A Drink of Dry Land

by Chris Marais

  But in this case, on a special “impoverished journo” discount rate, we were only too happy to flop over in The Nest and begin doing weeks of washing.

  “Not bad for a pair of skanky desert rats,” said Jules, as we tipped half the Kalahari and a chunk of the Namib from our boots out into the Atlantic Ocean.

  A brief rundown on Lüderitz:

  In 1883 a German merchant called Adolf Lüderitz sent Heinrich Vogelsang down to these parts to establish a trading relationship with the local tribes. By then a sailor called David Redford had already settled in what was known as Angra Pequena with his wife and, subsequently, eight children. Redford and his family collected shark oil, fish and sealskins for trade in the markets in Cape Town.

  Vogelsang bought the bay from the local chief for £100 and 200 rifles with accessories. A year later, it was declared a German Protectorate. An initially spurned Redford was given a life annuity for having been there in the first place, and Angra Pequena was renamed Lüderitz.

  Thus, from this little coastal spot on the Atlantic seaboard began the German occupation of what is today called Namibia. For more than 30 years, the German flag flew over the South West, with disastrous results for the indigenous tribes. And when the South African government took over after World War I, they pursued the German policies with a matched vigour.

  Back in Lüderitz, however, no one noticed that they were literally walking on a vast bed of super-grade diamonds until 1907, when Mr Stauch’s labourer made a spectacular find near Kolmanskop. This led to a crazy, colourful, champagne-swilling, caviar-consuming era in which vast mansions were built into the rocks of the Diamantberg and men lay on the moonlit sands of the Namib, stuffing the glinting precious stones into their pockets and, sometimes, their mouths.

  Usually, however, water was really more precious than anything. It was desalinated or imported until 1969, when the massive Koichab Pan, an underground reservoir, was tapped. It is pure and lovely, this fossil water. But one day it, too, will run out and the Buchters (bay people) will make another plan.

  The diamonds of Kolmanskop may be all gone now, but the Sperrgebiet (forbidden area) still protects those that remain on either side of the town.

  Writers and travellers such as John Brown (The Thirsty Land ) had warned me about the bars of Lüderitz:

  “There are the usual people in the saloons, drinking Cape brandy with Pilsener chasers. Little side-shows are staged by the customers, such as mongoose v. snake and tarantula v. scorpion bouts, with good money changing hands. There are bums, gamblers and poor whites, all with interesting stories to tell, but it seems best to keep on the move.”

  Alas, try as we might, we didn’t see any of those. But we did meet Marion Schelkle, who ran Lüderitz Tours & Safaris from her office in the mid-town area. Marion was a third generation Buchter and grew up running barefoot in a tiny town that seemed to be caught in time and was becoming rustier by the year.

  In the 1970s, Lüderitz had reached its low point. There were fewer than 6 000 residents left, with half the shops standing empty.

  “The new boom began with the town’s centenary in 1983,” said Marion. “Everyone who’d ever been to Lüderitz came to see it breathe one last time. Then UNTAG [United Nations officials] arrived in 1989 to oversee the elections and gave the local economy a massive boost.”

  After independence, investments flowed in: fishing plants, a revived diamond mining operation, gas mining, hydro-electric schemes and a whole new form of moneyspinner: tourism.

  What about this wind, we asked. Do you ever get used to it? She welcomed the challenge with a combative look in her eye:

  “Firstly, there are far windier places in the world. Secondly, we arrange our activities around it. The tours to Kolmanskop are in the mornings, when there is less wind. The wind comes up in the afternoon and wipes out the tourist footprints of the morning. The next day it looks like an untouched ghost town again.

  “When Mozambique was hit by floods in 1999, the wind stopped blowing in Lüderitz for 19 days straight. We cried for the wind. It not only keeps the temperatures down, it pumps oxygen into the sea. The crayfish were walking out of the ocean in their millions.

  “As for getting used to it, my father used to say it’s only the first 30 years that are the hardest …”

  It was Heroes’ Day in Namibia and the air in Lüderitz was dead still. Hardly a breeze in the streets. We took the Diaz Cross loop drive and photographed flocks of flamingos dancing in the mud, teasing breakfast out of the black stuff with their bony toes. From a distance it looked like the professional section of Mrs Murgatroyd’s Long-legged Dance Classes.

  We returned at lunchtime to find Lüderitz in a dozy idyll, wind-free and peaceful. Out at Shark Island, we saw a rather startled-looking likeness of Adolf Lüderitz (who, strangely, embarked on an expedition one day and never returned) on a brass plaque. A century ago, more than 1 000 interned Nama men, women and children died here as the result of conditions in the German concentration camp, which earned it the name of Death Island. Now it was a campground with the best sea views in southern Africa.

  After four days in Lüderitz, I was sold on the place. I tried to put my finger on the source of this fondness. Was it the colours, the architecture, the flamingo flocks or the fishing boats parked out at sea, glinting in the morning sun? It certainly wasn’t the wind. Maybe it was all the merry Buchters we’d met. A positive bunch of folk who braced themselves against the breeze, went out and just did the job.

  Chapter 10: Kolmanskop

  Beer & Skittles

  Kolmanskop was literally blowing away when we arrived for a tour of the ghost town in the dunes. Hot on our heels was Das Rollende Hotel, the tourist road train that trundles around Namibia with its large complement of sleep-in German visitors. Their countrymen of yore used to live out here in sandblasted isolation, fanatically tending little patches of garden (soil and seeds imported from Cape Town), brewing fine beer and playing skittles of an evening. Meanwhile the Namib winds howled their outrage at the intrusion, flinging high-speed sand at the army of humans pecking away at diamonds in the desert.

  Ironically, nothing except for the actual diamond mining came easy in these parts. Even being a tourist was no small thing on a day like this. Groups of foreigners clutched onto flapping clothes and squinted in the glare of the sun. Lining up behind German and English guides, we found ourselves in a small cluster of South Africans being led by Ute Manns, a doughty Buchter lady who switched easily from German to English to Afrikaans.

  We ducked in from the wind to the shelter of the bowling alley, with its long wooden lanes and heavyweight skittles, which is still being used by NamDeb employees working the nearby Elizabeth Bay diamond mine.

  “Kolmanskop was named after James Colman, a transport rider who was caught here in a sandstorm in 1905,” said Ute. “His wagon was stuck in the sand and his oxen ran away.” So Colman didn’t really discover anything (people already knew about the winds, so you can’t count that), win a battle or save any souls. He just got stuck on a hill and Voila! Everlasting fame.

  Let’s just rest a while here for an author’s aside. While I respect the right of others to love a diamond, to kill, cheat and rob for a diamond, I have to say I’m not a great fan myself. Give me a plain old quartz crystal or a piece of finely crafted silver and that’s my lot. And even then, I won’t fight you for them. I just don’t get diamonds, and I don’t see why civil wars have to be fought over baubles. If you steal my water, expect a squawk and a tussle. If you steal my crops or my citizens, I’ll shout. But help yourself to my diamonds if that’s what drives your motor. It’s not like the world is running out of them. It’s not like you can eat them. And don’t tell me you need them to cut things in your workshop. I know that industrial diamonds can actually be made these days. Truth is, I’d rather pick a feather out of an ostrich and wear it in my hat than hang about the place festooned with diamonds.

  In The Last Empire – De Beers, Diamonds and the Wor
ld, author Stefan Kanfer has a lot to say about all the diamond stocks in the world. During the Depression era of the 1930s, when the last thing on everyone’s mind was buying or wearing a diamond, the mining operations in Kimberley continued as if there were still a frantic demand out there. The safes and drawers of De Beers were overflowing.

  “Matters grew so dire that De Beers used butter churns to store the jewels,” says Kanfer. “Sorters went through the motions of separating and grading the stones every day, then mixed them up at night in order to give themselves something to do the next morning.”

  I might not love a diamond, but a diamond legend, well, that’s another story. My interest in visiting Kolmanskop was not really fuelled by the diamond rush that took place here nearly a century ago, but by the way people managed to live in the desert, where everything had to be almost nailed down, where water was non-existent and where the catering promised to be dodgy, at best.

  And yet this place was famous for its parties and dance hall extravaganzas, and was replete with hookers of note, dandy soldiers, champagne-prescribing doctors and caviar-guzzling citizens. Desert cowboys used to drop in and shoot up the chandeliers, then wander out into the wind and disappear for months at a time.

  It all began back in April of 1908, when a railway labourer called Zacharias Lewala found an interesting stone. Old Zach had worked in the diamond fields of Kimberley in his youth, so he had a fair idea of what an uncut diamond looked like.

  He took the stone along to his boss, August Stauch, the Bahnmeister of Grasplatz Siding near the town of Aus. Stauch’s job seemed mainly to consist of watching the barchan dunes of the Namib dance a merry jig over the railway tracks and hide them. But he must have had an inkling of what lay under the sand, because he advised his labourers to bring him all the “pretty stones” they came across.

  August Stauch took the stone from Zacharias Lewala and made a deep scratch on the glass of his wristwatch. He had the stone professionally tested in Swakopmund and was suddenly a major player in the diamond business, buying up mining claims and paying no attention to sand on the tracks.

  By 20 June of that year, the offices of the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft in Lüderitz had heard of the discovery. Diamonds were now being found all over the place, literally at the feet of the townsfolk.

  In April 2005, my hometown of Jo’burg experienced a particularly severe hailstorm. It came upon us like a grey ghost from the east, and huge stones bucketed down for an hour, slicing up gardens into manageable salad portions, shattering windows and adding decades onto the lives of nervous household cats. And then it swept off towards Botswana, leaving a magical trail of glittering water-diamonds all over our yards.

  And that must be how the Buchters of Lüderitz felt, once Stauch & Co had shaken the scales from their eyes. Diamonds lay everywhere, and it was a doddle to mine them. You simply bent down and picked them up, preferably on a full-moon night when it was cool and the cheesy light reflected off the carbonised stones.

  At one of his claims, later to be named Idatal (Valley of Ida) in honour of his wife, August Stauch instructed his servants to search the area for diamonds.

  “Ein Märchen, ein Märchen (A fairy tale, a fairy tale)!” exclaimed his partner, one Professor Scheibe, as they came upon diamonds lying like dropped fruit on the sands. The servants eventually ran out of hands for all the diamonds, and began stuffing them into their mouths.

  The German Kaiser’s secretary came out to see the much-vaunted “diamond town”, and was amazed at the serene sight of people hunting for diamonds by lying on their stomachs in the sand.

  Of course, the Lüderitz-Kolmanskop area turned frenetic.

  “ Beer halls, hotels and shops sprang up in the feverish, reckless atmosphere of this new El Dorado,” writes Lawrence Green in his journal. “Flaxen barmaids arrived. Over all floated the German Eagle. Within a few years, the little group of huts had become the well-built town you see today. When there was a water shortage, people washed in imported soda water.”

  But, as they say around here, Mr Green may have been prone to exaggeration. In fact, there was a factory that supplied free ice – half a block a day to each household – lemonade and soda water. More than 1 000 tonnes of water were shipped in from Cape Town each month.

  “When the ship was delayed, they made their coffee from soda water,” said Ute our guide. “They could buy more than their allotted 20 litres of water, but it was the same price as imported champagne.” So my friend and mentor Lawrence Green had not been too far off the mark.

  The factory used imported ammonia gas and electricity to cool seawater down and freeze fresh water in moulds. The butcher built his cold room next to the ice factory, and thus had access to chilled pipes. Fans blew the cold air onto the carcasses. Next door was a bakery, which supplied each household with fresh hot rolls each morning.

  But the rush was short-lived. Shortly after the initial finds in 1908, the German government decreed the diamond-bearing deserts a Sperrgebiet (forbidden area) and if you were caught rooting about in there you could end up in jail for a very long spell.

  In 1917, the German government was forced to sell its diamond areas to Ernest Oppenheimer’s company, Consolidated Diamond Mines, for nine million pounds. CDM later morphed into the modern-day NamDeb.

  Conservation and controlled ecotourism gained a foothold in the Sperrgebiet in 2004, I was pleased to hear. The area between Oranjemund and Lüderitz, stretching as far eastwards as Aus, had been set aside as an environmentally protected zone. While mining operations still continue, efforts are being made to preserve what’s left of the unique and fragile Namib ecosystem of the area.

  So, let’s go back on this tour with Ute. She took us to the shopkeeper’s house and showed us the ingenious freezer where the block of ice was placed. As it dripped down, the water cooled the vegetables and other perishables, then gathered in a pan at the bottom, where it was used for washing.

  “And even though the water was so expensive,” said Ute, “the miners cultivated extravagant gardens, many of them supplying places like Oranjemund with cut flowers.”

  The shopkeeper was very wealthy, because the miners often paid for their groceries with diamonds. In her house stood an interesting looking hat stand, and Jules asked her about it.

  “That came from the first brothel in nearby Lüderitz,” she said. “In those days, any transport rider who escaped being killed or kidnapped by Namas between Keetmanshoop and Lüderitz was received like a hero in the brothel. His tired feet were washed in imported champagne, and he was offered the pick of the girls.”

  The Lüderitz brothel madame was also very wealthy, it was said. She too was paid in diamonds. She hoarded her diamonds under false floorboards in her dog’s kennel. One day the Schutztruppe arrived, randy and remorseless. There was an argument about payment. The soldiers were never as good value as the miners, so she threw them out. In revenge, they almost shook her bungalow to pieces, and were going to roll it down the Diamantberg when she relented and let them in.

  Kolmanskop had a very large hospital, which could handle more than 200 patients. It had the first X-ray plant in southern Africa, and two most eccentric doctors. A Dr Kraenzle used to give every patient French champagne and caviar sandwiches in the belief that this was the ultimate distraction from pain. The other medico, Dr V Lossow, used to eat a freshly chopped onion every morning, whistling a strange tune as he chewed it. It gave him such an immense feeling of well-being that he prescribed the same treatment (including the Pythonesque singing ritual) to all his patients.

  But you could be a strange doctor, a whoring colonial soldier or a grower of exotic flowers in the desert out here. This was Kolmanskop, where more than a million carats of diamonds were retrieved by leopard-crawling fortune-seekers in the sands in less than two years. Wads of money were thrown away at the horse races and men drank champagne out of women’s shoes every night (a habit I personally do not recommend or support).

  TV Bulpin tells
of the wonderful gardens of Kolmanskop, and the social whimsies such as training a tame ostrich to haul a children’s sleigh through the sand. He also notes that the cultural standard of life in the town was so high that when the recreation hall (Der Kasino) was built, an expert was brought out from Germany to advise about the acoustics, which are said to be so superb that choirs love singing in the building to this day. They staged fancy dances, masked balls, operettas and plays in the Kasino, and the Buchters of Lüderitz, perhaps a little jaded by the bawdy goings-on up on the Diamantberg, used to flock to the desert for a night out in Kolmanskop. Life here was tough, colourful, interesting and, on a medical diet of champagne and caviar, more than a little toxic.

  But Kolmanskop had its sadder side as well. In 1928 there was a mine workers’ uprising, and more than 100 labourers decided to simply walk through the desert to Oranjemund. Years later, eight skeletons, fragments of clothing, a pocket knife and a purse containing coins and some banknotes were found by police along the desolate coast south of Lüderitz.

  “They carried little food or water,” said Lawrence Green. “Day after day they left their dead along the trail. Some of them went mad and threw themselves into the sea. Altogether sixty-five perished.”

  “Sometimes the bones of those who died in the desert are uncovered by the winds,” added Ute.

  After 1939, mining operations at Kolmanskop started winding down until 1956, when the inhabitants were transferred. The structures were looted by anyone looking for building materials. The fact that many houses still stand is miraculous, especially in the light of all biblical advice concerning building on sand. The Namib desert came in through the front door of all the houses formerly belonging to senior staff, blew open the windows and set up home for the rest of time. The mine manager’s house has been renovated and tours (special permits required) to the ghost town have been operating since 1980.