But by late afternoon the
harshness of the sky softens and slowly transforms into deepening shades of purple, while
the soft deep glow of the setting sun illuminates the deep yellows and ochres of the land
until the sky, finally, becomes an infinite black void studded with a billion diamonds
glinting and blinking against a silhouette of a sand dune here, or perhaps a mountain there
or even an elephant or some other great African animal wondering across a darkening
plain. Sometimes, when it rains, the yellow land turns green and the blue of the sky is
interrupted by great voluminous white clouds that barrel and mushroom their way
heavenward before dumping their precious cargo upon a grateful earth. It’s the sky that
defines this nation, where the sun and moon compete in a celestial dance of epic
proportions, giving the land an aura of space and timelessness like none other in Africa.
The 15th century Portuguese explorers were the first Europeans to visit Namibia but the
bleak, sandy Namib desert was too harsh and unforgiving for any significant settlement
and the mariners remained content with a tenuous toe-hold in the odd desolate bay. Over
the next four centuries Namibia’s sandy coastal wasteland gained the macabre appellation
of the Skeleton Coast - as any shipwrecked and marooned sailors were doomed to a slow
and agonising death without food, water or shelter. In the mid to late nineteenth century,
while most of Africa was carved up by the European powers, Namibia remained
untouched, a spacious blank on a continent’s colourful kaleidoscope map of colonies,
each colour designating the European power in charge. The colours on the Africa map
during this carving-up period were predominantly red and blue, with the odd yellow and
green patch, until soon-to-be-purple Germany, late-scramblers on the scene, finally took
Namibia as their fourth African colony in 1884 simply because there was nothing else
left. By that stage, Europeans had the technology to penetrate beyond the Skeleton coast,
through the Namid desert and into the wispy fertile plateau between the Namib and the
mighty Kalahari desert. It was here that the Germans created their capital, Windhoek, it
was here that they encountered the local Herero tribes, successful pastoralists in an
unforgiving environment; but most of all and it was here under the blue Namib sky that
the colonists realised what a hold this land began to have on them and while the rest of
Europe pitied the Germans on trying to make something from nothing, the colonists were
falling in love.
At first the love for Namibia was intense and possessive. They named their territory after
themselves, Deutsch-Sudwesafrika. The colonists wanted the land for themselves and
embarked on a policy to drive the people of Namibia out. They decimated the Herero,
driving them into the Kalahari to perish from hunger and thirst by the thousands. The
Herero were almost wiped off the face of the earth. The Germans were less successful
with the Nama in the south, who went to ground, scattered into the wilderness, returning
periodically to exact brutal raids on remote German outposts. But the Germans were soon
to be banished, the outbreak of the First World War saw the colonial forces succumb to a
new power, South Africa, who occupied the territory under the League of Nations
mandate. The South Africans too fell in love with Namibia refusing to give up the
territory even after the League was liquidated. In the years after the Second World War,
South Africa twice asked the United Nations to allow full incorporation of Namibia into
South Africa. But South Africa, by then under Apartheid rule, was repeatedly refused and
ordered to give Namibia up which South Africa delayed as long as she could, fighting
legal battle after legal battle with the UN until after 75 years South Africa, heartbroken,
finally released Namibia from her clutches and the country gained her long-awaited
independence in 1990.
Like the South African’s and the German colonists before, people today find it difficult
not to fall in love with Namibia. The desert, the mountains, the sky and the colours are
captivating. Namibia’s dimensions - open, incessant, limitless - vault the spirit. There are
hardly any people. It’s the second least densely populated country after Mongolia (just
two million at a per capita count of two people for every square kilometre). But what
Namibia lacks in people and big cities it makes up in nature. The country has a surprising
abundance of fauna, surprising because the land is so arid and unyielding. The great
white Etosha Pan in the north is Namibia’s faunal showcase and as far as game reserves
go it is exceptional. The enormous salt-pan surrounded by grassland and Mopane
woodland, spanning a staggering 5000 square kilometres, hosts a profusion of Africa’s
great mammals. Etosha’s elephants, in particular, are remarkable, often covered with the
fine white dust of the pan, they resemble ghosts, their gigantic pale forms seemingly float
through the shimmering mirages of the pan, the deep blue sky providing a perfect
contrast to their white flanks. The pan also is home to the rare and endemic Black Faced
Impala and occasionally when it rains the great pan fills with a couple of inches of water
where it resembles, from satellite photographs, a gargantuan mirror framed by brown
wood and grassland. When the pan is flooded it attracts tens of thousands of flamingos
and pelicans that gather in a noisy melee to breed. Etosha too exudes a sense of
timelessness and once again it’s the ancient sky that gives out the aura. No wonder
Stanley Kubrick chose Etosha as the backdrop for the opening scenes of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. The animals are not confined to Etosha alone, they seem to be everywhere.
Hippos and crocodiles wallow in the pools of the rivers that cross and border the piercing
corridor of Namibia’s only tropical spit of land in the northwest known as the Caprivi
Strip. Baboons bound along the roadside in Windhoek’s suburbs; Kudu, Springbok,
Gemsbok and other antelope are almost always spotted from the national roads. Rhino
turn up in the most inhospitable desert recesses, cheetah are more abundant here than
anywhere else in the world and as for Namibia’s oceans, apart from abundant fish stocks,
some of the largest seal colonies can be found scattered down the entire length of the
coastline, with the vulnerable seal pups often falling prey to brown hyena, jackals and
desert lions.
And the people too, timeless faces, timeless ways, are a blend, tribally and racially, but
all open and welcoming, smiles as broad as the land itself. Namibia’s peoples are not
quite essentially African but yet still very African. It’s a nation that stands apart from the
continent yet it is so inextricably bound to it. What sets it apart from other African
countries is the sense of timelessness. It’s not quite the fact that Namibia’s history, like
the German thirty year rule over 100 years ago that left its permanent but decaying mark
on the land - ghost towns and lonely buildings in the German version of Victorian
architecture, nor is it quite the fact that the sky, an ancient guardian over desolate yellow
desert and red mountains, is always present, always dominant. Namibia, uniquely, is all
of this, but more. Her timelessness runs deeper. Africa is the mother continent from
where it peopled the world. Namibia is Africa’s womb, from where it peopled Africa.
Stanley Kubrick was correct in filming the opening dawn of man scenes of 2001: A
Space Odyssey in Namibia. This is a land where it all began for us. Humans first began
looking and acting like modern humans among the craggy mountains of Namibia’s
escarpment. Protected and isolated from the ice sheets and deserts plaguing the rest of the
world between 200 and 100 millennia ago, our ancestors were left for eons in this
southwest corner of Africa to evolve and become modern in a tranquil haven, to build a
platform from where we as a species could expand and colonise the world. The origins of
our kind are in evidence everywhere in Namibia, petroglyphs painted and etched in red
ochre on the rocks and caves while Achulean tools are scattered on the yellow plains. If
one ever wondered what Adam and Eve looked like, just look today at the faces of
Namibia’s oldest tribe, the Nama, – neither African, European or Asiatic but perhaps all
of them. Conceivably this is why the German colonists, the South African care-takers and
Kubrick felt such a spiritual kinship with Namibia – modern visitors too – they were, we
are, simply returning home.