opuwo

“Ahhh, but we saw the license on your car but it was different, and we thought, now where is she from?” Linda said, grinning, as I answered the where-are-you-from question with, Botswana. Just to see how they’d react.

Linda and Queen Elizabeth were the first two people I met in Opuwo. I had just walked out of the grocery store and there they were, a cluster of women sitting under a tree, selling souvenirs. Himba souvenirs.

Opuwo is the regional capital of the Kunene region, in the far northwest of Namibia. It is known for its vast scenic desert, craggy mountains, foggy coastline, and the Himba. Pastoralists with a love of their cattle, the women wear skirts carved out of animal hides and rub a mixture of otjize (ochre) and omaze (cow’s fat) into their skin and hair, giving them a russet luster that is distinctly beautiful. They are gorgeous. And they are ogled. Did I forget to mention that they wear only skirts and necklaces?

When I first drove into town this afternoon, I was unprepared for how striking the mix of people walking and mulling and driving and sitting and talking along the sides of the road would be. There were Herero women in their full-swinging Victorian-influenced dresses, regional government professionals in suits, teenage girls in flouncy skirts, packs of sunglassed young men ready to spend their August paychecks at the bar, wildlife officials in olive drab.  And Himba women, burnished and half-naked, everywhere with their children, waiting in the back of open pickup trucks, bargaining at the market, sitting by the side of the road, sipping a Twist in the grocery store while pushing a cart carrying a finger-handled jug of an alcoholic sparkling ginger drink.

As the only white person walking around town this afternoon, I made a great target for the ladies in the parking lot. It was Queen Elizabeth who struck up a conversation, selling of course, but also chatting. Linda chimed in, we talked about where I was from, then where I was really from, what I was doing here (of course, they know IRDNC, Red Cross, VSO, Peace Corps – the development crowd), all the while putting bracelets onto my wrists, one woman busy adorning each arm, pushing me to buy.

Traditionally dressed as my two new friends were not, an elderly Himba woman just behind the Queen wanted to sell, too, but did not speak English – other than to keep repeating, “Himba!” She said it loudly, as if asserting some obvious authenticity or authority granted her by the tone of her skin and the length of her bare breasts. She took my right arm, adding bracelets too, repeating, “Himba, Himba,” holding up a bracelet and then pointing to those on her own arm, verifying, illustrating, asserting visually what she could not verbally.

In the end I bought one from each of the three of them, but I did not bargain. This was not just because I often don’t, unless I find the price offensive – but because what the women asked was next to nothing. I paid a bit more than the equivalent of $5 for all three. This style of bracelet is actually made from rounds of PVC piping, so the material is not pricey – but a design is then carved into each one, and it is tinted with the same ochre-and-fat paste that women rub into their skin. I wanted to look up how much the Until There’s A Cure Foundation charges for those they sell online that have ribbons cut into the PVC to raise AIDS awareness; I was sure it was at least $20 each. My brain took off for nerdville and I started thinking about marginality and access to markets and middlemen and marginality and then I looked down. Some of the ochre had worked its way off the bracelets and the women’s hands as they decorated me. I rubbed it with my finger. And I smiled as my brain returned to the parking lot where I was standing, where the sand and dirt was so powered with dry and the grinding of footfalls that it was like walking through a fine layer of flour puffing gently with each step.

Perhaps an hour before, as I’d driven slowly all the way through town to have a look around before checking in at the campsite, I stopped on the hill at the northern edge of the business district. I looked at the dirt road leading to Angola to my left, and the pavement leading back to where I’d come from. Despite how close I was to places I’ve worked before, this is a whole other place entirely, I thought. And as the week progressed, and the "meetings" for which I had traveled were "canceled" or "rescheduled" because of certain "circumstances," I found out a bit just how different (and not) it was. But that, too, is another story entirely.