TheHimbaandthedam.docVIP

The Himba and the Dam Jakatunga Tjiuma, counselor to a Himba headman in Namibia, washes his hands in the Kunene River, the site of a proposed hydroelectric dam. A questionable act of progress may drown this African tribes way of life.Similar dramas are playing out around the world by Carol Ezzell ...........SUBTOPICS:Into the Desert Dammed If They Do Lifeways of the Himba Toward a Struggle? SIDEBARS:Kaokoland Family Life Social Change PHOTO GALLERY HIMBA SONG TRAVEL DIARY FURTHER INFORMATION Photography by Karin Retief In our world a dam is a small thing that gives cattle water. What you are talking about is something else and will finish the Himba. —Chief Katjira Muniombara Not until we stand on a ridge overlooking the Kunene River—which forms part of the border between the southern African nations of Angola and Namibia—does tribal leader Jakatunga Tjiuma comprehend the immensity of the proposed dam. Look there, I tell him with the help of an interpreter, pointing to a distant notch in the river gorge that a feasibility study says would be the most likely site of the wall of concrete. Thats where the dam would be. Turning, I point to hills in the east. And the water would back up behind the dam to make a lake that would stretch to there. I can see the shock and incredulity in his eyes as he begins to understand how high the water would rise up the faraway hillsides, flooding more than 140 square miles of Himba settlements, grazing land and grave sites. He clutches a blanket around his shoulders and crouches on a rock, speechless. Himba mother and child glisten red from a coating of butterfat mixed with the iron ore ocher. Like other adult women, the mother shaves her forehead and twists her hair into multiple braids that she daubs with a mud mixture. The heads of infants are shaved until they are weaned. Tjiuma is a counselor to one of the headmen for the Himba tribe, an essentially self-sufficient band of 16,000 people who eke out an existenc