Damaraland – A Place of Preservation

Mama Regina Heibes says stink bush helps with gastric problems but we should be sure to drink it alone. The effects are quick and the wind is strong and it’s better to be without company.

For kidney problems or men who can’t make babies, she recommends longiflora, a bright green plant she pulls from a shallow woven basket in a forgotten world. A place of eternal fires, opinion stones and young men chanting “burn, fire, burn” as they bend low, vigorously summoning the spark that will make them worthy of a spouse.

“If a man cannot produce fire, he will not have a wife.”

That is the way of the Damara people and it’s told to us in clicks.

In the melodic Khoekhoe language they share with the Nama and the San that so confounds anthropologists because the Damara are a Bantu people. Ancient hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, coppersmiths and communal land owners who once occupied central Namibia before being displaced by the Nama and Herero and later forced into an area ranging from Uis to Sesfontein by the apartheid government who called the Bantustan ‘Damaraland’.

This is where we find Mama Regina.

She sits on the ground through a time-turning stone portal about 10km from Twyfelfontein’s ‘doubtful fountain’ where she relays the old ways at the Damara Living Museum in north-west Namibia.

Wearing the traditional goat skin !gub (loincloth), young Rustan !Uwuseb translates and walks us through the settlement, proudly introducing us to the simulation’s blacksmiths and jewellery makers before the whole village bursts into song.

Just seven years old, the Damara Living Museum is the first of its kind and strives to honour and preserve Damara culture while expounding on its legends. Incredible tales of disputing chiefs who settled their quarrels with a traditional owela style stone game, at times unwittingly played with diamonds, with wives and children as the spoils.

Around the living museum, the land is harsh.

Sand sears, shade is luxury and rain seems a thing of imagination.

But there is more than the site of poor soil and irregular rainfall into which the Damara were flung.

Rocks red and endless, mountains burnt, flat or columnar like an organ, sand sprawling and sprouting Welwitschia and grasslands golf course green depending on where the rain has been.

Defiant, contrasting and compelling, we, a group of intrepid woman journalists, journey to Damaraland with Wilderness Safaris – Africa’s foremost eco-tourism operator.

Entrusted to tour guides Franco Morao and Jermain Ketji, we board a seven-seater safari vehicle to drive the 500km to Doro Nawas Camp where the Etendeka Mountains wait beyond Khorixas and the many roadside stalls selling tribal dolls and the finest crystals the parched earth has to offer.

As we bump through the ever-changing landscape and graduating light, Morao eagerly points out the fauna and flora we encounter on the way. He’s been fascinated by Namibia’s plants and animals since he was child and his enthusiasm seems to swell with each kilometre.

Born at Gobabis and placed in Windhoek’s SOS Children’s Village when he was just two years old, Morao has been connected to Wilderness Safaris since he was teenager.

Invited to experience Namibia’s natural wonders by the company’s ‘Children in the Wilderness’ (CITW) programme before working his way up from tent leader to a popular private tour guide, today, Morao, who has attended CITW camps every year since 2002, is actively involved in the CITW programmes where he helps out as a camp director.

With his pointer angled at the sky’s various constellations, an eagle eye when it comes to spotting miniscule steenbokkies, gemsbok and giraffes bounding far across a plain boasting perhaps its sole brilliantly flowering hoodia, Morao is just one of the many children the programme has enchanted.

The magic happens a few times a year.

Closing some of their award-winning camps for a week at a time each year to host a group of 16 to 25 children between the ages of 10 and 14, CITW gives the local youth the opportunity to experience these wilderness areas and their wildlife in conjunction with a curriculum that covers environmental education, HIV-AIDS, nutrition, life skills and the importance of conservation.

The programme also hosts eco clubs with schools in the surrounding safari areas throughout the year where children are educated about their natural heritage.

The idea is that “conservation of animals and plants is only as strong as the people who live in the vicinity” and “if they’re not interested, protection is likely to exist only on paper”.

Morao introduces us to some of the men who bring the paper to life early one morning.

Trackers from the Save the Rhino Trust who meet us shortly after daybreak having recently left the luxurious Desert Rhino Camp seeking the elusive deserted-adapted black rhino in the Palmwag Concession.

The search is swift.

The sighting is a privilege.

Save the Rhino Trust (SRT) has been protecting Namibia’s rhinos for over 30 years and though the fight against rhino poachers continues to be a bitter one, there are firm boots on the ground working tirelessly with the Ministry of Environment and Tourism as well as suspicious-behaviour-reporting local communities and NGOs to protect Namibia’s natural heritage.

For that afternoon, SRT tracker Denzel Tjiraso is the principal of Rhino School.

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