The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

6. The Bush Track to Tsumkwe

AN EARNEST, HIGH-MINDED, well-funded, foreign-sponsored event — the sort I always either avoided or mocked — was being held in Tsumkwe, a small town in the remote northeast of Namibia. Much less than a town, Tsumkwe was a village crossroads in the Kaokoveld, a region in the center of Nyae Nyae, which was eighteen thousand square miles of infertile, drought-prone, famine-haunted, thinly populated bush — an unpromising area, it seemed, for such an expensive and scholarly effort. Yet I knew such places to be the beating heart of Africa.

The event would be a full day’s program of talks and films, billed as “World Day for Celebrating Audio-Visual Heritage in Namibia,” organized by the Windhoek office of UNESCO. You cannot hear such a pompous title without imagining a long hot day of yawning and paper shuffling and protocol, discussion groups, noble projects (“We could start a workshop … form a committee … apply for a grant”), and endless talk — the jargonized gabbing about plans that would never amount to anything more than words on the wind. You think: What’s the use?

I was asked if I would be willing to speak at this Tsumkwe event, at a forum devoted to the theme for the day, “Preserving a Cultural Heritage.”

The subject, however vague, interested me, and I had nothing else to do except stay on the road. I welcomed the idea of a ride to Tsumkwe, which was 454 miles from Windhoek, the last third of it on a gravel road through uncultivated and featureless bush. And I might have something to add to the discussion.

I said yes, fighting my skepticism, and was glad afterward.

No train, no bus, hardly even a bush taxi went to Tsumkwe. Trucks traveled to the place at irregular intervals. At the end of the dusty road and near the Botswana border, Tsumkwe was closer in miles (about a hundred or so) to the Okavango Delta and the small town of Nokaneng in Botswana than to any place of substance in Namibia. It was home to the Ju/’hoansi, a subgroup of the!Kung, and near many of their settlements, and was regarded as a center of the last of the hunter-gatherers, who had lived thereabouts for almost forty thousand years.

In return for two talks at the event, I’d get a ride from Windhoek. In my travel, I used no transport other than public buses and trains, and I was determined to proceed overland, though it was awkward at times. In any case, no commercial planes flew to Tsumkwe either; an airstrip had been bulldozed in the bush to accommodate the private planes and ministerial helicopters of Namibian politicians.

Though it was only a dot on the map, in a historical sense Tsumkwe was important. It was near the base of operations chosen by the ethnographer Lorna Marshall for her pioneering study of the Ju/’hoansi, the Real People. In a fit of restless inspiration combined with wanderlust, Lorna’s husband, Laurence Marshall, a wealthy businessman and cofounder of Raytheon Corporation, took his wife and children to southern Africa in 1950. Newly retired, he said he wanted to do something constructive that would include spending time traveling with his family. He devised an ambitious — some would say reckless — plan to relocate to the remote Nyae Nyae Conservancy area and get to know the indigenous people, at that time an overlooked and undifferentiated folk called simply, and unhelpfully, Bushmen. Until that time these despised people had barely been studied, and had been pushed to the margins and ignored by the South African government, which administered what was then the mandated territory of South-West Africa. Laurence and Lorna Marshall and their teenage children, Elizabeth and John, penetrated the trackless bush in a Chevy truck, a difficult journey now, almost unimaginable in the 1950s.

Tsumkwe then was not any kind of formal settlement. No more than a waterhole near a large black baobab tree, it was a mere unsurveyed landholding, a patch of bush (called a n!ore) that supported the hunting and foraging of a tiny group of Ju/’hoansi people. The Marshalls located themselves about thirty miles to the southeast, near a pan — a seasonal waterhole — called Gautscha. There they stayed for two years, and kept returning for more than a decade. On the face of it, the Marshalls resembled the Swiss Family Robinson on wheels; in practice, it was family rustication provoked by intellectual curiosity that bore rich anthropological fruit.

Lorna Marshall’s book, The!Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976), was one of the earliest scholarly studies of these people. Lorna’s children were similarly inspired. John Marshall, traditionally initiated while still in his teens and fluent in the language, was to spend the rest of his life, off and on, among the Ju/’hoansi, hunting with them, studying them, filming them. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a novelist, has written two nonfiction accounts of the Ju/’hoansi (“Ju/wasi” in her spelling): The Harmless People (1991), a mild and hopeful account of the people, and The Old Way (2006), a more sober look at the drastic changes in their culture and at the myths about their lives that are harbored by romantic voyeurs like me.

Over a period of fifty years, from 1950 to 2000, John Marshall, a man of luminous sensibility, recorded the Ju/’hoansi extensively on film. His five-part documentary, A Kalahari Family, in which he interviewed Ju/’hoansi in footage now considered very rare, is regarded as a classic ethnographic visual record. He made many other films about them and their disappearing culture, chronicling the dramatic recent history of these people who, living the old way, undisturbed for 1,500 centuries, have been confronted by the outer world of bureaucrats, traders, politicians, missionaries, miners, tourists, opportunists, educators, and all the paraphernalia that the outsiders brought with them — legal briefs, guns, money, canned food, alcohol, candy, books, Bibles, and new diseases. They also brought extravagant promises, if not of prosperity in this world than glory in the afterlife. The Marshalls witnessed the Ju/’hoansi change from self-sufficient and strong to mostly dependent and much weakened. The timeline of Tsumkwe, this outpost in the bush, was like the timeline of sub-Saharan Africa, the history of Africa in a parable of exploitation and decline.

Something else that persuaded me to participate in this Audio-Visual Heritage Day in Tsumkwe was the news that two of John Marshall’s films, recently discovered in the Namibian National Archives, would be shown there — where they were made — for the first time. I wanted to see the place, view the films, and meet the people, and I was eager to travel into the bush.

So far my trip had been fairly straightforward. Though many South Africans had warned of physical danger, and Namibians warned of theft, I had not been seriously inconvenienced. All I had experienced were a few shouted threats, some mild racial abuse, petty thievery (sunglasses, a small amount of money), and the pleading of hungry people — but you might encounter these annoyances anywhere in the world.

People said, “Wait till you get to Angola!”

I asked, “When were you last in Angola?”

They said never, that no one went to Angola because it was so dreadful. No eyewitnesses, no firsthand accounts; I was not deterred.

I never looked for trouble and usually took the path of least resistance, though the simplest trip in Africa can be trouble for someone traveling alone. I hated taking risks, I tried to avoid them, but sometimes they were unavoidable. Going solo, I always had problems to solve. I had no car, so I had to rely on public transport. I did not make plans very far in advance, so I was always in need of a hotel room or a meal at short notice. Because of that, I sometimes had to sleep on a bus, or not sleep at all, and now and then went without meals. But I could hardly complain about such irksome outcomes in countries where so many people were destitute and slept under trees and endured long periods without food. I am not by nature a networker or a looker-up of people, so I am always dependent on chance meetings, on dumb luck, on the kindness of strangers.

Tony, an American diplomat in Namibia, was one of those helpful strangers. He had invited me to the Tsumkwe event, and he too would be a participant. Briefing me beforehand over dinner in a Portuguese restaurant in Windhoek, he proved reassuringly amiable and well read (“You know, Thomas Pynchon wrote about the Hereros in Gravity’s Rainbow and V”). Tony was also unflappable, and he had access to a fairly new four-wheel-drive vehicle. All the best qualities for a ten-hour road trip into the bush.

We set off early in the morning from Windhoek, driving into the sunrise. We talked about Pynchon’s books. I mentioned that, sentence by glowing sentence, the man was brilliant, but his high-density pages and wandering, infolding plot lines gave the books a bloodless literary affectation that made them almost unreadable to me. Tony, educated as a literature major, had an academic’s patience, a stomach for solving monotonous literary puzzles, and a delight in lessons learned: a difficult literary text to him was a problem in dissection, like a biology student in a lab hovering over a gutted rodent. Tony read for the challenge and possible reward of identifying obscurities and making connections. This was not my temperament at all. I hate studying books and chewing through teasingly contrived texts, the obstacle courses of deliberate difficulty. If a book doesn’t engage me, I toss it aside. I read for the visceral pleasure of it.

Driving past browsing cattle in the savanna of the great sunbaked heartland, Tony urged me to treat the Pynchon books more sympathetically. They were fiction but historically accurate, dramatizing a period of German colonialism and atrocities that had been suppressed by German politicians and not written about much elsewhere. But in the past few years this brutal era has received much more notice and, as well, deeper and detailed scholarship.

Germany — the last European country to acquire colonies, and the first to lose them — had attempted to exterminate an entire native population, the Herero, in South-West Africa in 1904. The wipeout had almost succeeded, in what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century. This was largely the effort of one man, General Lothar von Trotha, charged by Kaiser Wilhelm II to carry out a Vernichtungsbefehl (“extermination order”), an actual printed document, dated October 2, 1904, a copy of which is kept in the Botswana National Archives. To von Trotha, the Herero were Unmenschen — nonhuman. They were — and a small number still are — a pastoral nomadic people. Herero seeking to cling to their traditional lands, and occasionally raiding the intrusive colonists, infuriated von Trotha.

“All the tribes of Africa share the same mentality, in that they only retreat when confronted by violence,” von Trotha wrote to his superiors, sounding like Mr. Kurtz. “My policy was and is, to apply such violence with the utmost degree of terrorism and brutality. I will exterminate the rebellious tribes with rivers of blood.”

Pushed by the Germans, the Herero resisted. One of the results was the Waterberg massacre, and in this and other battles (the rapid-fire Maxim guns against arrows and old single-shot rifles) it is estimated that as many as ninety thousand Herero — the great majority of the Herero people — were killed.

Tony and I talked about this as we traveled in glorious sunshine toward the town of Otjiwarongo, passing the very spot, Waterberg, a bluish ridge in the distance, where the massacre took place.

Somehow — in exile, scattered, in concentration camps, as slave laborers — the remnant Herero had survived. Herero women are easily identifiable by their distinctive clothing: a billowy ankle-length dress with full sleeves and an extravagant headpiece of folded cloth, called an otjikaiva, with two pointed ends that look like a flattened admiral’s hat which is said to mimic the horns of a cow.

“I see Hereros all over the place,” I said. The Herero men were unremarkable in their clothes, but the women were unmistakable. “I saw a lot of them in Windhoek, which is full of Germans. They don’t seem to bear any grudges.”

“The people in Namibia are generally easygoing,” Tony said. “They’re gentle. You seldom hear anyone shouting. It’s the Angolans here who have a reputation for being lively and excitable.”

But we saw no one on the roadside or in the landscape, nothing to suggest human habitation except the cattle fences strung along the road. Now and then we saw wild game — a springbok or an ostrich or an occasional raptor hung in the sky — but there were no people, no houses, nothing but the vast hot land, yellow in the drought that had gripped it.

Tony said, “The people in Tsumkwe are really glad you’re coming.”

“I’m grateful they asked me,” I said, and meant it. And I smiled to think that I, who usually mocked such events, would be taking part in an NGO effort at enlightenment in this remote place.

“What’s it like there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “This is my first time.”

We came to the town of Otjiwarongo (“Place of Fat Cattle” in the Herero language), still a center of cattle ranching. One of the German outrages had been to push the cattle-owning tribes off the land and to engage in cattle ranching themselves. When challenged on this by right-thinking people, the Germans, and after them the South Africans, said that what the natives needed in order to achieve self-sufficiency was education.

“My great-grandfather, the late Chief Kambazembi, had never been to school, but he had 25,000 cattle in 1903 before we were conquered,” a Herero man, Zedekia Ngavirue, told a UN commission in Dar es Salaam in 1961 (quoted in Ruth First, South West Africa, 1963). “I have a college diploma but do not possess even a chicken.” This statement was prescient: many Africans today could make this sort of claim.

The ancestral graves of this chiefly Kambazembi family were not far away, on the slopes of the Waterberg Plateau. Some disinterred remains had been returned from Botswana (where the family had been exiled) and ceremonially reburied as recently as 2006.

Otjiwarongo had a German and Afrikaner population of around three thousand, mostly farmers and shopkeepers, when the writer Jon Manchip White passed through in the 1960s and found it an outpost of fussiness — Rotarianism, parking signs, and plaster garden gnomes. The number of whites had not much diminished, though a great number seemed to live in a neighborhood of walled-in bungalows two blocks from the main street. The town remained a center of ranching and farming, so on the main street was a big supermarket, repair shops, feed stores, small hotels, and many churches, including a large Lutheran church with an enormous square-sided steeple, which was also a clock tower.

“You could probably find a cell phone here at one of these shops,” Tony said.

I had mentioned my lack of a cell phone on our drive. I sometimes felt that I was the only person in Namibia without one, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to phone home.

Some helpful directions from friendly Otjiwarongans brought us to the small roadside shop of Mr. Khan, who had an array of electronic goods in his display case. Mr. Khan explained that for about $20 I could buy a phone, and for another $20 a SIM card and usable minutes, which he would program into the phone. I now understood, rather late in the day, why rickshaw wallahs, Cambodian fishermen, and Masai warriors were sometimes seen talking on a tiny plastic phone.

A young Herero woman, Grace, helped with the transaction.

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-looking 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.”