Africa & Middle East > Namibia > Namib Desert > Sperregebiet > Articles > Namibia: Deserts and Diamonds

"Diamonds were so plentiful that early 'mining' was done on one's stomach," says our Namibian guide. "Prospectors just lay there and plucked gems from the sand." We're standing on the edge of a wild dunescape in southern Namibia known ominously as the Sperregebiet, or "Forbidden Territory".

Namibia, Africa's "newest" nation, stretches 1300 km down the continent's south-western seaboard, from Angola to South Africa. Here, in 1908, a railway labourer discovered the first diamonds in what was then the German colony of Südwestafrika — South West Africa. The discovery set off a free-for-all gem rush that ended only when the Colonial Reich administration absorbed all private leases into one huge concession, stretching the length of the country's southern coast and some 100 km inland.

Today, this Diamond Coast still contains one of the richest lodes on earth. With diamonds as the source of 45% of Namibia's GNP, the region remains "Forbidden Territory", off-limits to all but employees of the Consolidated Diamond Mines company.

In a nation of only 1.65 million people, there's a certain truth in the Namibian travel advertisement that promises, "Wherever you are, you'll double the population." But in the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop you don't even achieve that — unless you count the ghosts.
Standing at the northern tip of the Forbidden Territory, Kolmanskop became enormously rich when five million carats of diamonds were extracted during the first six years of mining. A community of 1300 people, mostly Germans and Afrikaans, once thrived here. Amid the dunes, we find the town's old social club, replete with auditorium, murals and choir loft, plus a two-lane skittle alley with wooden balls and nine pins. We bowl a few "frames", scored perhaps by the ghosts of the miners who had abandoned them over 40 years ago.

Nearby, the former mansion of the mine's chief engineer stands, overlooking the glittering wastelands like a desert version of the Bates Motel in "Psycho". The tiled floor and enamel bathroom fixtures have survived, but the window panes are long gone with the winds. Tongues of sand lick through the vacant doorways.

Not far from Kolmanskop, in the port of Luderitz (population 1400), the streets still have names like Bismackstrasse and Zeppelinstrasse. The beer-houses, Gothic lettering and dormer windows make the place seem like Bavaria-by-the-Beach — in Africa. Established by a German merchant in 1884, Luderitz was the first German enclave in south-west Africa.
German South West Africa lasted only 30 years, the colonial administration being replaced during World War I by the South Africans, who clung onto the territory until 1990. That brief German reign, concluded some 84 years ago, still remains evident today in everything from daily papers in German to delicious apple strudel. Most major towns have a street called Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse and some citizens still bear almost comically Teutonic titles like "Mr Frink von Finckenstein". It comes as little surprise to hear someone boast, "We speak the Kaiser's tongue here, unlike in Germany today."

In Lüderitz, the desert light has a hard, diamond quality. From the hilltop "Goerke Haus" mansion — a piece of homeland nostalgia built in 1907 by a mining engineer for his newly-arrived bride — one can look out to sea, past imported Austrian curtains and a baby grand piano. These were the limits of a wife's world - domestic confinement between the blues of Lüderitz Bay and the dust devils of the Sperregebiet. Little wonder that many of those brides soon sailed back to Germany.

Now independent, multi-racial Namibia has not shied away from its often traumatic past. Today it takes full advantage of the capital and skills of its 300,000 or so European citizens, and especially of the excellent road and rail system constructed by the old South African regime in the name of defence and diamonds. When independence came, instead of trying to privilege or punish any particular language group, the nation's new rulers were supremely pragmatic — they disadvantaged everyone almost equally and made English the lingua franca.

I am travelling on the Shongololo Express, a new resort train that takes tourists on a 13-day itinerary through Namibia. The diesel loco-drawn train rolls by night while its guests dine and sleep; by day they range afield in the fleet of Kombi buses that the train carries. At the town of Mariental our buses head out to the western fringes of the Kalahari Desert where grassy savannah soon gives way to the swells and troughs of a dune sea. On a private game reserve, Intu Afrika, the acacia trees hide giraffes, oryx (a large, straight-horned antelope), eland and ostriches.

Here, we meet a dozen San Bushmen, clad in little but chamois breechcloths (the desert version of lederhosen?) Short and fine-boned, the San are entirely distinct from other African tribes. These hunters were the original inhabitants of Namibia, having arrived some 2000 years ago; however, due to farm fences and national borders, the Bushmen's nomadic traditions are all but gone. Several of the men demonstrate their hunting and trapping techniques and through an interpreter explain how they store water in buried ostrich eggs, sometimes for years. Able to locate a particular tree, among hundreds, at the foot of which they had long ago buried a "water egg", the Bushmen claim a kind of psychic "radar" for water.

Namibia's complex ethnic mix, of Ovambo, Bushmen, Herero, Germans, Afrikaans and Basters (a proud tribe, of mixed Dutch-African blood, whose name derives from "bastards"), to name a few, get along with admirable accord, although a general "colour-coded" social stratification still remains apparent. The elected, multi-racial, ruling party is SWAPO (South West Africa Peoples Organization) which led the long guerrilla war against South African occupation.
"The desert winds around here can sand-blast a car back to the bare metal," says a white farmer as we gaze at the enormous Namib-Naukluft National Park, of almost 50,000 sq km, that runs north from Ludertiz to Swakopmund. Feral horses, whose forebears escaped long ago from some German estate, roam the Savannah. In the middle of the park are the Sossusvlei dunes, massive tsunamis of pink sand — the highest in the world — that reduce us from chattering on-lookers to creatures of silence.

The Namib Desert rolls in a cataract of dunes down to meet the ice-blue Atlantic. Nowhere is this shore more dramatic than on the Skeleton Coast, north of Swakopmund. Shrouded by fog and littered with the ribs of ships and whales, this is a place of legends rather than of train rides - there being neither tracks nor roads into it. We drive as far as Cape Cross, with its spectacular colony of 60,000 barking, brawling, surfing fur seals and the cape's lonely, namesake cross planted by a 15th century Portuguese navigator.

The seaside town of Swakopmund seems like a suburb from turn-of-the-century Hamburg. Cupola domes and widow's walks sprout from the roofs of buildings, while ornate, old apartment blocks bear names like Haus Hohenzollern. Everything is in excellent repair; after all, Namibia is sometimes known as "the Switzerland of Africa" because of its comparative wealth, cleanliness and rule of law. If only Switzerland had a coast like this, and strudel like Swakopmund's, it could be the Namibia of Europe.

In the far north of the country is the lush bushvelt of the Etosha Pan, one of the finest game parks in Africa, where elephant, lion, rhino and leopard roam. However, it was time for me to head to Namibia's capital, Windhoek — where, fittingly, this tranquil country has an airfield named Eros. As the plane climbed from Swakopmund, the Namib Desert below us flowed like an ochre tide from the Kalahari to the Atlantic —a forbidden but infinitely enticing territory.

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