The Himba

After leaving Oshakati (with a surprising degree of regret, especially after saying goodbye to our brilliant local guide, Dr. Morne Dowie--"yes, yes, yes, yes, darling, sweet-sweet!") we drove to the northwestern outpost of Opuwo, a town that bears a certain resemblance to the bar town in the first Star Wars movie, filled as it is with peoples from different continents all wearing wildly different costumes, from butter-&-ochre to bustles of silk to ballcaps-&-blue jeans. Opuwo, a community of a couple thousand people on a steep desert hill, greeted us with twin dust devils large enough to carry Dorothy and Toto far away from home, and, by the next morning, we were in the home of a local primary school teacher up the hill and Sarah was being fitted for a Hererro wedding dress (gold skirts with symbolic "cow-horn" headress--think Queen Victoria meets Princess Padme). After that extraordinary experience, we spent an afternoon at a Himba village. We would have preferred a full day or more, but still we found the encounter enlightening. The most assertive women we've ever met wear cow dung in their hair, ochre on their breasts, and fumigate themselves from bottom to top for perfume. The classical world's Amazonians have nothing on these putatively subservient femmes. As for the men, well, they get to sit on footstools and campchairs while wearing no ochre at all.

The Himba are famous among anthropologists for their dramatic pastoralism, once nomadic, now sedentary, but still committed to the "cow" way of life. A polygynous, ancestor-revering, fiercely anti-literate cattle-herding people, they split from their cultural twins, the Herrero, when westerners started missionarizing in the area. The Herrero adopted western clothing with a vengeance, so that now the Herrero women going to buy groceries outdress any westerner at a formal cotillion. The Himba, speaking the same language as the Herrero, wear nothing much more than full-body makeup. The effect, however, in both cases, is strikingly dignified. We have had a Himba mother and infant ride with us as hitchhikers on the way to Epupa Falls, and we can testify that no one has ever left so much ochre/dung on the car door, ceiling, seats. We can also testify that no one has ever accepted a ride down a dirt road with so much noblesse oblige.