Ramble around Omaruru
The Omaruru Museum is closed, and the Franke Tower is locked. A sun-bleached sign says the key to the tower can be picked up at Little Bush Rest B&B. When we arrive there, however, it’s also closed. There’s a “For Sale” sign outside.
Photographer Shelley Christians and I drove here from Windhoek yesterday. Omaruru is known as the art capital of Namibia, but so far it hasn’t made much of an impression.
We carry on our hunt to find somewhere that’s actually open. Tikoloshe Afrika is on the koppie at the southern end of town and it seems promising. We pull into what looks like a scrapyard for anything once made from wood. Next to the double-storey shop, three men are skilfully carving and sanding.
Martha Pitt comes to greet us and show us around. There are several rooms with a variety of curios from across Africa, and a coffee shop on the top floor. They have the standard curios you’d expect in a place like this (masks, wooden spoons, carvings, batik fabric), but owner Paul Goldbach and his team – Ndingi Ndumba, Alberto Kambinda, Rino Johannes Kativa and Johannes Lirunga – are doing something special here: They carve animals and birds from dried tree roots. I see a big hippo and a small hoopoe; an elephant, carved from rose gum root, is ready to be shipped to Austria; a giraffe is on its way to Germany.
Farmers in the area supply the roots of trees like mopane, tamboti and camel thorn. “The wood will tell you what it wants to be,” says Paul.
Paul moved to Namibia from Germany in 1970, to work as a furrier. He gave that up because, in his words, “I grew tired of all the tannies.” So he went travelling. In South America, he came across wood carvings made by Peruvian artist Agustin Rivas, who used tree roots. Paul bought 20 of his carvings and shipped them to Germany.
He went back to Namibia, where he worked as a
