Post by Bozur on Jun 15, 2008 13:32:42 GMT -5
Explorer | Namibia
Living Reminders of Africa’s Colonial Past in Namibia
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Mark Simon for The New York Times
If not for the palm trees, visitors to Swakopmund, Namibia, might wonder if they were in Germany, which once ruled the area as South West Africa.
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: June 15, 2008
Mark Simon for The New York Times
Felsenkirche, a Lutheran church built in 1912 in Lüderitz.
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Mark Simon for The New York Times
Graves of Schutztruppen killed at Waterberg in the Herero uprising
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Mark Simon for The New York Times
German tourists photograph indigenous Himba families in Swakopmund.
IT was getting toward evening in Swakopmund, on the desert coast of Namibia, and at Kiki’s Pub just off Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, the Pilsener was starting to flow. Swiveling on a stool with a stein of Hansa Draft in his fist, a stout fellow in safari shorts and with gray mutton-chop whiskers was chatting emphatically in German with the young bartender. Waitresses bearing the day’s catch moved through the room, its walls decorated with colonial-era German maps of Africa and sepia-tinted photos of Schutztruppe (German protection force) soldiers riding camels through the bush.
As we headed for the door, the bartender bade us goodbye with a hearty “auf wiedersehen.” Then we stepped into a stiff, salty breeze and strolled past a turn-of-the-century army barracks to our bed-and-breakfast, the Prinzessin Rupprecht, a former military hospital built in 1908.
Squeezed between the Namib Desert and the frigid South Atlantic, Swakopmund was founded in 1892 as a port of entry into Africa for the Schutztruppe. Today, it has the dislocating feel of a Baltic Sea resort set in the tropics — ornate Wilhelminische-style architecture juxtaposed against palm trees and a bustling African crafts market. It is also perhaps the most atmospheric vestige of a forgotten era: the 30 years, from 1884 to 1914, when Germany ruled Deutsche Sudwest Afrika, a vast, sparsely populated protectorate bordered on the west by the Atlantic, on the east by the Kalahari Desert.
A South African-British force drove out the German army during World War I, and the colony was ruled by South Africa until its 1990 independence. But the influence of Germany remains stronger there than in any other of its former African possessions, including Cameroon, Togo and Tanzania. This is largely because thousands of descendants of German settlers have stayed in the country, keeping alive their language and cultural traditions.
In mid-April, I set out on a five-day, 2,000-mile road trip through Namibia with a photographer, Mark Simon, to retrace the steps of the German colonizers and to conjure up a vanished era of adventure and brutal conquest. In Windhoek (pronounced VINT-hook), the sleepy capital on the central plateau, we rented a two-wheel-drive Toyota and drove 500 miles southwest on the main tarmac highway to Lüderitz, where the German experience in Africa began.
In 1883, Heinrich Vogelsang, the 21-year-old agent of a Bremen merchant-adventurer, Adolf Lüderitz, moored a small vessel in a natural harbor then known as Angra Pequena (“Little Bay” in Portuguese). Coming ashore, Vogelsang found a blasted patch of rock and sand dunes with no drinking water and only a rough track, barely navigable by ox cart, leading into the interior. Marching inland, Vogelsang met with a local chief of the Nama tribe, Joseph Fredericks, and purchased the bay and surrounding territory for 100 British pounds and 200 rifles.
The tiny settlement Vogelsang established, Lüderitz, still has the feeling of an end-of-the-world entrepôt. We walked in harsh desert sunlight past pastel-colored Jugendstil buildings, and climbed to a century-old Lutheran church perched on a forbidding outcropping overlooking the bay.
On Shark Island, a rocky spit connected to the mainland by a causeway, plaques commemorate both Vogelsang and his ambitious employer. In 1884, after vastly expanding his territory through further land purchases, Lüderitz persuaded Bismarck to declare the region a protectorate, and dispatch an administrator and soldiers to enforce German rule.
Lüderitz dreamed of discovering a trove of minerals in his territory. In 1886, however, during his second trip to Africa, he disappeared while searching for the mouth of the Orange River, the border between South Africa and South West Africa, and presumably drowned in the frigid Atlantic. Twenty-two years later, a railway worker clearing sand from some newly laid tracks near the village of Lüderitz found a tiny diamond. For the next several decades, millions of carats were pulled out of the coastal desert.
Four miles from Lüderitz lies a curious remnant of those diamond-rush days: Kolmanskop, a company settlement constructed in 1908 and abandoned in the 1950s when the nearby mine was depleted. Some buildings are derelict and half filled with sand; others are weirdly frozen in time, including the Kasino, or recreation center, with a wooden skittle court and an opera stage where touring German stars once sang arias for lonely mine executives.
Leaving Kolmanskop, we turned off the paved road and journeyed north through the Namib Desert along gravel tracks, kicking up clouds of dust. At one point, we became stuck for two hours in a normally dry riverbed that — because of unusually heavy rains this season — had turned into mud. (A farmer dragged us out with his four-wheel-drive truck and a steel cable.)
The rains had made the desert vibrantly green. Springboek, gemsboek and ostriches darted through the bush; the pancake-flat land changed to gently rolling hills and trapezoidal sandstone buttes, with an occasional lone homestead appearing in the wilderness. After an all-day drive we pulled up before a vision straight out of medieval Europe: the Duwisib Castle, a turreted red-sandstone fortress built in 1908 by a retired Schutztruppe captain, Hansheinrich von Wolf, using funds provided by his American heiress wife, Jayta.
Duwisib has a dreamlike feeling, with salons filled with oil portraits of Saxon nobles, Zeppelin imagery painted on the walls, and French windows providing panoramic views of the stark terrain. The von Wolfs lived there until 1914; von Wolf enlisted in the German army and was sent to fight at the Battle of the Somme, where he was killed by a grenade in 1915.
This doomed creator of romantic medieval kitsch had also been a participant in one of the bloodiest chapters of Germany’s pre-Holocaust history. Von Wolf joined the Schutztruppe in 1904, the same year that Samuel Maharero, the supreme chief of the Herero, led a rebellion against German rule. After killing a hundred shopkeepers and farmers in the Herero heartland, near Windhoek, Maharero and his warriors retreated north to Waterberg, a 30-mile-long sandstone plateau.
In August 1904, four columns of German troops surrounded about 80,000 Herero men, women and children in a field at the foot of Waterberg called Hamakari. Thousands died under a machine-gun and artillery attack; the survivors fled east into the desert, pursued relentlessly by the Germans; most died of thirst. A few thousand survivors were dispatched to slave labor camps in Swakopmund and on Shark Island.
Simon and I climbed with a Herero guide to the top of Waterberg, and from the bare sandstone summit, we gazed upon a vast plain blanketed in thorny acacia trees. In the silence of the morning, I tried to conjure up the smoke and flame of German heavy weapons, the clatter of horses’ hoofs, the screams of Herero women and children fleeing through the bush.
Later, we drove to Hamakari, the main battleground, now the site of a private farm. Herr Diekmann, the brawny farmer who owns the place, met us in front of his house with his three dogs, and, when we told him we were writing a story about the “German era” in Namibia, he became angrily defensive.
“What do you mean, ‘error’?” he barked. “There was no ‘German error’.”
Then he ordered us to leave his property.
The misunderstanding — and Mr. Diekmann’s hostility — served as a reminder that the Waterberg tragedy remains a source of bitter controversy. The debate pits historians who see the carnage as foreshadowing the Holocaust against those who regard it as no different from Britain’s tribal wars in South Africa and Rhodesia. We left Hamakari and rejoined the main highway to Windhoek, sobered by the thought that the wild ambitions of a Bremen dreamer had ended with so much bloodshed in the African bush.
A BIT OF BAVARIA IN SOUTHWEST AFRICA
GETTING THERE
There are no direct flights between the United States and Namibia. The fastest route is South African Airways (www.flysaa.com) from J.F.K. in New York (or Dulles near Washington) to Johannesburg (with a fuel stop in Senegal) and connect on Air Namibia to Windhoek. This month, round trips from New York to Windhoek for early July started at $3,200.
Americans can obtain tourist visas free at Hosea Kutako International Airport in Windhoek.
GETTING AROUND
Avis, Hertz and Budget all operate in Windhoek. But we chose Odyssey Car and 4 X 4 Hire (12 Joule Street; 264-61-223-269; , which has a fleet of two- and four-wheel-drive vehicles at good prices; we paid 3,500 Namibian dollars, about $438 at 8 local dollars to the U.S. dollar, for an eight-day rental of a Toyota Corolla. The company also offers free airport pickup.
WHERE TO STAY
In Windhoek, one of the best places is the Hotel Heinitzburg (22 Heinitzburg Street; 264-61-249-597; , 1914 white-turreted castle. Doubles from 2014 local dollars, with breakfast.
A more modest choice is the Vondelhof Guesthouse (2 Puccini Street; 264-61-248-320; , a pleasant bed-and-breakfast with a small pool and a dozen rooms off a central leafy courtyard, close to central Windhoek. Doubles are 780 local dollars.
In Lüderitz, by far the best place to stay is the Lüderitz Nest Hotel (Diaz Street; 264-63-204-000; , an upscale establishment right on the rocky coast with a swimming pool and a good seafood restaurant. Depending on the season, double rooms start at 884 to 1,105 local dollars.
The Farm Duwisib (264-63-293-344; , on Route D826 50 miles south of Maltahöhe, is a beautifully situated, rustic lodge a stone’s throw from the Duwisib Castle. There are four rooms in the guesthouse and three bungalows. The owner, Jochen Frank-Schultz, cooks good meals, takes visitors on hikes and game drives, and serves up a wealth of information about the German experience in Namibia. He charges 430 Namibian dollars a person.
Prinzessin Rupprecht Heim in Swakopmund (Anton-Lubowski-Strasse 15; 264-64-412-540; is a pleasant B & B set up in a converted century-old German military hospital (a part of it is still being used as a retirement home). Doubles are 255 Namibian dollars a person, with breakfast.
Nearby is the more upscale Hotel Europa Hof (Bismark Strasse 39; 264-64-405-061; . It has 35 rooms, with doubles from 813 local dollars, including breakfast. There’s a good fish-and-game restaurant in the rear courtyard.
A comfortable jumping-off point for visiting Waterberg is C’est Si Bon Hotel in Otjiwarango (26467-301240; www.namibweb.com/sibon.htm). It has a dozen thatched-roofed bungalows with bathrooms built around a swimming pool and a garden; doubles at 595 local dollars a night, with breakfast.
WHERE TO EAT
One of the best restaurants in Windhoek is Leo’s at the Castle at the Heinitzburg Hotel (22 Heinitzburg Street; 264-61-249-597), with excellent fish, game and vegetarian dishes in the French-German tradition, and has an extensive wine cellar. Dinner generally runs 400 to 500 local dollars a person, with wine.
Sardinia Pizzeria (47 Independence Avenue, Windhoek; 264-61-225-600) is one of the capital’s most popular evening hangouts. It has good pizza starting at 40 Namibian dollars, and a solid South African wine list.
In Swakopmund, Kuki’s Pub Seafood and Grill (Tobias Hainyeko Street; 264-64-402-407) offers good fish dishes from 65 local dollars; a dinner for two goes for about 235 dollars.
WHERE TO SHOP
Peter’s Antiques (24 Tobias Hainyeko Street, Swakopmund; 264-64-405-624; sells indigenous masks and other Namibian handicrafts. The owners are also authorities on the German colonization and the Herero wars. JOSHUA HAMMER
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