The Himba tribe and floods

  Opuwo, Namibia
Sunday, January 22, 2006

We headed north to Opuwo, the centre of the Himba and Herero tribes. Vicky, our 4WD buddy through Zambia is a VSO volunteer there and had invited us to stay.


We arrived in town and were utterly flabbergasted. We had been travelling for days in areas of very little. The few towns we had come across were a mixture of (mainly richer) white German/Afrikaaners and (much poorer) black Namibians. Opuwo was so different from everywhere we had seen so far in Namibia - a desert town in the middle of nowhere with no 'whiteys' in sight. But most bizarre of all was that the local tribes had managed to hold onto so many of their traditions when most tribes in Africa had lost their traditional ways of life with colonization.

The Himba wear not much at all - a loin cloth and red ocre mud. They never remove the mud and never have baths. The mud is steamed daily to keep them clean.


The Herero (according to Vicky) were originally Himba, but the German colonists back in the day didn't like their semi-nudity and so forced some of the Himba to wear German traditional dress style (for that time). The style hasn't been adapted through the years, and so in the middle of the desert heat you have poor Herero women walking through town with their crinoline-type dresses and 8 petticoats. The Herero are also more likely to be of mixed race. It was a fascinating town to say the least!


Vicky put us in touch with the town guide - Queen Elizabeth. She was a portly wee thing with a fascination with all types of alcohol - the stronger the better. She agreed to take us out to her Himba village that day - in return we were to give her a minimal amount of cash (to support her drinking habit?) and to purchase supplies at the supermarket for the village. A-shopping we went - for maize, sugar, milk, sweeties and... surprise surprise, a few bottles of (the strongest available) beer.

We were mightily surprised when it got time to head out to the village - we were to be taking Queen Elizabeth's twin daughters and two older sons - the other SIX were being looked after by her sister. Upon gentle prodding later in the day we found out that, in typical African village way, there is no husband and no contraception, and also several boyfriends around at any one time.


We all piled into the car, the kids chucking mayonnaise and liver around the back of our rental car. We tried not to think of the $50 we would be charged for cleaning costs and heading along rocky roads to the village.


We headed off the main road and along dirt tracks, through several Himba villages before arriving at Queen Elizabeth's small village. The village consisted of 8 round huts, holding the chief (in the biggest) and his six wives. It wasn't at all touristy - it was a window into their normal everyday life.

We were whisked away into a small hut near the top - the kitchen. Here the oldest wife and some of the pre-pubescent girls were mashing up maize with rocks, then grating it, to be used for their staple porridge. We had a quick go - hard work! Before being introduced to the chief himself. He was a stately man who oversaw the village from a seat in front of his hut.


One of the younger wives then dragged us into her hut and showed us some of their traditions - how they layer on the mixture of ocre mud and rancid butter, how they steam the mud in incense to cleanse and smell fresh (full on demonstration of cleaning the lower body too!), and how the foreigner looks with mud on her face - pretty stoopid really!


We came out into daylight to find perhaps 20 Himba woman gathered around outside - amazing how quick it takes for word to get around! We chatted the best we could and admired their babies and wares. We goo-ed and clucked over the kids and brought a few trinkets - cash is needed in societies like this to hitch to hospitals ($1) and then to get their babies seen to (another $1).


We arranged to camp out near the village that night so set up tent, then headed back into town to pick up a few more supplies. Later that night, just as the rains were beginning to fall, we headed back to the village. The rain started to pour so we took refuge in the car. Within 10 minutes we were stuck in the middle of a full-on storm with no signs of it subsiding. We made a split minute decision that if we didn't pack up and clear out immediately we would be flooded and trapped at the village for god knows how long (the joys of a 2WD...).

Unfortunately we had made our decision 10 minutes too late.... We got back to the main road and down the road 5 minutes before we started hitting water falls and rivers in every trough in the road. The water level got higher and higher until we could no longer cross the rivers. We were now stuck between two rivers, night was approaching fast, and we had Queen Elizabeth and her 4 kids in the back of our car. We resigned ourselves to sleeping in the car until morning.

After several hours the rain stopped and the water levels started to drop dramatically. The local taxi approached us from the town side and, after a lot of hesitation and rackas from the passengers, made it through the river that had defeated us. The passengers on board, who were quite sloshed already, were delighted to find a car of females and agreed to push us out if we got stuck, in exchange for... alcohol. Reluctantly a deal was made and we made it through.

Feeling relieved we headed into town as quickly as our little wee car would make it, to the safety of Vicky's home. The road had been badly washed away in parts - half of the road had just...disappeared! (hard to see in this picture I know...)


Back at Vicky's we relived our experiences and also heard more about some of the problems of the villages from Vicky. HIV/Aids is a big problem. As elsewhere in Africa, there are a lot of misunderstandings and a sense of fatalism. There is a rumour going around the Himba community that the government put AIDS in the condoms they hand-out, so the education sessions given by aid workers are next to worthless - they listen to the lectures, take the hand-outs, then as soon as the workers leave the village the condoms are all thrown on the fire and life goes on as normal.

Sleeping around is also part of the culture (as in most countries in Africa we have been through). In Himba society it is common to have more than one wife. Being beaten-up occassionally is seen as being loved, so the power is with the husband. And when a visitor comes to town, it is tradition that the chief gives the visitor one of his wives for the night. All of these traditions make Africa a breeding-ground for HIV/Aids. In a girl's high school (boarding school) in Vicky's area they recently decided to test the entire school. 50% of the girls were HIV positive.

Alcoholism is also becoming a bigger and bigger problem. In the old days, the traditional ways of farming and eating required everyone to put in full days of hard physical labour. With Western conveniences however less labour is needed and so there is more time for the people to sit around with not much to do. Unemployment and under-employment is rife and alcohol can be cheaply home-made. It was sad to see.

And so our Himba experienced came to an end. We survived it, just! We had all-too-briefly been a part of the traditional way of life and were proud to see that inspite of the best attempts of colonialisation, that some of the old ways of life have been kept. We had seen how the Himba live and eat and survive, and also unfortunately, some of the modern day problems - alcoholism, HIV/AIDS and underemployment. It was an experience never to be forgotten.