The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

5. Night Train from Swakopmund

ON A DAZZLING HIGH-DESERT early morning, I stepped off the bus into thin air, in the center of Windhoek, a city of wide streets with the kind of old-fashioned wooden arcades jutting over sidewalks that you see in cowboy movies. It was a Sunday. The dignity and somnolence of a Sunday, gone in most countries, was observed in Windhoek, and that made my arrival simpler. Among families in formal churchgoing clothes — men in suits, women in frilly dresses or long-sleeved robes, all smiling as though newly baptized — I walked toward a hotel a few blocks away. And I saw that rarest of workers in Africa, a street sweeper — two of them, actually — one chucking at the granite gutters with his yard-wide broom, the other scooping with his shovel, succeeding in their labors. The clean streets added a touch of surrealism to this African capital.

Stopping to look and to catch my breath, I became self-conscious in my way of gaping at the city. It had become my habit on this trip, a sudden pondering of a landscape or a particular face — faces can seem topographical too, like lumpy landscapes. More than merely observing, I was studying the features and shadows, trying to seize them somehow, thinking that I might not see them again because I probably would never return. I couldn’t recall ever having had this feeling before in my traveling life; even in the worst places I believed I might be back to search for changes. There was a finality in my way of looking now, a gaze with more remembering in it.

Look thy last on all things lovely,

Every hour…

Someone who seems doddery is perhaps not doddery at all but only an older person absorbed in squinting concentration, as though on an ultimate trip, memorizing a scene, grateful for being alive to see it. Knowing that a return to Africa for me was probably out of the question — how much more can these bones take? — made me want to be scrupulously truthful. None of it was trivial, all of it was meaningful; everything I saw mattered much more. And a great deal that I witnessed in Namibia was a revelation.

Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — “the new gang — the gang of virtue” — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many people do both — animal watching in the early morning, busybodying in the afternoon.

Lots of African countries offer this opportunity — Kenya (game parks and slums), Uganda (gorillas and tyrants), Tanzania (colorful Masai herders and urban shantytowns), Malawi (lakeshore luxury and one million AIDS orphans). And there are other tourism-and-busybody opportunities, notably in South Africa, where you can travel without much trouble from a game drive on a wilderness safari to a township tour and see — by the way — that both experiences (game viewing, slumming) have a certain pathos, even an aesthetic, in common.

One of the features of tourism through the centuries, from the Grand Tour onward, is that not far from the five-star hotels there is starvation and squalor. In most destinations you can’t be a tourist without turning your back on human desperation or holding your nose. India is the enduring example: glory in the background, misery in the foreground, no vision of gold without a whiff of excrement. But we are in Africa now, a continent plagued with foreign advisers. I have stayed in African hotels, usually the more expensive ones, where virtually every other guest was a highly paid advice giver.

You can hardly meet a visitor to Africa who doesn’t have an opinion on how the continent should be fixed. The well-publicized high-profile do-gooders provide a gilt-edged mirror in which many of these flamboyant ambitions are reflected, through a glass, darkly.

Four examples, wearing theatrical makeup, come to mind. The modestly gifted, semieducated, but hugely popular movie star, whose provable skills are purely thespian, decides to become an ambassadorial presence in the Sudanese territorial struggle. The aging, dissolute singer visits Malawi, adopts both a posture of piety and a child or two, and leaves with the promise of a new school. The TV talk-show billionaire hobnobs with a head of state and founds a luxurious academy for girls in Johannesburg. The married, scandal-plagued pair of superstars find seclusion from their fans in Namibia, the wife giving birth in a private hospital, and thereafter providing the maternity ward with a large endowment.

In each case, the donors are from faraway America, professional performers, novices in Africa, and they seem weirdly euphoric — wild-eyed and deafened by the power their money has given them — for money can’t buy belief or obedience in Hollywood the way it can in Africa. These stars act out their concern in public, their patronage rising to the level of a performance, like giant infants fluttering money into a beggar’s outstretched hands and pretending to ignore the applause. It is as though they have set out to prove that a person in such a shallow and puppetlike profession is capable of a conscience.

Does this improvisational charity do any good? History suggests no, that the countries are worse off for it. Many African economists, including Dambisa Moyo, from Zambia, and the Kenyan James Shikwati, have convincingly argued that most aid is harmful. In her book analyzing foreign aid to Africa, Dead Aid, Moyo declares that the $1 trillion that African countries have received since the late 1940s has discouraged investment, instilled a culture of dependency, and created corruption, all of which have impeded growth and retarded the nations’ economies.

This is also the view of the Sudanese telecom billionaire Mohamed Ibrahim, who was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 2012 as saying, “It’s my conviction that Africa doesn’t need aid.” In his view, corrupt governments are the problem. “Without good governance there’s no way forward.” Ibrahim is a generous philanthropist in Africa but refuses to give money to any badly governed country. A great deal of aid is plainly political, and much is pure theater, something that comes naturally to the performers and public figures who involve themselves in these efforts at African improvement, which, when you look closely, are often efforts to improve the irregularities in their own public image.

Still, a lack of human charity is an appalling defect, so I am not condemning the actions of these people, only questioning them and finding them mostly misguided. And the ambiguous, self-indulgent, or egomaniacal fame hogger, speaking with the tongues of men and of angels, is never more of a clanging cymbal than when playing a starring role as a philanthropist. No one is a bossier moralizer than a decadent celebrity.

Poor Africa, the stage on which so many outsiders dramatize their lives, test their theories, and reinvent themselves. And there are tens of thousands of others, well-intentioned organizations and generous donors who are also engaged in the business of aid. Namibia is a wonderful place to observe this parade.

Namibia — vast country, small population, and mostly arid stony desert — receives the attention of many charity-minded Americans. There is only one city in the land, and it is hardly a city — Windhoek, the capital, has a quarter of a million people. It is the same size as Newark, New Jersey, and I can well believe that many visitors from Newark to Windhoek make the journey with the idea of telling the locals how to live their lives.

In fact, Newark and Windhoek face some similar problems. Both cities struggle to maintain literacy programs and alleviate poverty and unemployment. One difference is that the high school graduation rate is higher in Windhoek than in Newark, where it is a mere 29 percent (so said New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie in a speech at Harvard Business School in 2011). The neighborhoods of Windhoek are dangerous, yes, and though there are fewer homicides than in Newark, there are twice as many robberies and three times the number of burglaries. Windhoekians are, however, demonstrably more polite. Windhoek has a balmier climate than Newark, and has access to diamond mines. It is not far from an unspoiled coast, and herds of lions and elephants roam nearby. Windhoek’s streets are cleaner than Newark’s too.

This is not Newark bashing. The streets of Windhoek are swept more often than those in many U.S. cities. Arriving by bus early that morning for the first time, I stood on a wide street, impressed by Windhoek’s cleanliness, orderliness, and look of well-being. I sensed its pride, even a sort of civic smugness.

Instead of giving advice on community development, it would make more sense for outsiders to inquire how this order came to Windhoek, and to Namibia at large, especially given the country’s colonial history, which is shamefully rich in massacres and oppression, and its war of independence, which started in 1966 and went on for twenty-four years — Namibian guerrillas pitted against the well-armed South African army, mostly in wicked skirmishes in the bush. After the whirlwind of all this trouble came years of peace and order.

The high literacy rate (above 90 percent) accounts for the fact that there are five daily newspapers in Windhoek, not including one in German, the Allgemeine Zeitung, known in Namibia as the AZ.

“Actually, it is written in Southwest German, the language spoken by German-speakers in Namibia,” a former editor explained to the Deutsche Welle website on the paper’s ninetieth anniversary. The editor, a Namibian-born German, gave the Southwest German word rivir as an example. “It doesn’t mean river and it doesn’t mean Fluss,” the German word for river. “It means a dry river,” or wadi.

Deutsch-Südwestafrika, like many African colonies, started as a small private trading post, until the foreign population grew, flexed its muscles, and began grabbing more land, which needed protection. The modest trading operation of 1883 turned into a German colony, and flourished, but after the defeat of Germany in World War I, the whole territory was turned over to the South Africans, who ran it as their colony, imposing their biases, their racial laws, their army and police, and their own settlers. Yet there had been trekkers from South Africa in this area for a century or more, and in the most remote pans and valleys of Namibia the graves of Boer trekkers bake in the sun. I was to see one cluster of seven tombstones in Etosha, northern Namibia, near an elephant wallow in the middle of nowhere, and another in Humpata, in south-central Angola.

Race-conscious white South Africans had an obsession for categorizing people. But it proved to be a dilemma, because in SouthWest Africa people came in every shade from white to black, with all the coffee and tea tones in between. Take Edith, for example, the mixed-race woman I had met on the bus. Proud of her Namibian heritage, she was on her way to Rehoboth, with its Baster population. The Basters traced their ancestry to the early Dutch in this territory whose mingling with indigenous Nama people had produced a distinct community that proudly called themselves Basters — from the Dutch for “bastard” — a word and a designation they still rejoice in. The South African Guidebook for 1923: “The Bastards are descendants of a cross of Cape European farmers and Hottentots. They number between three and four thousand and live in the Rehoboth District. The Bastards are ruled by a chief with the title of ‘Captain.’ ”

It was not until I arrived in Namibia that I made onward plans, but even so, these plans were vague. I had volunteered to speak at a UNESCO-sponsored event in Tsumkwe, in the far northeast, for the experience of meeting the local people, and I wanted to see the coast, but otherwise I simply had no plans other than to travel overland in a northerly direction, into Angola.

I found it easy to find my way in Namibia, which was crisscrossed by well-trodden paths, filled with busloads of tourists from Europe. Many of them were Germans, making a sentimental journey to their former colony and agreeably surprised to find Gemütlichkeit, German hotels, German restaurants, and about forty thousand permanent-resident Germans (twice the pre-independence number). Thousands more Germans lived seasonally in the seaside town of Swakopmund, a sunny refuge from the German winter.

Though Namibia is twice the size of California, it has a population of only two million people — one of the smallest populations of any African country — and most of them live in Windhoek or in the far north, above the so-called Veterinary Fence that bisects the country (a protection against the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease). Namibia is a land of extremes: ultrarich in minerals that range from uranium, which the United States buys in increasing quantities, to lead, zinc, tin, silver, tungsten, and gem diamonds. Most Namibians are farmers, but poor ones. While Namibia has one of the highest literacy rates and per capita incomes in Africa, it ranks near the bottom in land and income distribution.

“Tourists say they’re disappointed — it’s not Africa,” a man named Karl said to me. I had bumped into him at Windhoek’s main rail station, where he was picking up parcels that had been sent from the coast by the mail train. By “not Africa” he meant the place was too orderly, not obviously poor or tyrannized. “But this is the way all of Africa could be.”

We talked a little while. Karl had been born into a farming family in the small cattle-raising town of Gobabis, in eastern Namibia at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. The English traveler Francis Galton had described this remote place. One of the earliest explorers in that part of the country, Galton was also the first European to write about the animals in Etosha, in his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853). I asked Karl, who was about seventy, what life had been like growing up in his hometown.

“Very quiet,” he said. “And it’s still quiet.”

He had gone to boarding school in Cape Town, he said, a long journey by train. “My brother and I took the narrow-gauge line from Gobabis to Windhoek, changed to the broad-gauge line into South Africa, to Upington, changed again at De Aar on the high veldt, and finally got to Cape Town — four days in the train.”

His parents, his grandparents, all had been farmers. The somnolence and early rising of rural life: nothing changed for years, and even this elegant, white-plastered railway station in Windhoek had been in use for a century, as an important stop on the Trans-Namib Railway and in Karl’s life.

“No tourists came here, and the country didn’t change much until they found uranium,” Karl said. “Then they needed people to work in the mines, and we got people from other countries. And some from Europe overwintering.”

The first uranium deposits had been found in the 1920s, larger seams were discovered in the 1960s, and bigger finds were made in the seventies. New mines were opening as late as 2007. Mining by cartels accounts for two thirds of Namibia’s income but employs less than 10 percent of the workforce.

With Karl’s help, because no one was on duty at the station, I discovered that there was only a night train to the coast, leaving in the dark, arriving at dawn. So taking it I would see nothing but the interior of the train, my disappointed face reflected in the coach window.

Pondering the night train versus the day bus to Swakopmund, I walked back along Bahnhof Street and around the small city center, breathless in this mile-high place. Windhoek looked the way Harare, in Zimbabwe, had once looked: a colonial capital and market town with streets wide enough to allow an ox wagon to make a U-turn. Harare was now a desperate ruin on the verge of bankruptcy, but Windhoek had grown larger without having lost its character, was well kept, proud, as solid as ever, and invested in. The uniformity of the fat squat German architecture — churches and municipal buildings and bungalows — was unmistakable and looked bombproof, built to last, as though on a street in Berlin instead of in this distant plateau in the Namib Desert. “This uniformity derives from the sense of fitness and superiority of the German outlook,” Jon Manchip White wrote in his 1971 account of his journey through this country, The Land God Made in Anger. White, who traveled the area in the early 1960s, provides marvelous summaries of the history and culture, though he sometimes overeggs his descriptions, even of mild, dull Windhoek, asserting that the city gives the traveler “a sense of necromancy … The African mystery is omnipresent. The deserts press round him as pitilessly as the jungle at Kinshasa.”

No “African mystery” now; only brisk, self-important Namibians busily talking on cell phones. I wandered into a shop and asked a man where I might buy a phone. He said they were easy to find and inexpensive, and he gave me the name of an electronics store where I could sign up for one.

The store was on a side street, a rack of sample cell phones in a display case, and at the counter a woman was waiting on a customer. In the corner, at the edge of the counter, a small boy sat on a stool, his arms folded.

Seeing me, the woman clerk said, “Go there,” and gestured to the child.

I smiled and hesitated, and the boy said nothing. Then I saw that the child, about the size of an eight-year-old, was actually a grown man, with San features and bat ears and tiny hands.

I said hello.

“I am Jakob,” he said.

He was polite and patient. He’d seen me hesitate, on the point of ignoring him, taking him for a child. But here he was in a responsible job, explaining what I would have to do to get a cell phone that worked in the country. And though the phone he showed me seemed very cheap, I decided to buy it some other time.

I thanked Jakob and went away, wondering what miseries he had suffered. There were people of small stature all over Central Africa, in the Congo and in southern Angola and northern Namibia, who called themselves the Twa, or Batwa (“Twa People”). I knew of scattered groups of them in Uganda, where their villages were close to the Congo border. They gathered on the road to Bundibugyo, waving at passing cars. When a car slowed down, they called out, “Me pygmy. Take picture,” and demanded money. The Twa, who are part-time hunter-gatherers, tend to live near other peoples in a semidependent way, trading and negotiating, but have their own customs — one of which allows a woman whose husband has committed adultery to strangle the woman who presumes to be her rival. (The man is not punished.)

Jakob could have been a Twa, but I didn’t raise the delicate subject because the one trait that unites the Twa is that they are despised by whomever they live among. And even if Jakob had not been a Twa, he would probably have been identified as one of these pygmoid people who live at the margins of the country.

I spent my time in Windhoek outfitting myself with supplies. Since I was headed to the bush after my trip to the coast, I needed more Malanil, a daily dose against malaria. This being southern Africa, I could buy the drug cheaply without a prescription, as I could my gout medicine and certain antibiotics. I found a Namibian pharmacist who helpfully described dosages. I bought batteries, insect repellent, a hat, spare socks, an elephant-hide belt, and a padlock for my bag.

Windhoek was so rich in safari gear I could have outfitted myself for an ambitious hunting expedition — safaris do not get more elaborate or bloodier than in Namibia. The abundant waterholes and low bush make it a prime destination for shooting animals, not just the Big Five (elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino) but the great horned plains game too, like kudu, oryx, and eland. These animals are gunned down on concessions in the bush operated by safari companies, which also take care of stuffing and mounting the dead beast — the object of the whole ridiculous charade being the trophy.

There were hunters at my hotel, easily identifiable by their funny hats, new khaki clothes, and rifle cases — like oversized Boy Scouts — and by the way they walked in small groups, warily, keeping to themselves except when they were traipsing after their local guide. The guide was the key man in the whole enterprise. He was the arranger, the facilitator, the hirer of cooks and trackers and camp staff, the man who would drive them to the hunting concession or game ranch and bring them to within easy shooting distance of the animals, for which they’d bought licenses to kill. It was safari tourism, trophy hunting for dummies.

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 and 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.”^*

Another man I met, Michael, who had a shop near Pierre’s, had migrated from Germany in 1986. Namibia was better then, he said — no crime, you could leave your door open. But now, with high unemployment, petty theft was common. And he was dismayed by the parsimony of the tourists. Of the tens of thousands of Germans resident in Namibia Michael said, “They never spend money, my countrymen.” He was looking forward to Oktoberfest, a big celebration in Swakopmund and Windhoek, with music and dancing and drunkenness.

“I keep my German passport.” Nodding toward the street, as though at all the other Germans, Michael added, “They do the same. There are no Namibians in this country. There are Herero, Damara, Oshiwambo, Afrikaners, Basters — that’s what they say first, if you ask. Then afterward they say, ‘Oh, yes, I’m also Namibian.’ ”

There was something colonial about Swakopmund, and perhaps it was this that the Germans liked. The old buildings still stood, some of the town looked much as it had a century before, there were no high-rises, and — owing to the hard-up townships — there was no servant problem. There were many good restaurants, the wine lists were lengthy, the prices were reasonable, the hospitality was convincing. Every evening when I returned from my forays, Herr Wacker, the general manager of the Hansa Hotel, greeted me warmly.

“You must stay longer,” he said.

I would have, but I had a train to catch.

It wasn’t easy leaving the hotel. As all the other guests were filing into the dining room, I made my way by taxi to the now obscure railway station, the driver reminding me of the all-night journey through the desert and repeating that, for a hundred dollars or so, he would whisk me to Windhoek in the morning.

But I had resolved to ride the train, and the more it was denounced (“Only black people take the train”), the greater my desire to see it. Like much in Swakopmund — many houses, the banks, some hotels, the layout of streets — the railway, too, was a hundred years old.

I found a seat that canted back and would allow me to sleep. Among my fellow passengers, some were burdened with bundles, some with small children, family groups already settling in for the night. Across the aisle was a great fat Afrikaner reading a newspaper in his language. He was sitting alone, and his entire bulging midsection was swathed in a heavy bandage, as if to prevent him from exploding.

In the seat ahead, a German, Klaus. He said he was ill. “I passed a bad night,” he explained. And he made the vomit gesture, his hand mimicking a flow from his wide-open mouth. “It was the biltong [cured meat] I ate.”

Then we left the station, and when the lights in the coach went out, the desert was lit, and glittered for hours in the light of the cold moon.

* I had written about the Zimbabwe government violently seizing these farms in Dark Star Safari. Eight months after Pierre told me this story, the New York Times reported, in 2012, that the maize harvest had been reduced by a third, 1.6 million Zimbabweans faced starvation, and the UN’s World Food Program would need to distribute emergency food aid. Before 2000, Zimbabwe had a surplus of maize, the staple food of the people.