Cattle kingdom, p.4
Counting Teeth, page 4
As they busy themselves with my tire, I take in the surroundings. “‡Gâingu Conservancy,” the sign behind me says. I ask Jannie how to pronounce it, and lesson one in basic Damara ensues. It lasts almost half an hour. Damara has four clicks. We start with those. I have three down pat from having grown up in an isiXhosa-speaking environment, but I work on the fourth, a variation of the palatal click. After the lesson and the tire change, we say our goodbyes and head off to the camping area.
Ahead of us, the Spitzkoppe bleed into the late afternoon shadows. A scab of boulders covers the earth below the sheer ironstone cliffs. We find an open space under a large camelthorn tree at the edge of the cliffs where two boulders shelter us from the wind. We are invisible in the folds of these gigantic boulders. While Sinead scrambles through the rocks to the long-drop outhouse we noticed as we approached, I pitch the tent. In the distance, two specks have appeared at the top of a rocky outcrop. Sinead rejoins me and we build a small campfire to keep the chill of the evening at bay. It is dark when the couple we had seen on the rocks walk past us.
“Darkness comes so quickly and so completely here,” says my city-raised daughter.
There is no time to linger and climb to the top of the Spitzkoppe in the morning, for we have to head back to Okahandja for the Herero Day parade. After breakfast, we scramble to the top of a large rock before it is time to leave. On the way back to Uis, we pass a group of children sitting at a roadside stall with their mother. The oldest should be in school, but the rest of the gang is still too young. One, barely out of diapers, runs toward us as we stop, asking for sweets. Instead, I offer apples. We look at the beadwork on display, but what catches my eye is the large tub of water in the shade: a sign attached to the tub lists the cost as twenty-five cents for a mug. In a desert country, water is precious, so it comes as little surprise that it becomes a commodity out here where access to water is limited. On our way to the mountains the previous evening, Sinead had promised one of the young girls that she would buy something from them in the morning. While she looks for some souvenirs, I ask for a cupful of water. It tastes brackish.
Back in Usakos, I find a place to fix my tire. Wherever you turn people sell stones. The guy fixing my tire mumbles something. I nod absent-mindedly and a bucket full of semi-precious stones appears from nowhere. The locals live among stones and it is the crop that is most desired by tourists.
Two towns exist alongside each other. They bear the same name, but one lingers amidst the markets of time where old memories are traded for new; the other shifts and pushes against the banks of two converging rivers, the Okakango and Okamita. Okahandja is larger than memory. The town that rises before me in the glaring light of a late spring afternoon sprawls around Moordkoppie. It catches me by surprise, for the town I expected to find ends at the railway line. This town before me is not the town of memory and story. That town is isolated and sparse. It lingers in the bazaar of memories and changes as the light catches each aspect of it. In that town of memories, Moordkoppie is a short trek out of town. There are no houses crowding it as they do now. We lived “just down from the Standard Bank, over the railway line and down a block on the road to Walvis Bay,” as my mother recalls before she glances at her handiwork to pick up the count on the chain she is crocheting. “Street names? Ag nee, my kind. They just sent the mail addressed to us in Okahandja. The people at the post office knew where we lived.”
The twin town, the town of the present, squats uncomfortably in places where memory roamed freely. There is a new road to Walvis Bay now, one that bypasses the town, and the smattering of houses that lay beyond the railway line are now part of the central business district. In an old photograph, my sister and I sit at a small rock garden in front of one of these houses. My sister is playing with her dolls in German, for that was what she was taught to do at the kindergarten where Tante Elizabeth cared for her while Ma taught at the Augustineum. Tante Elizabeth, who also looked after the elderly Oupa Vedder in his dotage. In the town of memories, Oupa Vedder’s powerful voice still booms from his frail body.
In the town of memory and illusion, Bishop Mize drives through from Windhoek once a month to come and minister to the Anglican community in Okahandja. On these occasions, our living room is transformed into a small chapel. Joseph, the Owambo contract labourer who worked in our kitchen, emerges to help rearrange the furniture and as he prepares to return to the kitchen, Bishop Mize turns to Ma and says, “Let him sit with us for the service. He, most of all here, needs to hear the Word of the Lord.” On such occasions, Ma retreats to the kitchen with me in her arms to make lunch while Joseph sits on an upright chair in the living room. After the service and after lunch, I follow Joseph to the edges of the garden and to the borders of my world. Beyond those borders, things happened of which I was unaware. Things that I have come to discover and, hopefully, understand.
Sinead and I squeeze our way through these adjacent towns that compete for space in our lives. The town of my childhood memory is invisible to her and she relies solely on my fading memories to recreate it. What she sees is the town that implants itself in her own memory; a town she is about to discover is already forgetting itself. This town she sees, the one caught in the stupor of a Friday afternoon, is filled with generic buildings. Occasionally we see a date on the gable that suggests this building once belonged to the town of my memory, but the fading paint on the facade has rendered it indistinguishable from the newer buildings that surround it. I try hard to dredge up some memory that will help us locate the house in the photograph, but the only common ground I find in these twin towns is the heat.
It was hot, almost unbearably hot, in Okahandja and in the reed shelters that functioned as outside classrooms at the Augustineum, the school started by the old Rhenish missionaries. During the summer months, the Ovaherero men attending the school would rise from their desks and stand to prevent themselves from falling asleep in class, according to Ma’s stories. Ma no longer remembers the names of her students, but I know that among them were several young men who were busy making plans for their future, plans that would take them beyond the borders of their country to take up arms to fight for independence. Men like Peter Katjavivi.
One day, I too would be called upon to take up arms. Only, I would be required to wage a war against these men and the many women who had crossed the border after them. Just as I was learning to walk on my own in the streets of Okahandja, six men had crept back across the border into Namibia and were hiding in Meme Priskila Tuhadeleni’s house at Endola. In 1966, the first shots of the war were fired at a small village called Omugulugwombashe in northern Namibia. The war soon escalated and from 1968 on all white South African males had to register for compulsory military training when they turned sixteen. At the start of our grade eight year, the teachers set aside time for us to complete our initial enrolment forms – lists of hobbies and interests, skills, history, special posting requests and so on. Every year, I would receive the one-page letter stating my duration of service and my training base. Every year, I would have to present proof that I was still at school, or registered at university, in order to defer my enlistment. I would tear off the perforated edges that had guided the form through a dot matrix printer in some military office and file it in a folder I eventually destroyed after Namibian independence.
Sharing the location of our call-ups after a Christmas holiday was part of hostel life at school. We would envy those with the plum call-ups and commiserate those who received call-ups to what was rumoured to be less desirable camps, like Walvis Bay. We performed the ritual even though we all knew that we would not be required to report for a few more years. Since I was born in Namibia, my call-up papers were often to training bases in Namibia, including Walvis Bay and Okahandja.
Even though we only received our call-up papers at sixteen, the military had been part of our lives from the day we started high school at thirteen. Within the first week of the school year, we lined up to collect our cadet uniforms, and twice a week after that, we practised drills and learned to shoot at the school firing range. Well, not everyone. A handful of students were exempt, for they were Seventh-day Adventists, and their beliefs forbid participation in war. But they were all day boys and we hostel kids knew of them only as the oddballs who entered the library as our junior drill sergeants marched us around the school grounds. I envied them the privilege of not having to obey orders from overly eager cadet officers. I drowned out the endless barrage of commands by focusing on finding places where I could hide in the future if I chose to skip cadets. The opportunity arose when they changed cadets to first period to avoid unnecessary disruptions to the school day. Then I was able to sneak off to the hostel boiler room, only to rejoin my classmates as they returned to school at the end of cadets, or Moral Education as it was called at one point, for our military education was rounded off by a thorough grounding in Christianity.
In the dusk of the boiler room, I had about an hour in which to entertain myself by reading, or simply poking into nooks and crannies behind and under the boilers. In those nooks, I discovered the first faded copies of Stephen Bantu Biko’s magazine, Frank Talk, and Sechaba, the African National Congress’ magazine. I knew that I should report these magazines to the hostel master or someone else, but I didn’t. There was something exciting about this subversive world that drew me toward it. These magazines opened a new world to me, one in which I even learned things about my own school that were not common knowledge among the students, like that Bram Fischer, who had defended Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial, was an old boy.
Armed with such knowledge, I asked for Namibian call-ups in my questionnaire. The idea was that if I got posted to a Namibian base, I would desert at the first opportunity and join SWAPO. In reality, my aversion to the military and war trumped the idealistic desire to join the revolutionary forces. And while I waited, I played the game of sharing my postings with my friends at school.
I had expected Okahandja to be busier in the days leading up to the annual pilgrimage to Maharero’s grave, but everything seems to have been baked to silence in the late afternoon sun. Sinead and I leave the main street and head down a side street where two guards in military fatigues lounge against the gates of a compound of sorts. Through the gates, I can see a row of military vehicles and a sign advertising this as the site of a military museum. It seems appropriate for a town that started off as a military command post and subsequently housed a South African Forces Training Base and also became the training ground for young revolutionaries. Okahandja was founded by the colonial administrator, Theodor Leutwein. His insatiable demand for more and more land for European settlement necessitated a strong military presence among the people whose land he desired.
A story from the oral tradition goes that when Leutwein asked for land, Chief kaMaharero told him to bring baskets and buckets and he would give him land. When Leutwein returned, kaMaharero filled the containers with sand and returned them to the governor. “There is your land,” he said. KaMaharero’s response did not please the governor and so he took the land he wanted by force. KaMaharero died in these battles over the land. His son, Samuel, was more accommodating and obliged Leutwein by selling off sections of Ovaherero land to him. By 1903, however, Leutwein had begun to put into motion plans to settle the Ovaherero in reserves, forcing them out of their traditional territory. In January 1904, the Ovaherero took up arms against the Germans in an effort to avoid losing more land. The two sides moved around central Namibia, engaging in regular skirmishes. After months of trekking up and down the region, Leutwein was forced to withdraw his troops to the safety of the garrison at Okahandja. At about the same time, Samuel Maharero moved his troops north to the plateau at Ohamakari, where the grazing was better and where his people could regroup after the prolonged campaign. There, they would wait until Leutwein came to negotiate for peace, as he had on previous occasions.
The Germans had other plans. Frustrated by Leutwein’s inability to gain a decisive victory, the kaiser removed him from his command and appointed General Lothar von Trotha. Immediately after his arrival, von Trotha demanded, and got, more troops from Germany. The German contingent in Namibia grew from five thousand to twenty thousand in the space of a few months. As the new troops arrived, he moved them up to Ohamakari, cornering Samuel Maharero and his people. On the eleventh of August 1904, he attacked the Ovaherero.
Throughout the day, the women stood behind the soldiers, singing omatandu, praise songs of encouragement, and providing spiritual sustenance. “Ehi rovaherero,” they sang in defiance of the slaughter that was happening before their eyes. The battle continued deep into the night, and shortly before dawn the desperate Ovaherero fled into the Omaheke, the western edge of the Kalahari Desert. It was early spring and the wells were dry after the winter. Eyewitnesses say wells were filled with the bodies of cattle and humans. The words of the omatandu paint a dire picture of Maharero’s plight:
He had horses of hunger
He was riding with horses of hunger
He was riding, he was riding
And still he had horses of hunger.
The Ovaherero fled east toward Botswana. The Germans pushed ahead of them, occupying the watering holes, poisoning some of them and forcing the Ovaherero back into the desert to starve and die of thirst. On the second of October 1904, General von Trotha issued a now-historic proclamation:
I, the Great General of the German soldiers address this letter to the Herero people. The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I will force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people – otherwise I shall order shots be fired at them.
Thus began the ruthless extermination of the Ovaherero. Von Trotha’s proclamation caused uproar in Germany and by December he was forced to rescind it, but he did not end the brutality of his campaign. Instead, the Ovaherero were rounded up and taken to concentration camps, where they died from exposure and hard labour. Samuel Maharero died in exile in Botswana in March 1923. Later that year, on the twenty-third of August, his remains were returned to Okahandja and since then, the Ovaherero have gathered here annually on the Sunday closest to this date to pay homage to their ancestors, to the leaders and to the people who fell during the carnage. Over a period of four years, up to ninety thousand Ovaherero died – about two-thirds of the total population. During the Wars of Resistance, many of the survivors had converted to Christianity out of convenience in the concentration camps, but after the war they began to relight their eternal fires and return to old customs. In the future, the omatandu would talk of the great sadness.
Sinead and I do not stop at the museum, for our main goal is to find Maharero’s grave and to establish where the weekend’s festivities will start. No one, it seems, can help us. “Maharero’s grave?” I ask every person we pass. Not a clue. “Herero Day celebrations?” Never heard of them. The young girl at the tourist information bureau reluctantly ends her conversation on her cell phone when she realizes we’re not going to go away or look at the tourist kitsch on sale. She saunters over and insists on addressing me in English even though she has spent the last five minutes speaking Afrikaans on the phone. I respond in English, but it is clear she does not understand, so I swap back to Afrikaans. The light of comprehension on her face is visible. Yet she still tries to explain in English. The graves, we gather, are beside the old swimming pool.
“And where might that be?” I ask. She doesn’t know. But she does start closing up shop to indicate that the conversation is over. The swimming pool doesn’t show up on the maps, or on the GPS, so we decide to ask at the place where we will be staying for the night. We drive past the craft market that has arisen on a stretch of land on the outskirts of town, right beside the main road that links Windhoek and the north, and cross the intersection to get to the King’s Highway Rest Camp. Things do not improve there. The woman at the reception desk has a baby in her arms and she juggles the telephone and the bookings with practised ease. Her husband is from Okahandja, she says, but she only moved up from the Cape two years ago. She’s still not sure about much around these parts. She’s never heard of Maharero or his grave, but she knows there is a cemetery. “Mind you,” she hastens to add, “I‘ve never had a reason to visit it myself.”
Another woman appears from the back office. “I’ve only been here a few days myself,” she informs me, “but I know there’s a monument of sorts just up the road in Nau-Aib. I walk past it on my way to work every day. Maybe those are the graves?” She gives me directions.
I ask whether either of them knows where the old Augustineum buildings are. “In Windhoek,” comes the instant reply from the woman with the baby.
“I know the Augustineum in Windhoek,” I assure her, “but for the longest time the school was here in Okahandja. I want to know where the buildings are here. You see, my mother taught there and I’d like to get a picture for her.” I persist, and the woman with the baby shakes her head and disappears into the back office. “Maybe the new school is in the old school building,” the woman from Nau-Aib suggests and begins to explain where the school is. She stops in mid-sentence. “You know, a Herero woman did come in here yesterday to make a large booking for next weekend. Maybe that’s when the festival is. It’s Heroes’ Day next week. Perhaps they will celebrate Herero Day then too.”
She looks through her booking register and makes a quick phone call. “Next weekend,” she confirms as she hangs up. Sinead and I have no intention of sticking around Okahandja for a week, so instead we decide to head to Lüderitz, a coastal town in the south of the country. On the way out, we take a short detour past Nau-Aib: it’s not Maharero’s grave, but a memorial to Ovaherero heroes. That, at least, is a step in the right direction.
