Swakopmund is still more German than African.
Daar’s die hele vokken land wat jy kan op sit,” said the young, white assistant director, incorrectly using the singular pronoun to address a motley band of black extras who were sitting on a Land Rover that was supposed to be decorating the movie set.
This is the independent republic of Namibia, Africa, in the 21st century. My mind was begging to boggle, but I kept a stiff upper lip and tramped it down. I needed to keep all my faculties about me. This was no time to let emotions get involved.
The huge, sparsely populated country of Namibia used to be best known for being a major producer of uranium, the home of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, and the birthplace of one Howard Barrell, editor of a popular but irreverent South African weekly newspaper.
Nowadays the country is becoming increasingly well known as a tourist destination for the last surviving supporters of Adolph Hitler, Count Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. It is also a wildly popular destination for Hollywood film- makers wishing to shoot anything from interplanetary science fiction to gritty love dramas set in an imaginary Africa whose fabrication would make even Tarzan look embarrassed.
But back to my opening line. What was going on? “You’ve got the whole f?ing country to sit on,” the young, straggly-haired AD, imported from South Africa, was saying to some dozen or so Namibians who were trying to rest their tired limbs on some out-of-the-way corner of a film set in their own country, and had made the mistake of draping themselves over an old Land Rover that didn’t seem to be doing anything useful, while the film crew raced around frantically trying to make something out of nothing.
“Get off my Land Rover,” the AD was basically saying in his schoolboy Afrikaans. “Sit on the ground, sit on the rocks, go fry in the desert. Just don’t touch what isn’t yours.”
Yes, it is difficult to write this stuff without getting emotional. Why?
It is difficult not to get emotional when you touch the ground in Namibia. You are stepping into one of the world’s primal spaces ? endless miles of desert, which even from the air speak of secrets that have baffled the scientists: hidden sources of life, ancient evenings, the unexpected blossoming of living matter where there was only pre-creational darkness-without-end before.
But then there is always the human element.
Namibia is one of three vast tracts of Africa (the others being Cameroon and Tanganyika), which were summarily annexed by the German princes of the time in favour of that country’s gambit into the Dark Continent. In the 1880s, no self-respecting European power would be seen dead without a chunk of Africa to call its own.
When the Kaiser’s armies started losing ground during the World War I, his colonies were among the spoils taken away from him by the victors, his cousins who sat on the thrones of neighbouring European states that were gradually coming to nationhood. Germany’s African colonies were parcelled out between Britain, France ? and South Africa.
Huh? South Africa a European power? But you forget: in those days it was. South Africa was a country preordained for Europeans, you remember ? even way back then in 1915. Everyone else who happened to be living there, and in the neighbouring countries, was purely incidental to the natural order of things. This is how it was.
And this is how it continues to be.
The extras killing time sitting on a Land Rover in the desert are incidental to the real business of movie making. Fantasy supersedes real life. Money talks, people whisper. And movies are about very big money indeed.
The worst thing is that you get the impression that, even if they were inclined to, the locals wouldn’t really be free to sit wherever they wished on the wide, spectacularly barren landscape of the Namib Desert. You get the impression that the ordinary people are forever on the point of being told to move on. Independence has not significantly altered relationships in this bizarre territory.
The ruling party has tinkered with some superficial details. In Swakopmund, the coastal town near which we are filming, the long main drag formerly known as Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse has been renamed for Sam Nujoma, president of the republic. Intersecting thoroughfares honour the names of veteran nationalists like Nathaniel Maxululi and Daniel Tjongarero.
But no one takes these symbolic gestures very seriously. The tourist maps still bear the old street names, and guide groups of visiting Germans to all the old landmarks that make this town a picturesque, living museum of 19th century German architecture.
This is a German town, not an African town. It is a perpetual journey down memory lane for the heirs of the country’s conquerors. For those who have presumably inherited the country’s future, there are no memories to speak of.
The tension is tangible, lurking just beneath the surface. On a Saturday night it explodes briefly into furious racial violence as a wiry black man takes on a large Afrikaner who has jostled him at the bar and called him a kaffir. The packed bar is split into hostile factions, a full-scale riot just headed off by the suavely-suited black bouncers ? not locals, but West Africans filling a dangerous gap in this polarised environment.
The combatants have been separated, but there is a kind of excitement in the air. The black man’s sister is rushing up and down, yelling defiantly to no one in particular that she is going to bring some guys with guns to sort this thing out. First blood has been drawn, and the antagonists are raring to be let loose on each other.
Gradually the bar resumes its normal, noisy rhythm. But an unmistakable warning signal has been released. The cat has been let out of the bag.
In the chilly air of the desert night, history’s unfinished business is begging to be resolved.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza