I Am Not Your Slave
Page 23
As is the tendency among the Himba during such get-togethers, the men and women eventually drifted apart and separated into two groups. I sat with the women under a huge marula tree. I expected the usual topics of conversation: small talk, family gossip, or news from everyone’s home villages and wherever they had just traveled from. But something unanticipated and truly wonderful happened. The conversation turned lively and became unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was new and surprising. It began among the younger women, but the older ones, after listening and nodding their heads in agreement for a while, became actively engaged too. Soon, everyone was contributing and clamoring to speak, wanting to get their words out, as if they could no longer hold back whatever it was that had been growing inside of them for a very long time.
And what was this conversation about? It was about who we are as Himba women and what our place is in a rapidly changing world, a world that holds both immense promise and infinite risks. Though the remote desert expanses of the Kunene might make it seem like it, we are no longer isolated. We touch the world and the world touches us. As women, we cannot allow ourselves to be victims in this process; we cannot just sit by our cooking fires and expect our men to always protect us and look out for our best interests. Traditionally, we have always understood that we are capable of voicing our own interests in our villages and communities when we unite as a group. But now our world is so much more than the village and the community. And the issues involved are more than motherhood and domestic life and everything else that we as women have traditionally been concerned about.
But as we talked about these things it felt like our words were somehow wrong. They were disjointed, scattered, as if they did not truly belong to the group. People began to quarrel and talk over one another.
And then my great-auntie spoke. She was a quiet old woman whose true age nobody really knew. But she was my grandfather’s eldest sister and everyone respected her. When she spoke, it was like entering a library.
“Daughter,” she said, turning to me, “go stand there in the middle.” We were sitting in a large circle under the canopy of the marula tree, so I got up and placed myself at the center. “Do you see how she stands there among us?” my auntie said, pointing her walking stick at me from her seated position at the base of the tree. “She stands at the center of our family. And because she is a woman, we who are both family and women have the strongest bond with her. We are the first and most important circle. And around this circle is a larger circle that is the village. And around that circle is a larger one still that is the Himba tribe. It was not until recently that we even knew about circles that go beyond this, circles that include Namibia, Africa, and the world. But even then, we have been content to let the men deal with them; as women we have not acted beyond the circles of family, village, and tribe. But now I think what we are saying is that this can no longer be the case. If we are to survive as Himba, as Namibians, as Africans, as people of this world, then the women must participate like never before. We must unite and let our voices be heard. I am too old to know the best way to do this. It is for the younger generations. But I can say one thing: whatever we do, we must do it from the innermost circle out. Then we do it our way, from our strengths, and in a way that preserves our traditions. Otherwise, bad things happen, like what happened to our daughter here. The closest circles around her—those of family and village and tribe—they were smashed and broken because our women have not participated in those larger circles. We have been silent. This must change, but it must do so from here, from the innermost circle out.”
Later that evening, I climbed one of the flat-topped etendekas surrounding Opuwo. I wound my way past gigantic termite mounds and passed through scattered forests of black thorn and mopani, the distinctive butterfly-shaped leaves of the latter cracking under my feet. I scrambled up and over clusters of craggy volcanic rock that must have been millions of years old. When I reached the top, the sun was just about to set. From my vantage point, I could look out across the mountain ranges of the Central Plateau and the Great Escarpment toward the horizon, where the Northern Namib Desert meets the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. I thought about my great-auntie’s words and how they were like little points of light connecting who I once was to everything I wanted to become. They reconciled me with my past and brought hope to my life. So as I watched the sun set that evening, I knew it would rise again tomorrow.
* * *
Now, when I think back on what happened to me, I cannot always make sense of it. I think the potential for evil in this world is very powerful and that it feeds forces we find difficult to understand. There are vast yet mostly unknown networks of well-organized and overlapping groups that profit from the slave trade, or what most people now call human trafficking. In Namibia, we know the term trafficking from its association with rhino horns. But when it comes to humans, we seem to be silent. I think it is because we do not believe—or do not want to believe—that such evil can visit our homes and cooking fires. Even when I myself try to comprehend the true power of the people involved in human trafficking, it leaves me stunned. It is frightening to think how expansive and well coordinated their operations have to be for a man in Dubai to be able to satisfy his sexual appetites with relative ease by literally ordering a Himba girl from southwestern Africa.
I often come back to the letter Rakesh wrote me prior to his suicide, in which he, too, highlighted far-reaching yet largely unknown forces working against him. I agree with what he said about how difficult it is to fight such forces. But it is not impossible. I am a living example of how one person can fight back, survive, and eventually move forward with her life. So now I live to bear witness. I want my story to serve as another kind of shield to protect people and show them how to live with a noble heart.
Until now, I have not told many people what happened to me. Some say that I have been silent because I am filled with shame and fear. They say that I should continue to hide my story. They say that I should just wait for my death. But I do not believe any of this. Since I have moved forward with my life, I do not experience shame or fear. I have more to do than simply wait for my death. I am not a poor, suffering girl from Africa. I am a Himba woman from Namibia. I am an elephant walker. I am a shield maker.