I Am Not Your Slave

by Tupa Tjipombo

  “I am Himba. Himba from Namibia.”

  “You are a full Himba? No mix?”

  “Yes. I am full Himba.”

  He nodded and clapped his hands together. “OK, good. Let’s proceed.”

  The second man left the room and returned several minutes later accompanied by an African woman. She made me sit down and, moving quickly, tied a small bit of rope across my bicep, tapped the crook of my arm, and drew two small vials of blood.

  Producing a cloth measuring tape, the second Chinese man took various measurements of my body, relaying the information to Ming, who entered it into his computer.

  They made me stand in front of the video camera as Ming gave me a piece of paper. “Read this,” he said. Stepping behind the video camera, he filmed me as I read several paragraphs. They were a series of unrelated sentences in English that made no real sense. I had no trouble reading them. He told me to read them again, but louder.

  He continued filming as he asked me a series of questions: What is your name? Where are you from? What tribe are you? How old are you? Are you a virgin? Do you have siblings? Describe your life. Did you live in a village? Where did you learn your English? Some questions were repetitive. It seemed like they only wanted to hear me speak. If I hesitated or my responses were deemed too short, Ming gestured for me to continue speaking. I had no idea what he was looking for, so I said anything that came to mind. I talked about my family and how much I missed them. I spoke about my plans to go to university. I said over and over again how I just wanted to go home. But Ming did not seem to care as he stared at his video camera. To him, the words were just rocks falling from my mouth, things without meaning or significance.

  After the video interview, the woman led me to a small building with a makeshift shower and motioned for me to strip and wash myself. I had not washed for many days, so I did not hesitate and handed the woman my clothes. Before leaving, she pointed to a few strips of hide skins laid out on a drum beside the shower. I was unsure what to make of them.

  When the woman returned, she looked irritated and snatched up the skins. She began fitting them around my waist, and it eventually became clear to me that I was expected to wear them somehow. But they were ridiculously small and made me feel more exposed than if I were wearing nothing at all. It took some adjusting just to keep my private parts covered. There was nothing for my breasts, however, and after some consideration the woman even removed several pieces of hide from the back to leave my buttocks exposed.

  She then spread some kind of grease or animal fat over my entire body. It gave off a musty, almost metallic odor similar to blood. Afraid that I was being prepared for another ritual, my mind raced through all the possibilities. I thought about making a run for it, but where would I go? I would never survive in the forest; they would catch me and beat me, perhaps even kill me. Something about the place made me feel I had little choice but to accept my circumstances. If they were, in fact, preparing me for some kind of sacrifice, I thought, I could only hope they would kill me quickly.

  As all of these thoughts raced through my mind, the woman produced lipstick and other cosmetics, motioning for me to hold still as she applied everything in a clumsy manner. It was a strange way to prepare somebody for a sacrifice, I thought.

  We returned to the video room, where Ming was speaking in English on the phone. When he saw me, he said to the person on the other end of the line, “She is here now. I think you will be pleased with her.” He described how beautiful I was and how well I spoke English. He said I was a “true Himba from the village” and “a rare one—very special.”

  The woman positioned me in front of the video camera once again. Ming began filming, asking the person on the phone if he was receiving it. Ming told me to turn around slowly. When I was halfway around, he told me to stop. “She is very nice from behind, yes?” he asked. He described how tall I was. And young. He mentioned that I would stay slim for many years. He repeated how nice I was from behind.

  I realized that I was being put on display for the caller on the other end of the line. That person, whoever it was, was my . . . buyer. Ming repeated phrases like “as you ordered” or “just like you wanted” and made it clear that my mysterious new owner wanted a young, tall, slim girl—possibly even a Himba girl specifically. Now that I had been ordered and was in the process of being delivered to my new owner, he wanted to inspect the product first. I was oiled, dressed in hide skins, and smeared with makeup to make me look both traditional and desirable. Maybe my buyer wanted some kind of primitive whore, I thought.

  Looking pleased with himself, Ming finished his phone conversation and dismissed me with a wave, but not before giving me a sharp, cold stare. I could sense his desire for me, having seen that look in the eyes of many men before, back in Opuwo. But there was something more remote and alien in Ming’s eyes, like a mix of desire and indifference.

  The woman led me to a different building this time—a tiny, one-room structure—making sure to lock the door behind her as she left. I sat on the edge of a small bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the room, and felt almost guilty as I ran my hands across the crisp, clean sheets. It had been a long time since I had slept on a real mattress, so I lay down and fell asleep almost instantly.

  I awoke to the sounds of the door being unlocked, realizing with a start that I must have slept all day. The room was dark now, except for the yellow glare from the floodlights that slanted in from a large vent above the bed. Somewhere in the compound, I heard the high, tinny sounds of hip-hop music being played over a portable radio.

  Ming entered the room and closed the door behind him. His face was blank. Stepping over to the bed, he stood over me and motioned for me to get up. As soon as I was on my feet, he slapped me across the face with such force that I staggered and lost my balance, falling against the back wall. My head throbbed and tears immediately streamed down my cheeks. I drew my knees up and covered my head with my arms.

  A second blow did not come, but I sensed Ming standing over me, looking down at me in silence. As the ringing in my head slowly subsided, I glanced up at him.

  “Stand up, girl,” he said in a hollow, lifeless voice. When I stood up he immediately set upon me, clutching and grabbing at my body in a frenzied burst of energy that truly shocked me. He threw me onto the bed and ripped off the tiny hide skins that until then had seemed so inadequate. Now, without them, I felt completely powerless. Knowing what was about to happen, I froze with fear and humiliation. I could not move. My whole body went numb.

  There was nothing sexual about what happened that night, nothing that even remotely made it like sex. It was pain and violence. It was garbage and spit and shit. My strongest memory of the night itself was the foul odor of the man himself, who had clearly not washed for some time and smelled like the sour, rotting jungle around us. His stench was that of an animal: raw and offensive.

  When I think back on that night now, it is impossible for me to separate it from another childhood memory. I cannot remember if I was thinking of this memory on the night itself, but to me it makes no difference; the two have become so intertwined that it is as if they have become one and the same, like the way a snake coils around its prey.

  I must have been around ten. I was collecting firewood by myself in a dry riverbed near my village, when the afternoon’s silence was suddenly broken by the piercing screams and guttural barks of a large troop of baboons. Curious, I followed a bend in the riverbed toward the commotion. I stepped carefully because I thought the baboons might have spotted a leopard, but instead I came upon some kind of internal quarrel among the baboons themselves. The focal point of all the excitement was a female who had been chased high up a large overhanging tree by an extremely aggressive and ferocious-looking male.

  I have always been afraid of baboons. They are savage, violent things, constantly shrieking and fighting or hanging around villages, destroying gardens or waiting for the right moment to steal your food. To this day, I am
uneasy with their humanlike appearance and mannerisms, an association that my grandfather reinforced with stories of how they were once children who had become lost in the bush. In the Kunene, the males are twice the size of females; they are larger than most dogs and easily come up to a man’s waist. They constantly fight one another to assert their authority, ripping at each other’s faces with their long, razor-sharp teeth until a clear winner emerges, who is then free to pursue the females as he pleases.

  In this instance, the dominant male had chased and harassed one of the females until she was forced to climb the tree. Now, the two were in the highest branches, balancing precariously above the rocks lining the riverbed below. I climbed the bank to get a better look and watched as the male bit and violently shook the female, ripped the hair from her head and body, and pushed her closer and closer to the outer edges of the branches. It must have been going on for some time, because she was a mess; most of the hair on her head had been ripped out, one eye was swollen shut, and there was a gash across her nose all the way to the bone. Her tail was bit almost in two. She was covered in blood and screaming for her life. Meanwhile, the rest of the troop, which must have consisted of at least twenty or thirty other baboons, ran around the base of the tree, wailing and screaming and howling in a manner I had never seen before. Some were throwing sand in the air and beating their fists on the rocks in distress. It was like they had all lost their minds. It was a scene of total madness and chaos.

  Finally, the male pushed the female to the very edge of the branch until it could no longer bear her weight. She slipped off and twisted in midair, just barely grabbing the branch with one hand. She extended her other hand to the male in one final, desperate appeal for mercy, but he lunged forward with a hiss and bit it with his giant canines. She fell from the tree and landed with a horrifying thud on the rocks below.

  I thought there was no way she could have survived such a fall. But to my surprise, she began to move after a minute or so and eventually stood up on very shaky legs. The fall had resulted in even more horrifying injuries: her entrails were now spilling out of her anus.

  When the males of the group all surged forward to grab her, it dawned on me that she was in heat. Despite everything, they were still trying to mate with her. I could hardly believe that the urge was so strong in them that they would pursue such a broken, wretched creature. As the female desperately tried to fend off her new attackers on the ground, the dominant male was making his way down from the tree.

  Upon reaching the scene on the ground, he quickly chased away the other males. They retreated a short distance away, still howling and carrying on, whether out of excitement or agitation, I did not know. The females were clearly agitated and continued to scream and scream. The sound was overwhelming. But the injured female was now silent. She simply stood there, dazed, bloody, her insides pouring from her to form a heaping, steaming mess on the sandy riverbed. I saw that half her tail had snapped off, and she held one arm at an awkward angle, as if it had broken in several places. Knowing that she was completely his now, the big male approached her from behind, casually pushed aside her entrails, and mounted her.

  That is the memory I have in my head when I think about the night I lost my virginity and my childhood was stolen from me. As for the night itself, I cannot remember everything, only bits and pieces. Toward the end, when Ming had finished with me, I remember fixing my gaze on the yellow light in the far corner of the room, dimly aware of the reedy sound of the radio playing somewhere in the compound. I remember feeling shame, guilt, anger, fear . . . but perhaps most of all disbelief. How could this happen to me?

  And even as I asked myself this question, a second Chinese man entered the room and raped me again.

  * * *

  I was returned to the dormitory building the following morning, where I found a spot on the floor and tried to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible. I sensed the other girls talking about me and was grateful that my original clothes had been returned to me so I did not have to suffer the further indignity of being completely naked among them.

  I was convinced that I could never go home now even if I wanted to. First, I had been witched. And now I had been shamed and ruined. I was now a part of this world whether I liked it or not. Huddling against the back wall, I remained motionless all day and into the night, afraid that at any moment they would come for me again. But even when they did not, their absence seemed telling. It was as if I were an empty beer bottle that had been discarded or some other bit of useless garbage strewn about the compound.

  I could not summon the energy to move until late into the night, and only then because I had to go to the bathroom. I stepped carefully over the bodies of sleeping girls and made my way across the front of the dormitory toward the outhouse. I walked quietly and turned my head away from the guard perched atop his platform.

  I was bleeding and needed to clean myself. I broke off a small splinter of wood from the outhouse and scraped off the crusted blood on my legs as best as I could. But without water or toilet paper I did not do a very good job. The blood stains would serve as another reminder of this new world I lived in. It made me want to vomit.

  Then I heard a commotion on the opposite side of the compound, followed by a girl’s voice—a voice that was strained and pleading. Not daring to leave the outhouse, I pressed my face against the wall and peered out from between the wood slats. Alieu and a second man were dragging a girl in my direction. It was the tall girl that was brought with me to Ming’s office the day before. She was completely naked.

  Just as I thought they were headed directly to the outhouse, they turned and passed by me, moving toward the forest on the far side of the compound, where a small structure stood by itself. Looking like a thinner version of the outhouse, it rose above the surrounding tree stumps like a coffin standing on end. The gaps between its wood planks had been filled with something like dried mud, leaving just a narrow slot above the door as the only ventilation. It was completely exposed to the sun and the elements.

  The girl pleaded with the men as they dragged her through the mud. By the time they reached the structure, her pleading had become less determined and more measured, as if she were praying. Alieu fiddled with a padlock on the door and placed the girl inside, locking the door behind her. As the men walked away, the girl let out a bloodcurdling scream that made me jump. Alieu paused but quickly turned and caught up with the other man, disappearing behind the buildings on the opposite side of the compound.

  As I was shuffling back to my room, Alieu reappeared from among the buildings. Spotting me, he raised his hand and whistled. I froze and looked down as he approached, cursing myself for ever leaving the room.

  But Alieu approached me in an easy manner, as if walking up to a friend on the street. He smiled, leaned his rifle against the dormitory wall, and took out a cigarette. Glancing at the narrow box, where the muffled sobs of the girl could still be heard, he said, “They call it a sweatbox.” He told me that the girl would be there all night and throughout the following day. “Maybe even longer,” he said darkly. “She will suffer greatly in there. It is very cruel.” He looked at me as if to gauge my reaction, but I remained silent.

  Alieu continued, telling me that the girl had tried to run away during the night, but they had found her very easily. He motioned toward the box. “That is her punishment. Mister Ming—he is not somebody to make angry at you.” Alieu paused and studied me, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette. “You are suffering now, I know,” he said. He told me that he had seen the same look many times before—every day, in fact—and suggested that I do what people said from now on. He said there was no going back and I should just obey. He pointed at me with his cigarette. “Do not fight, OK? These men will kill you. I have seen it with my own eyes. Your life before . . . it is finished now.”

  I considered his words for a moment before asking him where I was going. But he just shrugged and responded that he was not exactly sure
. He said the others did not tell him such things because he was just a guard. However, he thought I would be sent very far away—perhaps even to a rich man overseas. “A collector,” he told me. When I asked him what that meant, he entered into a long diatribe on the strange ways of rich men and how they liked to collect women from around the world. He clucked his tongue and looked off into the distance, as if trying to imagine himself what that might look like.

  I silently studied Alieu. Despite everything that had happened to me, I could not help but like him, even wondering if we could have been friends under different circumstances. “Why are you with these men?” I asked. Alieu smiled and shifted his gaze down in an almost embarrassed manner, kicking at the ground with his foot. “All of us Africans, we are still . . .” His voice trailed off as he struggled to find the words, or maybe, I thought, because he had found the words but did not want to speak them. Finally, he shrugged again and said simply, “We must all survive.”

  Finishing his cigarette, Alieu slung the rifle across his shoulder and repeated his advice not to fight or run away. “You must listen to me or you will only suffer more,” he said, before smiling weakly. As he walked away, he turned and added that I would be leaving in the morning, noting that the girl in the sweatbox was supposed to join me but now she would have to remain behind. “It will not go nicely for her,” he said. “So you must accept what God has given you.”

  As I returned to my room, I wondered how God could possibly be any part of this.

  6

  ALIEU WAS AS GOOD AS HIS WORD, and I was loaded onto a truck the following morning. As I made my way across the muddy compound, I gazed at the sweatbox. It was a particularly humid day, and the structure stood eerily silent in the thick, dank air. The surrounding forest seemed even more sinister in the rippling heat, and I felt my head spin as beads of perspiration trickled down my forehead. I wondered if the girl in the box would even survive the morning. The box itself revealed nothing as it cooked in the blazing sun.