ITCHY FEET TRAVELS

Mbunza Village, Namibia

May 29, 2024

I met Bettina the first evening I arrived in Rundu. She is the owner of the guesthouse and despite being a local, she had not even known of Mbunza village, nor of the living museums scattered around Namibia. Over a couple of drinks at the guesthouse bar, I talked her into visiting and we set off the next day.

Joseph our guide, dressed in a goat-skin skirt led us to the fenced area of the huts. Oh! That plaited orange hair of the women – just like the photos I’d seen in magazines! These are actually wigs that proclaim the tribe of Bantu. The “hair” is made of strings that are harvested from a special type of leaf. We saw a woman smashing the outer bark and extracting from it, string-like fibers. Thin, supple and strong, these are almost like nylon strings and used as such. Ochre and animal fat are mixed to dye the strings and then weave plaits and elaborate hairstyles. Labor intensive but how cool! Of course I had to try on a wig, finding it surprisingly light. The same string is used to make jewelry out of small nuts and seeds, pumpkin seeds being the bulk of the beads. In one corner, a woman had the backbreaking job of pounding the kernels of a kind of corn into flour.

The tedious a task of kneading of an animal skin to make it wearable was the same I’d seen in the San village of Khwe. Similar too was the bowl woven from strands of palm leaves. But here was something different – a woman sat weaving reeds to be turned into cone shaped baskets that are used to catch fish. Yet another was weaving thatch to be used as roofs and walls of the round huts. An older woman sat splitting nuts to get the soft inner kernel. It tasted like macadamia to me. Delicious!

The chores of men and women are separate, says Joseph, and the potter is an important figure in the village. He uses clay from the riverbed to fashion pots and to create realistic miniature figures of cattle. A prospective groom in this tribe needs to present figures of cattle until he can provide actual ones if he has any hopes of marrying. The length of the statute remained unclear. Next to him sat another man, carving toy mokoros out of a light wood. I did not recognize the name but it felt like balsa. Another woodcarver made bows and arrows from a special kind of wood.

And sometimes the arrows are metal tipped for which a metalsmith was needed. We saw them too. One, operating goatskin bellows while the other pounded and flattened an arrowhead. In the old days, said Joseph, this particular skill was kept secret from women. Since women marry and enter their husbands’ tribes, heaven forbid they give away the secret of blacksmithing to other tribes! The musicians – one on a finger piano and another with a string harp were men, strangely not women. In another surprise, the mats used on the floors inside the huts were woven by men as well. I would have expected this task to be for women. The man flattened a particular kind of reed on a wooden block and then wove them in a simple interlocking pattern.

A fascinating aspect was the many leaves, herbs, flowers and roots that are used for medicine. For stomachaches, headaches, contraception, to cure coughs, to heal wounds and reduce swellings. Joseph picked up each twig or leaf or flower and explained its usage. Imagine, a pharmacy in and around camp and all of it natural. Again I thought of what I had learned in the Amazon – just as fascinating and amazing. The Bantu seem exuberant and games are a large part of the their life. A mancala-like game with rules that I did not entirely get were played enthusiastically. The pieces were the same nuts we’d seen split and in one guessing game they used a single red hidden in piles of sand. This is a forest version of three cups sleight of hand I imagine.

The infectious smiles and easy laughter of the Bantu naturally meant music and dancing was a large part of their life. And soon we were treated to some rousing dances. Both men and women dance with gusto, wearing the skirts made of short lengths of reeds adding to the music with their clacking sounds. The energetic foot stomping on the dry sand soon creates quite a cloud. Bettina decides to join in but needs a breather after half a dance while the others stomp on.

Even after the demonstration was over and we were leaving, they were pounding the drums as some continued to shuffle on. The grins and smiles and shouted goodbyes resonated as we left.