The ritual of our traditional meal began outside the hut where first Betty, then me, and finally Beatle and Sampson washed our hands in a basin of soapy water and blotted them on a small wet towel hanging by the door. Inside the tiny thatched rondavel slivers of sunlight filtered into the dim interior between the vertical poles of its walls. After the glare of the late afternoon sun it took my eyes some time to adjust. Our hosts had already set out the food, but perhaps mercifully, I couldn't make out what it was. The four of us took our places on rough stools around a low plank table and Sampson poured generous portions of beer into large wooden tankards set in front of us. By that time I could see well enough to identify some of the food and began to prepare myself psychologically to eat fried caterpillars.
There are times when being a gracious dinner guest can be the most challenging part of visiting other cultures. As I sipped the warm yeasty brew from my wooden cup and pondered whether the caterpillars were dessert or part of the main course, I recalled past encounters with exotic cuisine: a second cup of rancid yak-butter tea from a Tibetan refugee in Nepal, sharing a raw octopus tentacle with a fisherman on the Kyushu coast, and chewing up live lemon-ants in the jungle of Ecuador. There were others but none took quite the same gastronomic resolve as eating the "mopane worms" of Namibia.
The sorghum beer, freshly brewed in a plastic garbage can outside the hut, has the colour and consistency of thick buttermilk. It's no threat to Kootenay or even the stuff Americans call beer, but it helps to wash down the food. A communal bowl of boiled wild spinach and the bowl of deep fried mopane worms sat beside a mound of mealie meal piled on a slab of wood in the middle of the table. This thick, bland porridge, made from ground millet, has been a staple of the black African diet for thousands of years.
"Help yourself," said Beatle.
Careful to use only our right hand (the left serves another purpose where rolls of tissue are not part of the culture) we took turns scooping up wads of mealie meal, dipping them in the spinach and adding a few worms for texture and protein. Betty and I ate enough to be polite and thanked our beaming hosts. Beatle and Sampson wolfed down everything that was left.
The meal was part of our visit to a black township on the outskirts of Swakopmund. Our guides, Beatle and Sampson, both live in the township and run their own small tour company to give visitors a look at the reality of life beyond the palm-lined beaches and haute cuisine of Swakopmund's tourist hotels. The resort is where the blacks work, but here in the township is where they live.
After World War 1 the Germans, who originally settled the country, lost control of Namibia to England, and later South Africa. For 69 years, from 1921 until it gained independence in 1990, Namibia was ruled by South Africa. During those years the best farmland was expropriated and given to white settlers, many of them poor, illiterate Afrikaners that the Union Government was happy to be rid of. The black population was herded onto native reserves – narrow strips of marginal land called "homelands". Later, when apartheid was introduced in 1948, the blacks of Namibia, like those in South Africa, were reduced to a pool of cheap labour with virtually no rights.
In the 16 years since independence the Government of Namibia has struggled to reverse the injustices of the past. But as Beatle told us as we walked the streets of Mondesa, it will take several more generations before the deep social scars left by apartheid are healed.
The township of Mondesa was established in the early 1950s to provide housing for blacks working in Swakopmund. Under the apartheid system a separate township, Tamariskia, was set up for coloureds, and Vineta was reserved for whites. Although the discriminatory laws of apartheid are gone the economic boundaries between rich and poor are still defined by race. Lavish holiday homes along the beach and the well-watered residential neighborhoods of Swakopmund are almost exclusively white. The rows of government-built, cement-block houses for people of mixed race in Tamariska are slightly bigger and better finished than those in the exclusively black township of Mondesa.
On the morning of our visit Beatle picked us up at the Duneden Guest House in Swakopmund and drove directly to Mondesa. Being his only customers that day, Betty and I had a personalized tour and a chance to learn about life in the townships from some of the people who live there. Beatle parked the van on the main street and the three of us spent several hours walking, talking and visiting with his neighbours.
"Many of my friends have no work," he tells us, "but even those with good jobs in town choose to live here. Here everybody knows everybody and everybody helps everybody."
The main street, a broad strip of open desert, is flanked by rows of small, precisely spaced, cement-block houses. Except for their colours, bright shades of pink, red, blue and yellow, all the houses are identical. A few skeletal trees, too small to provide any shade, have been planted outside some of the homes. Nothing else grows on the flat dusty stretch of desert where Mondesa is built.
"People wait many years to buy a house here," Beatle tells us. "They apply to the government and then they wait – sometimes for five or six years."
The houses, which have electricity, water and sewer, cost 20,000 Namibian dollars and they come with a 30-year mortgage. Sadly, many owners can't afford the payments and end up selling their house and moving back to a shack.
Despite the obvious poverty the people we met in the township were outgoing, optimistic and friendly. At first we were surprised when little preschoolers came out and took our hands. They didn't say anything or ask for anything.
"They just want to walk with you," explained Beatle.
Parents wave and smile and groups of older kids come and ask us where we are from. A giggling bunch of pre-teen girls, still in their school uniforms, ask me to take their picture. One plans to be a nurse, another a teacher. They were lucky today and got a ride back home from school. The walk usually takes over an hour.
From Mondesa we drove farther into the desert. White blocks of cement on either side of the track mark the locations of future houses – houses that hundreds of people now living in the DRC are waiting for the government to build.
The DRC, Democratic Resettlement Community, is where new arrivals to the township are permitted to build their shacks. And as more and more people leave their rural communities in search of urban jobs the DRC continues to expand. The neighborhood has a few streetlights and public water faucets but individual shanties have no services whatever. Built from scrap wood, sheets of corrugated iron, and plastic scavenged from the municipal dump, the hovels are so tightly packed together they appear to be a heap of trash piled in the desert. Yet even here there is optimism. One tiny shack advertises itself as a "Hair Salon" and a few of the residents, like Arons and Elsie, have created both a home and a thriving business in the DRC.
Arons, an artist who wears a home made replica of a bishop’s hat, addresses me as "father", and credits God and tourism for lifting him out of poverty. He paints T-shirts and sells them both in Swakopmund and from his home. I'm unclear how God figures in his success but his hand-painted T-shirts are a hit with the tourists and Arons has combined his T-shirt earnings with his artistic ingenuity to create a remarkably comfortable, if rather gaudy, dwelling for Elsie and their four daughters. Elsie brewed us a cup of clove tea while Arons gave us a tour of his creation. Like most people in the DRC he is waiting for one of the government houses.
"But I like this house," he tells me, "I may decide to stay here."
The grand finale of our tour was a stage show of sorts. In a cluttered alley behind one of the houses Betty and I, the only members of the audience, were seated on folding chairs to watch a bunch of pre-teen kids perform a wildly enthusiastic drum and dance routine. Dressed in their best outfits and oblivious to their blighted surroundings, they were happy, healthy, and clearly having fun. Like everyone else we met in the township that day these kids had learned to ignore the squalor of the township and enjoy life as it is while waiting for things to get better.
