Northern Namibia--Owamboland, Oshiwambo people, Oshikundu brew!

After leaving Etosha and the spectacular festival of wild things, we drove into our least expected new favorite place, the north-central region of Namibia that once went by the name of Owamboland, which happens to be the ancestral homeland of our new favorite folks as well, the Oshiwambo. Before coming to Namibia, we'd read much of the Bushmen, the Herrero, and the Himba, but we'd never heard mention of the Oshiwambo people who dominate the population of Namibia. Nearly half the country's entire population live in Owamboland, and everywhere else in Namibia we go, we find that we run into more Oshiwambo people, part of a sprawling internal diaspora. After our rough experience in Windhoek (see earlier post, "Into Africa"), we found ourselves a bit nervous when we entered the string of populous "O-Towns": Ondwanga, Oshideva, Oshakati, etc. This area recently made international news for a particularly fearsome rainy season that flooded tens of thousands of people out of their homes, killing hundreds. Owamboland floods every year, and a large part of the traditional way of life depends on the seasonal lakes called "oshanas," annually filled with mud-gut catfish that locals catch by the thousands with mosquito netting and traditional wicker traps. This year, however, the floods were historic, and as we entered the region we spotted tent cities, flooded neighborhoods and schoolyards, and a distressing number of prosperous-looking funeral homes. HIV-AIDS has also hit the region with a vengeance--so hard, indeed, that the most populous region of Namibia has had a negative net growth rate this decade.

Looks, as has been mentioned once or twice before, can be deceiving. So too can be statistics. For all the grim numbers and unsettling first impressions we had when we checked into the Oshakati Country Hotel, our first night in the area, we soon found that this part of Namibia is filled with the most vibrant people, culture, customs, life . . . and livestock. Everywhere goats and donkeys and cattle roamed across communal grazing grounds, while small boys sold strings of catfish at the side of the road and scattered local outdoor markets offered everything a body could need, from cuts of freshly slaughtered cattle to Chinese shoes or used tools, including, by-the-by, racks of traditional clothing, patties of dried wild spinach, tubs of mopani grubs, and plastic vats of the slightly sour, rather tasty, quasi-legendary Oshiwambo sorghum homebrew, oshikundu.

In the three short days we spent in the area, we visited a baobab tree so huge and hollowed that it has sheltered, over the past two centuries, frightened villagers, fierce warriors, a church, a hospital, a prison, and a post-office (we kid you not). We spent a morning in the thatched kraal of a local king, amazed by the grass/twig/branch construction of a maze-like complex that would rival any industrial bureaucracy for bafflement and that has withstood the alternation of fierce floods and droughts for half a century, unperturbed. Best of all, we spent three days going in and out of markets, shops, and "shebeens" (the regional version of the corner pub, although here they sometimes number three or four such pubs to a corner, with brilliant names like "One Love Bar," "Heaven No. 3," "Dark Side of the Moon Bar," and so forth), while getting to know good people, getting to sample real food (such as mahunga porridge dipped in marula oil), and getting to feel like we were weird but ordinary denizens of a neglected corner of the world. If we were to add one area to the travel list of most of the "first-world" tourists we have met elsewhere in South Africa and Namibia, it would be Owamboland.

Oh, and while at the outdoor markets, we bought two traditional Oshiwambo outfits for Sarah and a shirt for Mark. These clothes, in particular one of the dresses that we bought for Sarah, have since become a sort of combination conversation-starter-slash-passport for us as we have moved through other areas of Namibia, always running into local exiles from Owamboland who cluster around us whenever they spot those traditional stripes of red, white, black and (sometimes) blue.

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