Peace and goodwill to all – it is the message of Christmas that inspires people of every religion. But there has been fighting this month in Bethlehem on the West Bank, the cradle of Christianity. Mail & Guardian correspondents fanned out from Namibia to Jamaica, from Wales to the Free State, to discover the spirit of Christmas 1998 in the world’s other Bethlehems
Alex Duval Smith
Gebhardt Hengari was a wise man. Born 53 years ago into the cattle-herding Mbandero tribe, he observed tradition and became a farmer. Hengari was also a modern man; he did things differently from his forebears. The Mbandero were semi-nomadic, and had for centuries dwelt in clusters of thatched clay huts and followed their cattle’s quest for water across South West Africa, as Namibia was then called.
The Mbandero knew their ancestry, and every home kept an okoruo, a sacred hearth to honour the family line. But Hengari, son of Festus, a priest who had put aside traditional ways, learned farming in the classroom. “At the farmers’ union, the Afrikaners taught me it is best to farm alone,” he says.
Today, rotund and confident of demeanour, Hengari has the appearance of a man who did well to heed the Boers’ advice. Since 1986, he and his wife, Gerhardine, have owned a 5 000ha cattle farm near where the Trans- Kalahari highway crosses into Botswana.
Their four-roomed bungalow has neat fences, a television with a very large screen, scores of labourers and a gleaming white 4×4 pick-up parked at the porch. They call the farm Glimlag (Smile). But the smile is wry, and belongs to another place – a piece of Kalahari sand 90km north-east of here, where, in October 1979, Hengari discovered water, and which he then named Bethlehem.
“It was the hand of the Lord which led me to Bethlehem. I grew up on an Mbandero reservation at Aminuis, 200km south of here. But it was overcrowded and there was a drought. In the late Sixties, there was a tribal dispute, and the government wanted us to go to Rietfontein, near Botswana. It had bought farms there from Boers. Many of us were suspicious: why were the Boers leaving? Claudius Heuva, my uncle, wanted to give it a try and, in 1968, we left for Rietfontein. The land was good for the cattle, and we farmed together for 11 years.
“In 1979, it was time for me to become a man in my own right and to seek out my own land, as it says in the Bible. I got a map and travelled west by car. We had heard that the water was very deep in the earth on the right-hand side of the road, maybe 700m, so I decided my farm would be on the left.”
There was nothing much to distinguish the place now called Bethlehem from any other spot off the D1692 gravel road. The Kalahari borderland with Botswana is a monotonous landscape of dazzling white sand and sparse trees. For hundreds of years, only the San, with their intimate knowledge of the resources of the land, had lived here.
“There was no claim on the place,” says Hengari, “and I asked the government for a borehole. A South African geologist pointed out a good place. I told him to go further west. We started drilling at 8am and struck water at 11pm, after sinking 62 four-metre rods – that’s 248m.”
Hengari, who was then 41, did not intend Bethlehem to develop into a village. He merely planned to build a farm for himself and his family. It would be a homestead along Afrikaner lines, called Bethlehem, “because, to me, it meant a new beginning. It was the birthplace of my own independence from my uncle. Moses took his people to a promised land. This was the promised land for my family.”
On the wall above the door to his lounge is a plastic star of Bethlehem, bought by him on a pilgrimage to the West Bank in 1989.
Soon, Hengari took a seat alongside his uncle on the elders’ council for the Rietfontein area, which reports to the Mbanderos’ Paramount Chief, Munjuku II.
“I thought I had found a place to stay until I died. With my labourers, I built metres and metres of cattle enclosures. But it was not to be. More and more people kept coming from Aminuis.”
This century, the cattle-herding Herero tribe and their sub-group, the Mbandero, have been endlessly on the move, fleeing drought, overcrowding and persecution. Namibia was largely ignored by European explorers because of its inhospitable coastline. But the arrival early last century of the first settlers, German missionaries, brutally changed the country.
At the time, the Herero were at war with the Nama tribe over grazing land. The Reich sided with the Herero. In 1904, when the victorious Hereros’ control of the land began to thwart settlers’ ambitions, Kaiser Wilhelm II handed down a Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) that resulted in a genocide in which German troops pushed the Herero into the desert and poisoned their waterholes. The survivors – some 15 000 out of the original 80 000 Herero – fled into the Kalahari, to Botswana and South Africa.
They returned only after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, under which Germany lost its colonies and South West Africa was handed over to South Africa. It remained a colony of that country, and an apartheid outpost, until 1990. The Mbandero, increasingly at odds with the Herero, were largely confined to Aminuis.
In 1981, the Rietfontein council split along Herero/Mbandero lines, and Hengari found himself in the minority.
“The council decided to make me sore by bringing people to Bethlehem from Aminuis. I had no papers to say Bethlehem was mine – the land belonged to the government – so in 1986, I decided to leave.”
By then, Bethlehem had become the village it is today: a dozen two-roomed brick houses, constructed in rows and facing west on to the cattle enclosures, according to Mbandero tradition. The water pump, which runs on a generator, uses the only electricity in Bethlehem.
“Our water container is leaking,” says Job Tjitemisa Hengari, Gebhardt Hengari’s nephew, “so the government has sent a tanker trailer that acts as an overflow and emergency supply whenever the pump breaks down. We are waiting for money to get the container fixed.”
Job Hengari (33) is a teacher at Claudius Heuva Secondary School, named after his great uncle, in Tallismanis, 14km away. He stays in his Bethlehem house only rarely, and his 27 goats and 17 cattle are tended by a shepherd. Nevertheless, Hengari is one of the most important men in Bethlehem. He chairs the water point committee – the only decision-making body for all Bethlehem – to which each farm pays cattle tax.
No road leads to Bethlehem, but each house has a pick-up truck capable of ploughing through the sand to the village. These days, no one gets lost on the drive or horse-ride from the main road: you just follow the overhead telephone line to Florence and Gideon Kaotii’s house. Florence Kaotii (35) has the brightest house in Bethlehem: flame-yellow corrugated iron that bangs and pops as it expands and contracts in the burning sun. Here, in mid-desert, she keeps flowering plants in brightly painted pots made from car tyres.
Job Hengari has planted grass in carefully demarcated squares outside his house. His neighbour, Loth, has created plant pots by sticking bottles, neck first, into the sand. Bethlehem clearly has suburban aspirations.
Florence Kaotii also has the most dazzling outfit in Bethlehem – a shocking-pink Herero-Mbandero dress and horn-shaped hat. The Mother Hubbard design was imposed on the tribe – in sober, plain colours – by German missionaries who took exception to what they considered a lack of modesty among local women.
Kaotii, who has two children and an 18- month-old granddaughter, is community- spirited about her telephone line. “It cost N$450 to install, and I pay about N$100 a month for calls,” she says. “More people would like to be on the phone, but the main line that follows the road to Rietfontein is not strong enough, so they use mine.”
For all her modern aspirations, Kaotii is somewhat disdainful of a trend to “live like the white man”. In a new village, where the ancestors have to be, as it were, imported, hers is the only house with an okoruo. A stick in the ground with ashes at its base, it stands, as tradition dictates, between the house and the cattle enclosure. “The stick is from the haaksteekbos. I take coals to it every morning and every evening. It protects the household and helps when children are sick.”
But Kaotii also reads the Bible to herself and, in common with most of Bethlehem, celebrates Christmas at a service of dancing and singing under a canvas brought in for the occasion by the Evangelical Lutheran church in Tallismanis.
For her neighbours, Milka and Werner Katjiuanjo, who recently laid foundations for a two-room breeze-block house with a toilet, Christmas is especially important. “That is one time of year when Brito, our 28-year-old son, comes home,” says Werner Katjiuanjo. “He works in a fish- freezing plant in Walvis Bay. He brings fish for the dinner.”
The Katjiuanjos have 100 cattle, which, in common with all Bethlehem’s livestock, are independent-minded. Cows and nannies give birth unaided, in the bush, wander freely and find their owners’ enclosures when they require milking, every other day. “Jackals and cheetahs are a constant threat,” says Werner, “but they do not attack the goats if you keep dogs in the enclosures.”
Yet beneath the apparent pastoral bliss lurks trouble for Bethlehem. Gebhardt Hengari, who returns occasionally to the village he founded, says it is overgrazed: “People do not take care of the land, and they are just bringing in more and more livestock.
“I made four cattle camps around Bethlehem when I was there, and I always spared two of them. Now, there are six camps, and not one is spared. Everything is always the other man’s problem. When I was there, the water pump was encased in a zinc shack. The water container is leaking because the wind has blown away the sand at its base and no one has patched up the concrete. It hurts my heart to see the poor condition of everything I put in place. The government does not drink their water, so why should the government repair the water container?”
“When you speak to the villagers individually, they agree that they should each buy a bag of cement, but then nobody does. Many of the homeowners live away from Bethlehem and go there only for the holidays, leaving their cattle with labourers. Perhaps some constructive decisions will be taken this Christmas, when everyone is there.”
But even Hengari, the wise man who followed the Afrikaners’ advice and eschewed traditional community farming, may yet decide, on his homestead 90km away, that the price of isolation is too high. “My water supply is weak, and I have had to start drilling. There is supposed to be water at less than 100m here, but I have drilled seven times and found nothing. It is very expensive. I brought 400 cattle from Bethlehem. Now I am down to 200, because of paying off the farm and paying for the drilling.”
Hengari named his independent farm Glimlag, “because of all the trouble I had suffered in Bethlehem”. He may not have had the last laugh.