South West Africa and its Indigenous People (Preview)

South West Africa, a vast, arid, semi-desert bounded by the Republic of South Africa, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Angola and the Atlantic Ocean, is in the news to-day. It is a subject of dispute in the United Nations, who claim that South Africa has no right to exercise the mandate over the territory given to the Republic — then the Union of South Africa — by the defunct League of Nations after World War I. The outcome of this dispute is still in doubt.

Like all Africa south of the Sahara, South West has no history. The Damaras and Bushmen and Hottentots seem to have been there since time began. The Ovambos and Hereros drifted in from the north. The Ooorlams and Basters (mixed Hottentots and white) came up from the south.

All these races lived separately, divided by vast distances of nothingness, pinned by the scarcity of water to their own areas. Migrating, fighting when forced by population pressure on their meagre resources, they impinged one on the other.

The Ovambo were chiefly agriculturists, the Hereros a pastoral people with great herds of cattle, and the Hottentots with great herds of goats. The Ooorlams, mounted and armed with guns, were the real masters of the land till the Germans came.

The first white man known to have visited this barren coast was Diego Cao, a Portuguese Captain. He put up a stone cross (at Cape Cross) and hoisted a Portuguese flag, taking it in the name of Jesus and King Henry, and sailed away. This was in 1484. Two years later Diaz landed at Angra Pequena in i486, now Luederitz Bay, frightened the sea birds — its only inhabitants — and also sailed away. There was nothing here and the sands knew no white man’s spoor till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when some explorers came and also left, having lost their draft oxen, suffered much hardship and only gained in experience.

A few whalers hunted these leviathans from Walvis (Whale) Bay. Visitors only, who came to kill and fry out their blubber in the pots they set up in the sand, they had no lack of fuel from the wreckage that had been washed up for centuries. But at last, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Europeans crossed the Orange. Jacob Coetzee reached Warmbad. Hendrik Hop got as far as Keetmanshoop. Willem van Reenen reached Modderfontein. And after 1800 some Ooorlams, Hottentots mounted and armed, settled amongst the Hottentots of Great Namaland at Bethanie, Gobabis, Windhoek and Gibeon. In 1805 the first mission station was established at Warmbad and destroyed six years later. Missionary Schmelen then built the now oldest mission station at Bethanie.

Meanwhile, the whole country was in an uproar, with everyone fighting everyone else. The Hereros, who had displaced the Bechuanas in the Okahandja district, were conquered by Jonker Afrikaner, the Napoleon of South West Africa, the famous Ooorlam leader, a one-eyed bandit. In 1850 Jonker Afrikaner destroyed the mission at Okahandja, and drove the Hereros into the wilderness where he raided them for years. In 1870 the so-called ten-year peace between the Hereros and Hottentots began.

By 1870 a hundred and fifty Europeans had settled in South West Africa and the Basters from the Cape Province had arrived at Rehoboth.

Although the territory is so immense and lightly populated, almost empty in fact, the native wars and raids continued, were even inherent due to the sparsity of grazing and the shortage of water — disputes common to all desert countries.

But Africa was now being carved up like a joint of mutton. England, France, and Belgium sliced themselves big chunks of it. Only Germany was out — left with the leavings. She had her eye on South West but England, who wanted no part of it, declared Walvis Bay, the only good harbour, a British possession in 1878, painted it red on the map, and in 1880 sent a magistrate to hoist the Union Jack. As a kind of patriotic counter a German merchant Adolph Luederitz all on his own, acquired the Bay of Angra Pequena from a Hottentot chief, and at last, in 1884, succeeded in selling the idea of a German colony to Bismarck. The German Reich now made treaties with everyone in sight, and German South West Africa was born, a status symbol rather than a profitable concern, with a British enclave around the only good anchorage.

Some Boers came in, welcomed as colonists by the Germans. More Germans arrived. What their feeling must have been when they approached this desolate coast is not difficult to imagine. In 1896 local tribal differences were put down. There were a number of revolts in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century — the Matabele in Rhodesia, the Shangaans in Mozambique — all fruitless. Time had caught up with the Africans at last, as it had with the American Indians and the Australian aborigines.

After they had settled down at Windhoek in 1890, with their usual industry the Germans set to work to try to make half a blade of grass grow where none had grown before. They built villages that grew slowly into towns, built railroads — narrow gauge it is true, but they carried men and goods. They explored. They developed.

But in 1897 all Africa had a setback — the rinderpest, which killed hundreds of thousands of cattle and probably millions of head of game. It spread its net from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and reached down from the Sudan into the Cape Colony. Never had the vultures feasted so well.

But the course of Colonial development was now set. Beginning a hundred odd years ago it has now run its course. It only remains to be seen if the African can pick up the burden that the white man has put down.

In 1901 the great copper mine at Tsumeb began work. In 1903 the Bondelswarts revolted; in 1904 the Hereros revolted, and massacred 123 Europeans. They were defeated and driven into the Kalahari. The Ovambos, taking advantage of the trouble, attacked the fort at Namutoni. Then the Hottentots revolted and were put down.

Tribal war is an African behaviour pattern, a product of greed, land hunger and the young men’s boredom. Forays for cattle and women, as tests of manhood, were endemic among most tribes.

In 1908 the first diamonds were discovered near Luderitz bucht.

In 1914 the first World War came to South West as South African troops under Louis Botha landed there. In July, 1915, the Germans surrendered.

In 1919 Germany lost South West and her other African colonies as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1920 the League of Nations entrusted the country to the Union of South Africa as a C-Mandate (Art. 22) to be administered as an integral part of the Union. (Now the Republic of South Africa.) To-day the legality of the Mandate is being questioned by the United Nations Organization.

That in a nutshell is the history of this vast territory, that covers an area of 822, 907 square kilometres with a total population of half a million, distributed as follows (1960):

It is somewhat difficult to see how so empty a land can be a threat to world peace, as is claimed by the Afro-Asians. But South West remains an enchanted land, producing astonishing riches out of the sea, its deserts, and savannahs: diamonds, copper, lead, tin, manganese, fluorspar, beryllium, cadmium, caesium, germanium, vanadium, lithium, phosphates, kyanite, columbite, salt, semi-precious stones, cattle, karakul sheep, woolled sheep, karakul skins and wool hides, pilchards, rock lobsters, dried fish, fish meal, guano.

A curious mixture that breaks down to its main products — copper, lead, diamonds and karakul skins from the land, and pilchards and rock lobsters from the sea.

These are the big things. But it still remains difficult to explain the charm of this country to someone who has never been there. The charm of South West Africa — a lost land of bush, desert, mountain and arid veld.

It has the finest dust in the world and more of it. In some places a single karakul sheep requires 30 hectares of grazing to stay alive. Night drivers have to be careful because the kudu on the roads, dazzled by the lights, are liable to leap into the cars.

Tall Hereto women, dressed in fashions of the Regency, made still taller by their folded turbans, move with reluctant dignity, dragging their brilliant skirts along the ground. They will only do laundry and needlework — this they do superbly at a snail’s pace. Ovambos, Rasters, Damaras, Ovahimbas, Bushmen and Hottentots, all weave in and out of a scene where a short to-day has been superimposed upon an endless yesterday. The old Africa is very near the surface in South West, and this may be the secret of the country’s fascination.

It is an empty, silent land. The population, both white and black, is thinly scattered. But there is the feeling of great possibilities latent here, of riches that remain to be discovered in this Aladdin’s wilderness.

Basically the culture remains German. Everyone is trilingual and there is no apparent friction between the various groups. On Saturday nights at the Continental Hotel the atmosphere is gay and European — the girls as pretty as are to be found anywhere. Their dresses come from London, Berlin, Paris or Rome. Over the open-air dance floor hangs the great African moon. Mixed with the perfume of the women is the scent of the thorns in flower and a faint odour of dust. Africa is always calling here — someone has just shot a lion that was killing stock, two more skeletons of prospectors illicitly seeking diamonds have been found among the shifting dunes; someone is just back from the Etosha Pan or the Brandberg, or is just going. Parked next to the big black Cadillac is a farmer’s dusty, battered jeep.

New buildings are going up, almost as you wait, but history remains, like a backdrop to a changing scene. There will never be much industry in South West. The two prerequisites of ample labour and water are both missing, so progress will be along primary Unes: the production of beef, of fruit, of fur, of guano, of salt, of fish, diamonds, copper and other minerals.

The greatest need of the territory would seem to be improved road and railway facilities, coupled with packing and refrigeration plants which would enable the products of the country to be exported via Walvis Bay to the rest of the world — and above all, water. For here, as in so much of Africa, water is the magic key. The possibilities are all there, and much more than possibility, for from here already come almost all the world’s canned pilchards, almost three million karakul pelts a year; and the diamond fields of the desert and the sea are unbelievably rich.

As cattle country, much of the veld is unsurpassed, with a varying capacity of one beast to seven or ten hectares. Timber and tropical fruit can be developed in the well-watered North.

There is also a great opening for a tourist industry. There is plenty to see and to do in South West. Its highlights are, of course, the Etosha Pan with its game and the old German fort of Namutoni that looks like something straight out of a Foreign Legion film set, the Bushman paintings of the Brandberg, the great Fish River Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Namib Desert and the salt pans and the bird life of the Coast.

So far little has been organised to attract the visitor. The transport is poor, there are few rest houses, and not even a brochure which would tell the tourist something about the things he could see. Something like the “Tree Tops” of Kenya could be built at the Etosha Pan water holes. Some plan by which the Seal Rookery, which is unique, at Cape Cross, could be visited and photographed, could be arranged. Selected farms could be visited and gift shops selling karakul furs, wild animal skins, semi-precious stones and native curios could be organised.

Some people regard tourists as a nuisance and the industry not worth the trouble of developing, but this is a short-sighted policy. It is not merely the money spent by the tourist, there is beyond this an enormous and not immediately apparent return in the interest taken by the tourist in the territory he visits and the possibility of trade and investment growing out of what began as no more than a desire to see some strange new land. Because South West is the end of the line — on the way to Nowhere — it remains relatively unknown even to the South African Republic. Tsumeb is the end of the Southern African world. Beyond it lie Ovamboland and Angola. Beyond that Leopoldville and the Congo. But there is no rail link between these centres.

What, then, is the charm of South West Africa? It is the paradox of the Namib Desert and the Skeleton Coast lying only one air hour away from the sophistication of Windhoek. The fact that Africa cannot be forgotten here. In the streets, mixed up with modern buildings, are ancient thorns that were here even before the Hereros came down from the North. Nor can the beauty of the light be ignored — the lilac clarity of evening in the hour that the Zulus call “the time when everything is beautiful” is something that can never be forgotten.

South West is not a pretty country. It is grand, wonderful, changeable. It has the quality of a “jolie laide”, of a woman whose individual features may not be lovely but whose variety of expression never cease to enthrall and enchant.

South West has something that no other country I have ever visited possesses. An original quality where a surprise lies in wait behind every hill. Nowhere else do the rivers run hidden under their sandy beds, beer foam more beautifully in a glass; nowhere are there prettier girls or a better chance to see something new every day. South West is still a land of opportunity for the businessman and a peephole into the past for the tourist who wants to see Africa as it used to be. The herds of game, the empty veld and the burning desert. Here peace is to be found and, in the wilder places, a silence broken only by the beating of one’s own wondering heart.