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About Mondesa
The North
by Robert Mellis
We crossed the cattle grid at Oshivielo and that changed everything.
For four hours we had traveled the usual lonely road. The landscape is
different as you drive North: more scrubby trees, hills that actually
have bushes on them as opposed the nakedness of the southern hills.
But the grid changes everything. We stopped at the control post and,
since Jo was driving, the inspector wanted to know where she had come
from and where she was heading. He asked to see her license and then
we were through.
Within minutes we were tackling the obstacle course of this major
highway, littered with baa-ing goats that dart from one side to the
other, from dopey-looking donkeys that just stand mournfully at the
side of the road and with hundreds of long-horned cattle that seem to
be marching to nowhere, looking for water.
We dodged and darted and peeped the horn (I was back to driving in
this maze) and we pushed onward. The great Etosha Pan (potential for a
lake when the rains come) was to our left. Inside the park of 22,000
square kilometers is all the wildlife that one can imagine. But there
are plenty of other killing machines on the outside.
As we passed the kraals that are fenced with sticks to keep out the
carnivores, we noticed the houses had changed. There are a few
concrete block boxes. But mostly we are in Ovamboland, with thatched
huts. There might be 10 thatched huts inside a kraal. These house the
extended family. There may even be an extra kraal constructed to house
the cattle and goats during the night. But more often, the animals are
brought inside the housing kraal.
It seems most of the concrete block structures along the highway are
bars or shebeens. All of them have crazy names, often in English. Try
these:
Washington Bottle Store
Havana City
King Nehale Club
Hard Workers
Paradise Club
Mississippi Bar
Water Is Life Bottle Store
Holliday Inn
Days of Our Lives
Bar We Like
VIP Bar & Fresh Vegetables
Friend Ship Only
Take & Pay
Once we arrived in the metropolis of
Oshakati, with raw meat hanging from the trees along the road, we
searched for a place to eat. This brought us to Kentucky Fried
Chicken. It looked fairly safe. So we ventured in. Jo muttered under
her breath, “I feel insecure. I feel like I’m the only white person in
town.” This is what it must feel like to be a black woman or man in
Maine, or Vermont, where you are surrounded by white, white, and
white.
We found our way to the Santorini Inn and booked in. The innkeeper
apologized because there was no water available. NamWater, the company
charged with supplying water, has shut down the canal that carries the
precious liquid across the north. It is cleaning the dirt out of the
canal. While doing this, there is only sporadic water supplied to the
towns.
Our room has two single beds with separate mosquito nets. The TV cable
has been cut and then rejoined and so we can only receive a blurred
version of the local TV channel. We have a bucket of water to flush
the toilet. This is not luxury living, folks, even though we are
paying more for this room than any other placed we’ve stayed in
Namibia.
I phoned Oswald Shivute, our reporter in the North. He gave me
directions to his new office and I set out across the town.
Oh, what a welcome. “My brother, my brother. You have come home to us.
Welcome,” said Oswald. We hugged and he chattered away with excitement
about all of his problems. “Did you bring me a laptop,” he asked with
a laugh. I told him I couldn’t afford to do that. And he went on to
explain that the distances he has to travel in the North are so vast,
and the roads are often dirt tracks, that it would be much better if
he could take along a laptop and write his story without having to
drive back to Oshakati. I can’t imagine it is possible to plug in a
laptop out in the bush, but he assures me all these little towns have
telephone connections and he would be able to connect.
We chat about stories, and I commented that I had seen plenty of
stories in the Oshivambo language with his byline. But I have not seen
many stories in English. He tells me he had been waiting for me and he
has some good stories for us to work on together.
He told me about a farmhand, looking after the cattle for an Oshivambo
businessman in Oshakati, who was married to a San Bushman (even though
she is a woman she is a Bushman!) The woman died of cancer in the
family hut and the farmhand, who is Oshivambo, went to the village
headman to ask permission to bury his dead wife in the cemetery. The
headman refused. He said no Bushman will even be buried where
Oshivambos are buried. Take her out into the bush and bury her, the
headman said.
The Oshi farmhand then built a stretcher and hitched it to the back on
his donkey. He rolled his dead wife into a blanket and stitched her in
because he could not afford a coffin and he put her on the stretcher.
He made the donkey drag her body two or three kilometers into the bush
where he and his two younger sons dug a hole and buried her.
When they came back to their thatched hut, they found it was burned to
the ground. The village headman had sent people who ordered the man’s
9-year-old daughter to burn the hut down because the woman’s cancer
needed to be burned out of the hut before it infected others in the
area.
The man, grief stricken, went to the police and filled out a charge.
Oswald showed me the report in Oshivambo which the police had
dutifully translated to English. And, to be extra careful, the man
went to the tribal council, the traditional authority in various parts
of the North. There he made a complaint about the village headman.
Oswald, an Oshivambo, said the tribal council sided with the village
headman and fined the widower for falsely making claims against the
headman. That’s justice, folks.
So we must find a way to get to the widower’s place in the bush.
Oswald says it is where there are no roads so we need a very good
4-wheel-drive vehicle. He thought he might be able to get the actual
owner of the farm to drive out there with us and we would confront the
headman.
He told me of two other stories that are equally bizarre. So we should
have a good, though tiring time ahead of us. All the stories require
about 3 to 4 hours of driving in each direction to get to them. So
this would be Oswald making a case for his laptop!
New Namibian pictures are at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/robertsmellis
Sailing story at:
http://www.sailnet.com/collections/articles/index.cfm?articleid=ouread0018
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