More souvenir/art

Not much to write about... I need to get out more, work has taken over again. In the meantime, some photos of the souvenirs I picked up in Namibia - hand made, individual: art objects, as far as I'm concerned, even though they're mixed in with postcards and guide books and sell for a few euros. I'm starting to wish now that I'd moved into a bigger flat, just so I had space for more THINGS.

In Windhoek I went to the most amazing shop I think I've ever been in - the Bushman Art Gallery (click on "catalogue" and explore...) - where in fact the blurring of the boundary between souvenir and art is official - it calls itself an art gallery but nearly everything is for sale; there were some incredible artefacts which I immediately craved (many objects similar to those in the wonderful African art gallery in the British Museum), but space and weight limitations stopped me - this time.

(Above - tin can warthog; witchdoctor doll; Himba waterpot)

Namibia (2)

Some more photos... the daily commute; view from the farmhouse terrace; cat in a tree; ornaments; a cactus in the rain (Namibia is one of the sunniest countries in the world - more than 300 days of sunshine a year... pity it rained most of the time I was there.)

Namibia

Most of last week I was in Windhoek working, but I stayed for the weekend and saw a bit of the country near the city. Namibia is the second least-densely populated country in the world (after Mongolia) - two million people in an area six times the size of England. The capital, at 300k inhabitants, is spacious and laid back (and there are low levels of violence; you can actually walk around in the streets without getting mugged), and if you drive twenty minutes in any direction you see.... nobody; and nothing - except trees and bushes. I didn't see any of the famous sand-dunes, as you have to drive a couple of hours west to enter the desert area - so I'll need to go back, as the desert sounds like it's well worth seeing - some dunes are nine storeys high. However I did see a Himba woman, in the centre of Windhoek, which was an unexpected pleasure.

Yesterday my colleague took me to an old German farmhouse an hour out of Windhoek which now caters for tourists; the place was built in 1910 - there's a large community of Germans in Namibia, some of whom, apparently, have a certain, er, nostalgia for a certain period in the past... swastikas are not unknown. To get to this farm you turn off the well-tarmacked highway onto a dirt track, drive for half an hour, ford a small river, then give up at a large river - you then phone the farmhouse to come and get you in a Land Rover, which then takes you through this river - and another one - with water at bonnet level. We were served Oryx steak and then taken out to feed the farm's collection of leopards and the cheetahs, which are kept in very large enclosures - however they're not difficult to see as they hear the Land Rover and come running for their meat. Feeding five cheetahs is spectacular - and more than slightly scarey - as they jump around very close to the vehicle, trying to catch the chunks of meat as the driver throws them - and squabbles break out, with some very loud feline roars and screams. The Land Rover is completely open, so there's nothing to stop these cats actually jumping up and into the vehicle to take a closer look at the buckets of flesh - or the tourists - if they feel like it. (The purists in Timbavati would frown on all of this, of course - this place is a zoo, not a properly run eco-park; so I should probably feel guilty for having been there - but to be honest it didn't cross my mind until now.)

Above: a Himba woman and baby (courtesy of National Geographic, I didn't take a photo of the lady I saw; when I go back I'll go north, where these people live); a young eagle near the farm; a German dining room c. 1910; a leopard; a cheetah waiting to be fed; jumping for dinner; and a weaver bird nest (I learned that there are 18 species of weaver birds in Southern Africa; distinguishing the nests is an advanced form of bird watching....).

Magaliesberg

Magaliesberg is rapidly becoming my favourite part of Joburg - i.e., not Joburg. It's a beautiful area north-west of the city, about an hour's drive to get into the mountains - which are apparently some of the oldest mountains in the world. There are fun things to do in this area - see previous posts for caves, ballooning, canopy touring, meeting elephants etc. Saturday I was there for work (oddly enough) and fitted in, along with a visit to some baby elephants, two completely new activities for me: 1) climbing a mountain in a Unimog - which is, in a word, an off-road TRUCK with enormous wheels and incredible torque and suspension - the driver enjoyed terrifying us by launching this thing off impossible slopes and attacking metre-high rockfalls, etc - a bit like going on an improvised rollercoaster; and 2) quad-biking, which I wasn't sure I'd like, but it turned out to be amazing, largely because the track was through forest and a quarry and a number of mud puddles. Great fun.

A weird moment came when the Unimog driver parked at the top of the mountain and pointed out, in the distance, Pelindaba, SA's nuclear research facility - and until 1994 home to three atomic bombs which the apartheid government had developed secretly. The bombs are now decommissioned. "Who was the enemy?" I asked the driver - SA clearly didn't have any military opponents nearby at any time in the second half of the 20th century. The driver didn't know - probably the opponents of apartheid, at the height of sanctions etc. - e.g. the likes of Western Europe and the USA, both of which, one would think, are well beyond the range of any nuclear missile based in South Africa. It's impossible to think of any circumstances in which SA might have used these weapons - another indication of the regime's fundamental derangement.

Oh, and I saw the set of "Wild at Heart" - a BBC series, apparently, which I've never seen, and which is nominally set in central Africa but is actually filmed in Magaliesberg.

(Above: elephant stars of Wild at Heart - the mum didn't mind the baby being petted; the Unimog before it hit the mud; and part of the set for Wild at Heart.)

Sterkfontein

Close to Johannesburg is the "Cradle of Humankind", a World Heritage site - an area laced with underground caverns where thousands of fossil fragments of our earliest ancestors are still being dug up. Sterkfontein is one of the caves open to visitors, and the home of Little Foot, who fell down a hole into the cave while being pursued by a leopard - 3.3 million years ago (we know, or surmise, that he was being pursued by a leopard because the leopard's skeleton is right next to him - they both broke their necks in the fall). Little Foot was discovered in 1997 and the site is still being excavated. Little Foot is an australopithecene early hominin - one of a large number of "missing links" which branched off from the ponginae (today's orangutans) and the apes (today's gorillas and chimps) some six million years ago.

The Sterkfontein cave is nothing special in terms of stalacmites and tites - a lot of these were destroyed by lime miners during the gold rush days - but the whole area is very suggestive, and the museum attached to the cave is excellent - the clearest explanation of our evolutionary history that I've ever seen. What comes across very clearly is that human beings (or homo sapiens sapiens) is just one remaining branch of a fairly wide tree of hominid/human variations - all of our closest cousins are now extinct (including robustus, who had massive jaws to work through a heavy diet of vegetation - just think, if robustus had won the evolutionary race we'd all now be natural vegetarians with no conception at all of steak or hamburgers). Modern humans coexisted with some of these cousins - at some point about 200,000 years ago an ancestor identical to ourselves might have bumped into Neanderthal man, or homo heidelburgensis - but wouldn't have met Little Foot, who'd become extinct some two million years earlier. The timescales are incredible - the civilisations that we know about only go back some 9,000 years - what were human beings DOING for the other 191,000 years? Well, like Little Foot, they were probably mostly running away from leopards etc. Palaeontologist Bob Brain is very clear on this: "far from being mighty hunters, the early hominids formed an insignificant part of the fauna of the time and the were certainly subservient to carnivores such as leopards and sabre-tooth cats. They were the hunted, rather than the hunters".

All of this is a pretty strong argument against any anthropomorphic or creationist view of the world; God's image clearly has nothing to do with it, we're a lucky survivor from a very wide range of evolutionary experiments. If Little Foot had been able to run a bit faster, we could well all now be about three feet tall with a thick coat of fur.

A footnote: incredibly, research in the Sterkfontein area came to a halt under apartheid - the Nationalist government was extremely religious, and of course firmly believed in white supremacy, and so a line of enquiry which had begun to locate a common ancestor for all humankind in South Africa (and pretty certainly black, to boot, or at least not palely "European") was discouraged - all government funding was stopped.