STREWN WITH HUGE BLEACHED WHALE-BONES, shipwrecks, and the occasional human skull, Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is one of the most desolate shorelines on the African continent. Known to the Khoisan Bushmen of the interior as ‘The Land God Created in Anger’, it’s where the freezing waters of the Atlantic meet the scorched sands of the Namib desert.
Stretching from the Angolan border, at the Kunene River in the north, down beyond the diamond ghost-town of Kolmanskop in the south, the Namib is a vast swathe of undulating dunes. Far too dry to sustain much life, the flora and fauna found there have adapted, enabling them to glean just enough moisture from the ocean’s fog that spills inland at dawn.
Venture to the Skeleton Coast, and you get the sense that nature is warding you away right from the start. There are bones everywhere, flotsam and jetsam, the crumbling hulks of wrecks, dead plants, and the footprints of infrequent desert creatures, all of them on the constant and desperate search for sustenance.
Hanging in the balance, a slim no man’s land between life and death, I was reminded time and again by the struggle to survive. It was a point never more powerfully made than on my first morning on the Skeleton Coast.
I was moving clumsily across a towering sand dune which rolled down to the beach and into the foaming white breakers. There were no plants, no animals, no hint of anything alive, just the spectre of Death all around. As I took a swig of water from my flask, a male oryx came out of nowhere. Alone and weak from thirst, he stumbled down to the shore, tasted the salt water, and collapsed on the beach.
A great uncompromising chunk of Africa, Namibia is one of the last true wildernesses. It’s a place where a few drops of water have at times been far more precious than the diamonds that famously litter its coastal sands. Nonetheless, it’s blessed with a stable government and decent infrastructure, something you can’t say about a good many countries on the African continent.
Tearing south-west up from Antarctica, the trade winds of the Benguela system batter the shoreline night and day. No one knows quite how many ships they’ve swept onto the barren rocks of the Skeleton Coast. But, making your way southward, you spot wreckage every few miles.
There are the remnants of ocean liners and trawlers, galleons, clippers and gunboats – testament to the perfidious current and the unrelenting winds. The wreckage is only one piece of the puzzle, but one with which we all readily identify – the crushed remains a reminder of our own fragility.
The most infamous of the wrecks is the Dunedin Star. A Blue Star liner, it was washed ashore in 1942. Laden with munitions, crew, and a few paying passengers, the ship’s rescue has gone down in history as a catalogue of error. A Ventura bomber and a tug-boat, both sent to help, floundered as well. Their wreckage can still clearly be seen. And a slew of other vessels with good intentions were unable to get close. Forced to turn around, they left the stranded survivors on the desert. Yet, amazingly, most of them were rescued in the end.
Not so lucky was the shipwrecked crew of an unknown vessel, washed up in 1860. Seventy years ago their twelve headless skeletons were found clustered together on the beach, along with a slate buried in the sand. It read, ‘I am proceeding to a river sixty miles north, and should anyone find this and follow me, God will help him.’
The remains of the writer have never been found.
My guide, Gotfod, drove us towards another wreck a little further down the coast. A quiet man with oversized hands and a wry smile, he’d made sacrifices to be there. His wife and family lived so far away that he only saw them a few times a year. The Skeleton Coast is no place for family life.
Slowing the Land Rover, he cocked his head out towards a twisted heap of rust and old iron chains.
‘That’s the Suiderkus,’ he said darkly, ‘a trawler wrecked on her maiden voyage forty years ago. Every time I pass it, there’s a little less left.’ Gotfod glanced towards the rocks. ‘Sometimes I wonder how many ships have met their end here,’ he added pensively. ‘The wreckage disappears over time, but the ghosts are left.’
It’s not hard to imagine the elation of a shipwrecked survivor clawing his way to shore, only to be confronted by a new terror – yet another ocean stretching north, south and east, an endless barrier of dunes.
Shifting constantly, the mighty mountains of sand are born when a few grains collect around a nest of quick-grass. Gradually, the little mound gets larger, kills the plant, develops into a dune, and roams the desert for eternity.
Not far from the mortal remains of the Suiderkus, at Möwe Bay, is surely the word’s most remote police station. It’s so cut off that the handful of officers rush out at the sound of an engine. They man a tiny museum, filled with remnants of wreckage, bones, and more bones. Inside are human skulls, and life-vests from Japanese whalers, the sand-worn figurehead from an ancient galleon, delicate wooden balustrades, brass cannons, rigging and sea-worn chains.
Walk along the lines of skulls outside, and you’re reminded once again that the Skeleton Coast is a place where Death looms large.
But there is life, too.
Travelling down the shoreline, we came upon a huge colony of Cape fur seals. There were thousands of them. Jet black and glistening, they were basking on the rocks like mermaids, or slipping easily into the freezing Atlantic waters to feast on the schools of sardines.
And, on the beach itself, Gotfod pointed out canine footprints circling the putrefying carcass of a humpback whale – covered in ghost crabs. No one’s quite sure why, but dozens of such whales have been beached in recent months. The only consolation is that their death means life for others.
‘See how the black-backed jackals have been trying to get through the whale’s thick hide,’ Gotfod mumbled, pointing to teeth marks in the leather. ‘It’ll take a few more days before the rot softens it for them.’
We veered over dunes as high as any on earth, the sands roaring as the Land Rover descended. Then, jolting from side to side, we cut a path inland up a rock-strewn canyon.
Again, Gotfod nudged a hand to the distance. He was pointing to a straggly windswept plant, called Welwitchia mirabilis. Found only in a few areas of the parched Namib, it’s a living fossilized tree. Despite its humble profile, with a wide trunk that reaches no more than a few centimeters in height, individual specimens live for a thousand years or more.
Having crossed a moonscape of cracked grey mud and many more dunes, we reached the first place with any real vegetation. There was even the odd puddle of water.
Gotfod insisted it was actually a riverbed.
‘It’s the Waruseb,’ he told me, ‘but it’s dry most of the year. ‘We’re in the rainy season now, that’s why the oryx are here.’
Watching us from a distance, were a dozen or so of the antelopes, their straight tall horns rising like lances above them. Their innate curiosity must surely keep their numbers down. After all, there were predators around.
Grinding a path eastwards, Gotfod gave a thumb’s up, and almost grinned. He’d picked up a track. We progressed past a lone male ostrich, and a herd of springbok, who pronked away in all directions at the sight of us. Then, turning slowly to the right, Gotfod applied the brakes.
Touching a finger to his lips, he motioned out the window.
Twenty feet away, a dead oryx was lying on its back, blood dripping from the nose. It had just been killed. Craning his neck, Gotfod pointed again. A lioness was panting in the shade of a thorn bush, taking time to cool down before devouring her kill.
As we sat there watching, a desert elephant suddenly stormed up, blasting itself with a trunkful of dust to keep cool. Caught off-guard, the lioness retreated into the bush, vexed, but unwilling to attack a creature so many times her size. After a tense few minutes, the elephant rejoined the rest of the herd, trampling through bulrushes nearby.
Like the other creatures found on the Skeleton Coast, the elephants have adapted to the desert climate. Able to endure days of thirst, as they roam vast distances in search of sustenance, they can even cross the towering dunes. And, when they reach a dry riverbed like the Waruseb, they use their tusks to dig down, creating pools on which the entire food chain feeds.
Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.
Visitors tend to fly in by Cessna for a few days, and stay at one of the handful of lodges. Lost in an expanse of rolling dunes, these rely completely on the air-link. All food and supplies are flown in, and everything – from garbage to dirty bed-sheets – are flown out. Only the fresh water supply is local. Beyond precious, it’s fetched by tractor at a borehole thirty miles away.
Apart from the odd tourist, the only other people to be found are the nomadic Himba. Adorning their bodies with ochre and butter, to protect from the ferocity of the sun, they have spent centuries roaming the Skeleton Coast and nearby regions. It’s thought they migrated from East Africa, and there’s proof of this in their language – it contains some Swahili.
Gotfod took me to a little Himba encampment some way inland from the shore. Surrounded by a crude stockade, much of it topped with thorns, the hamlet was well defended against predators from outside. Hailing from the Herero, sister tribe to the Himba, Gotfod could speak their language.
‘The Himba venerate their ancestors,’ he told me, pointing to a sacred fire. ‘They keep it burning in the centre of the community and they never allow it to go out.’ His smile suddenly vanishing, he added: ‘Please make sure not to pass between the dead tree and the fire.’
‘Why not?’
Gotfod seemed uneasy.
‘Because it will make them sad,’ he said.
The oldest man in the community beckoned us over. His neck hidden in a mass of beads, a woolly hat pulled down over his head, he was grinding snuff in a metal tube.
‘In the droughts the lions get hungry and try to attack us.’ he said. ‘One came last year,’ he said slowly; ‘it jumped over the stockade and ran round and round. We were frightened. After all, there were children playing on the dead tree.’
‘Did you kill it?’ I asked.
The old man grimaced.
‘We’re not allowed to kill lions any longer. It’s against the law.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘We made a great noise and chased it away!’
For the Himba, the temptation to embrace modern life must be very real, if only as a way to escape dire poverty. Their sister tribe, the Herero, were converted by Christian missionaries a century and more ago. Many of them have their own houses and plenty of possessions. Herero women still sport colourful home-made dresses, reminiscent of those worn by the Victorian missionaries who brought them the word of Christ.
Travelling by ox wagon, the Afrikaans-speaking Voortrekkers travelled from the Cape Colony into the interior, and up Namibia’s Atlantic Coast. They converted and conquered as they went, settling lands with European ranching methods.
Their ancestors are still found throughout Namibia, especially in the remote desert realm of the southern Namib. Proud of their ancestry, many of them now work with tourism, especially at Sossusvlei, where the massive red dunes are found.
Taking its name from the baked mud pan, dry for all but a few days each year, the dunes draw visitors from all corners of the earth. The highest soars to three hundred and eighty metres. Tinted red by the high iron content, it glows almost crimson at dusk.
Reeling over an eternity of dunes, scorching hot, fine, loose sand, I reached a second pan known as ‘Dead-vlei’. Like something out of a sci-fi film, it was peppered with the remnants of a wind-seared forest, encircled by dunes. The gnarled trees there are said to be more than six centuries’ old, relics of a time when there was more water and less sand.
A little further to the south, at the small town of Aus, I came across Piet Swiegers, whose ancestors have made their home in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. Passionate about Namibia, Piet makes a living by showing off the country’s raw beauty to others.
Wild desert horses are one of the marvels found on his family’s land. More than two hundred of them in total, their numbers rise and decline depending on the rains. They’re thought to be descended from horses set free by soldiers during the First World War almost a century ago. As with everything else, they cling to life in a place where day to day survival is in itself an achievement.
Another curiosity on the farm is the bullet-ridden 1934 Hudson Terraplane. The rounded bodywork now russet-brown with rust, it was supposedly the getaway car of diamond thieves, shot at long ago by police.
The story might sound farfetched, and anywhere else it would be. But Namibia is a land of diamonds like no other. And a stone’s throw from Piet’s farm is the greatest testament of all to diamond fever.
Known as Kolmanskop, it sprouted up as a prim German town a century ago, in the middle of the Namib. There were diamonds everywhere, many of them on the surface, allowing prospectors to simply crawl about on their bellies to find them.
Over millions of years, the gems were flushed into the Atlantic from the Orange River in Namibia’s south. Then the Benguela current forced the diamond-bearing sands ashore, forming the Namib desert.
The result was that easy pickings of the high quality stones led to plenty of instant millionaires. And overnight fortunes brought luxury.
There was a power station and tramway, a casino, a skittle hall, a Champagne and oyster bar, and an ice factory, a theatre, restaurants, and a huge hospital equipped with Africa’s first X-ray machine.
But intense mining saw boom lead to bust.
Abandoned in the early ’fifties, Kolmanskop is today a ghost-town. Sand dunes fill the houses now, the paint stripped away from the walls, blow-torched by the wind.
In one of the buildings down near the tramway, I found a torn scrap of photograph. Black and white and burned on one side, it showed a young German couple, in Sunday best. They were straining to look serious as people used to do when posing, the tramway sign ‘Kolmannskuppe’ behind them. Like everyone else, they must have left when the diamonds were all mined out.
But there are still plenty of the precious stones nearby.
Kolmanskop is located within the restricted diamond zone, known as the ‘Sperrgebiet’, an area of more than 10,000 square miles. Managed by De Beers, entry is forbidden, and it’s under armed guard round the clock.
Twenty minutes’ drive from Kolmanskop, the neat little German town of Lüderitz gives a hint of how life at the ghost town may once been. Although located on the coast, it was constructed about the same time, and with the same Teutonic attention to detail as at Kolmanskop. There’s a sense that the glory days are long gone, a faded grandeur and irresistible melancholy.
Basking in the genteel glow of mid-summer light, Lüderitz was once gripped by diamond fever, too. The boom began when, in 1908, a station-master on the diminutive Aus to Lüderitz railway line, spotted something glinting between the tracks. Quietly, he staked out a claim, made a fortune, and lost it, before dying penniless.
At the town’s Kegelbahn, the century-old skittles hall, the descendants of diamond miners and Voortrekkers bet over beers and hardwood balls on a Thursday night. Among them, Alexi, a Russian trawlerman, who was washed up in Lüderitz years ago. Downing his beer in one, he ordered another, then peered out at the street.
‘Perhaps I’m crazy to live here,’ he says all of a sudden. ‘It’s just as well if I am, because a little madness helps you to bear the silence of the Skeleton Coast.’