Chapter 8: Ai-Ais to Lüderitz
“South West Africa does not welcome Alfons Schanderl,” said the Universe in a stage whisper to a young German soldier on Saturday 19 November 1904.
Alfons, a proud Upper Bavarian in search of his own African destiny, was on the Gertrude Woermann II that night. His own dream looked about to be wrecked as the massive troopship ran aground, between Cape Cross and Swakopmund. (Today, it’s the site of some prime coastal real estate, a fishing haven for wealthy Namibians wanting to escape the tourist floods further south.)
A motor launch was lowered into the Atlantic and dispatched to Swakop. Up in the first class dining room, someone with a great temperament and a flair for the occasion began to tinkle away at the piano. Drinks were served, and possibly some tasty little wursts and squares of brot. Private Alfons Schanderl may have heard snatches of song filtering down to where he worked with his comrades, settling the nervous horses in their makeshift boxes.
Unlike the victims in dozens of shipwreck stories told of the Skeleton Coast, everyone survived the wreck of the Gertrude. Most of the cargo, however, went to the bottom of the ocean.
“And the horses?” asked Jules, who was driving the bakkie as I read to her from Sven-Eric Kanzler’s Expelled from a beloved Country, a rather sad and angry account of two brothers who lost their hearts to this land and were later kicked out of it.
“The horses. Let me see.” I thumbed through the small but gripping book. “Oh yes, here it is. The horses were hoisted up on pulley blocks, gently set down on the deck of the Gertrude, then transferred to landing rafts and then, obviously, to shore. It says here the waves were dancing at the time. Bloody hell. Anyway, they seem to have been saved. The soldiers saddled them up and rode them down to Swakop.”
I could see Jules relaxing immediately.
“Oh well, that’s OK then.”
Alfons became a rather nifty signaller with his old-time heliograph. He and his fellow signallers used to sit on the tops of hills and talk to each other with a series of mirror-flashes.
Three years of fighting “the nimble Nama” in the southern regions of Namibia, mainly from a distance of hilltops, gave Alfons a deep love of the land. He had his eye on a spot near the Fish River Canyon, where Jules and I happened to be driving on our Dry Lands journey.
A long story (buy the book) cut short: Alfons persuaded one of his brothers, Stephan, to come out and join him, all the while struggling with German red tape for the right to own a patch of very arid land he called Karios. Out of nothing, they established a fruitful farm and built a house in the architectural style characteristic of their German home town of Margerethenberg.
But their happiness was short-lived. In 1915, with the German military defeats came General Jan Smuts and his boys from South Africa. Alfons picked up an Iron Cross Second Class and the German Army equivalent of a Purple Heart for wounds sustained in action during this period.
After the war, the brothers returned the farm to its original flourishing state. In fact, they probably worked too hard and were too successful, because a local South African military magistrate suddenly arranged for them to be deported for being “politically suspect”.
“And then?” the horse-loving bakkie driver wanted to know.
“The brothers packed themselves off to Argentina, continued to fight for their farm at long distance and were finally granted permission to return six years later.”
“So did they?”
“Yes, but just to have a look. They couldn’t live under the new South African rule, so they returned to Argentina.”
And just then we pulled in to Cañon Lodge, the former home of Alfons and Stephan. The original farmhouse, built by the Schanderls, now formed an integral part of the lodge. Tourists were sitting at tables in the grounds, writing postcards home and relishing the morning sun. We walked past the lodge kitchen, and caught the melodious sound of cooks softly singing Amazing Grace. We stood at the window and waited for more. They laughed and launched into a click-filled Nama song, followed by an old Afrikaans hymn called As jy net Glo (If you just Believe).
All the while, the singing staff took practised steps around each other, rolling the frikkadels (meatballs), peeling potatoes and cutting up vegetables for salad. Obviously the tourists had heard this kitchen choir before, because they took no notice of the little desert concert. We left the lodge area, knowing why the Schanderl brothers had fought so hard to keep this piece of dust. There’s a spirit here that goes way beyond the building.
The next day we left the Fish River Canyon and headed for Keetmanshoop. Low, wet clouds rolled in towards us. The early morning light diffused into a pink haze over the rocky hills. Soon we were in a cloud that sometimes lifted a metre or so off the ground, allowing a brief glimpse of sage-green milk bushes, stubby tussocks of bushman grass and the occasional drought-tortured quiver tree. I stopped to photograph some startlingly beautiful Nguni cows.
“You’d look great on my study floor,” I remarked in passing to a particularly handsome matriarch. She lowered her horns at me threateningly and took a couple of steps forward. No one was going to separate her from that lovely patchy pelt today. I quickly jumped back into the Isuzu and drove off into the milk-pink morning.
We bade the dirt road a temporary farewell and swerved onto the freshly tarred B1 highway, arriving in the dozing village of Grünau shortly afterwards. Because we hungered for some local contact, Jules and I ventured into the township, where we struck up a conversation with the Christiaan family. They were Namas, descendants of the leader Hendrik Witbooi, who led a highly effective guerrilla war against the Germans for six years at the beginning of the twentieth century.
A week before, on prime time television, a German politician had publicly apologised to the Nama people and asked for forgiveness. The German colonial wars had been particularly harsh in these parts.
“That’s a start,” said Jims Six Christiaan, his specs resting on top of his eyebrows. “Maybe there will be some compensation.”
His little boy, Vaughn Christiaan, sat on his lap. Relatives Thomas and Klaas, both with crumpled faces, stood within earshot, curious about the strangers from the land of mine dumps, gangsters and glitz. I asked what they did for a living.
“There’s a bit of piece work from the mines, but generally we sit around until the farmers arrive from South Africa,” said Jims Six. “Then we pick grapes in the vineyards along the Gariep River.”
Where had they come from, to create this township in a sea of sand and rock?
“Kicked out of the towns, expelled from the farms,” said Jims Six. “It’s like living in a cage.” Even in this desolate vastness, people were still being moved about like listless puppets. Land reform in Namibia was not a five-minute conversation. With a population of 1,8 million, it sounds like there should be a piece of heaven for everyone. But most of the land was not arable, so the age-old tussle for a tiny spot of good ground continued. And somewhere in the process, the Namas of Grünau ended up here on a blasted heath with few prospects.
On the northern outskirts of Grünau, we met a group of gypsy carvers who lived on the open road.
Thomas Kasinda, a doughty Kavango from the north, tried to flog us something made out of ironwood. He and his fellow carvers moved around the country, setting up rough roadside shops made of sticks and black plastic sheets.
“And where do you live?” we asked.
“Right here, behind the stalls,” said Thomas, with joy in his voice as he saw Jules reaching for a kiaat bowl like it had called her name.
Back in the bakkie, I removed the Buena Vista Social Club tape and switched over to our favourite station, Radio Damara-Nama, 106.5 FM. It was playing Nama bubblegum ballads and indigenous rock, of which there seemed to be no shortage, given the terrain.
“The Nama seem to be great lovers of a Hammond organ,” I told Jules, because I know about such things.
Just for the hell of it, on the long drive north, we station-hopped and found, to our very brief delight, a whole programme on German polkas. On yet another, there was an Afrikaans discussion on the joys of tango dancing. Other stations welcomed the spring arrival of tourists to their country.
This was the time of year when hundreds of thousands of foreigners in an assortment of vehicles coursed around Namibia. South African boys on fishing trips, their trucks pumped up and growling. Foreign tourists in soft-shell cars. All-girl expeditions in lacy khaki. Everyone welcome in the Land of Sand. This country is so big and empty (its entire permanent population could fit into a few suburbs of Soweto) that it sustains each person’s individual road-trip fantasies, embracing its visitors in soft lemon grass, tan dunes and curved mountains.
“The landscape drinks you in,” said Jules. Damn straight. But the Christiaans of Grünau were in my thoughts as I turned the knob back to Radio Damara-Nama and escaped into a singsong world. When you’re on a tourist itinerary and your tyres are humming across the blacktop, Namibia is a fine place to be.
When you’re scratching a living out of an ancient desert and the next man wants your space, Namibia is another story. And so it has always been with this place, from the time of its First People.
On crossing the Guigatsis River, we heard our horoscope on 92.9 FM: “Today, Geminis, who thrive on mental challenges, will have much dynamic energy on the move. There will have to be some crisis control, you may be irritated but you should practise what you preach.”
“Well. Why don’t we just park somewhere and sit this day out?” I suggested.
“Now for Pisces,” the droning voice continued. “Beware of your colleagues, even now they are busy plotting against you …”
We crossed the dry riverbeds of Löwen, Guruchab and Warmbakkies, names that reflected the Germanic Afrikaans Nama soul of the region. A secretary bird flew over the bakkie, trailing long, snake-kicking legs and gazing down imperiously at us.
On NBC, the national broadcaster, Eric Clapton and his old band Cream were playing Sunshine of your Love as we pulled into the town of Keetmanshoop and filled up with diesel at the Lafenis Lodge, “where the modern meets the old Wild West”.
We checked into the Canyon Motel, an architectural throwback to the 1970s that was clean and functional inside. No traveller needs more.
I have discovered that there are many histories of Keetmanshoop, but the one I like best comes from my travel guru, Lawrence Green, in particular his records from Lords of the Last Frontier.
Meet Gideon Visagie, a runaway from dubious deeds performed in the Cape Colony. Visagie was the first white settler here, arriving “some time before the end of the eighteenth century”. He found a rich source of water, and kept its whereabouts to himself.
Some years later, Dutch explorers began to arrive here in droves and it all became too busy for Visagie. So he placed rocks over the source of the fountain in the hope that the Dutchmen would dry up and blow away. But then along came Tseib the Nama chief, on an extended hunting trip that had driven him crazy with thirst. His dogs suddenly disappeared for hours one day and returned with wet black mud on their snouts. Tseib followed them back to Visagie’s waterhole and the game was on.
The Nama chief liked the fountain so much that he moved his tribe there, and named the place Swartmodder (black mud). Seventy years later, the Nama residents of Swartmodder asked the Rhenish Mission Society for a preacher and they sent along a worthy called Johan Schröder. He renamed the place after a wealthy patron, Johan Keetman, who never actually came out and saw the town for himself.
An hour before sunset, we drove out to the quiver tree forest near Keetmanshoop, which lay on a farm owned by Coenie and Ingrid Nolte. We rushed to where the trees stood in the soft afternoon light, in a blaze of bronzed leaves among the lemon grass and black ironstones. A posse of German tourists arrived and we were suddenly in Das Kokerwald. The quiver trees can take on all extremes of weather – they’re frost-proof and they thrive on summer heat.
We drove on to the Giant’s Playground at sunset, and encountered a confusing world of jumbled boulders, one balanced precariously on the other. Jules gave me a case of the highway blues by disappearing for a quick meditation and mislaying the car keys somewhere in the rock formations with the light fading fast.
She prayed to St Anthony (I gather he’s the patron of lost car keys or something) and we soon found them. We headed off to Uschi’s Kafeestube for monster steaks and a milkshake for shock.
The next day, we had some serious trainspotter luck. The Union Limited Steam Train Tours, which only visits the country three times a year, was building up a healthy head of steam over at the railway station before heading back to South Africa with its load of tourists. They’d traversed Namibia in the old loco and were currently the rage of Keetmanshoop. Kids were running up and down the platform, thrilled to be near the old steam train.
The train operator, Michael Esterhuyse, stood proudly on the platform, talking routes with his friend, ticket clerk Nico Jooste. Passengers and locals gawked at each other in utter amazement, just as they do in outback towns all over the world when a steam locomotive passes through. Townies look on with suspicion (don’t break the taps) and the tourists behave as if they own this wondrous, wheeled ship that takes them effortlessly through dry spaces.
Jules tried to engage the railmen in conversation, asking about the giant steel machine puffing away right there on the platform. They were reticent, as railmen usually are around “civilians”. Then she said, in a slightly aggrieved tone:
“I only ask because my granddaddy used to drive the old trains.”
My wife was instantly adopted as a member of the Railway Gang and they could not tell her enough. Two 19D steam locomotives coupled together, they said, each weighing 300 tonnes and built in the early 1930s. I had to break up this club before it got totally out of hand.
“Jules!” I called from the revved-up bakkie. “Places to go, wild horses to see …”