Death on the Kunene - Saving the Himba Heartland - an Adam Geard Story

Death on the Kunene

© Peter Cleary 2015

ISBN 978-0-9947119-6-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Published by Peter Cleary Books Mtunzini, KZN, 3867

www.peterclearybooks.co.za

peter@peterclearybooks.co.za

Cover photograph by Peter Cleary

Cover design by Jo Petzer of Cosmic Creations

Dedication

For Cathy,

In memory of the fun we had doing the research.

Chapter 1

He had to know why Josiah Nyambi had acted so out of character. The Tjimba headman’s anger had dominated the meeting of the chiefs and their councillors, the meeting called by the government to explain the new developments.

That was two days ago, Wednesday, and he’d stewed on it for those two days. It was not the Josiah he knew, the man he’d befriended when he was conducting the research into villages and burial grounds.

Adam was not normally indecisive, but this was a strange case and maybe it meant nothing. It was the unnatural vehemence of the normally mild mountain man that finally made his mind up. He needed to know the answers. What was the basis for Josiah’s vitriolic outburst? Why had he walked out of the meeting once he’d spoken? Why not debate the point if it was so important to him?

He would have travelled two days to attend the meeting, surely important enough to have stayed for some sort of resolution to his concerns? The passion and speed with which Josiah had spoken had been beyond Adam’s rudimentary understanding of the language.

After Nyambi had left that day, the old Himba men had sat, stunned, watching him stride purposefully through the gate, watching from their vantage point, sitting on their little metal folding chairs under the Makalani palm trees in the shaded campsite. They looked incongruous in that meeting which included the government representatives in their city clothes, and the two Russian advisors, cold white faces amongst the locals.

There was only one way to find out. It would be a trip of almost 40 kilometres, out on the old dirt track graded by the South African Defence Force during the war with Plan, the armed wing of the Namibian freedom fighters.

Out there, a long journey away, was the village of Josiah Nyambi. He doubted the soft off-roader Rivers for Life had rented for him would make those precipitous rocky gradients but it would get him far enough; he’d walk the rest of the way.

It was mid-afternoon when he decided he needed to make the trip, and he should have left it for the next morning, but that was not Adam’s way. He’d made the decision and he’d go straight away. No purpose in waiting – as good to sleep in the veld as in the camp.

His route took him up the hill out of the Kunene valley on the C43, the gravel road to Okongwati, and onwards to Opuwo, the district capital. The vehicle climbed up three or four slopes and out into a wide valley, dominated to the west by Okaninga, the holy mountain. On both sides he was flanked by small Himba villages. The ravages of overgrazing and harvesting for wood had left the mopane veld bare of grass, an arid parkland of red soil and scattered trees.

There were no cattle, only goats, plenty of them, looking surprisingly nourished considering the state of the veld. The cattle would be away in the far hills, wherever there was still grass, herded there by the men.

Adam turned onto the track he knew from previous trips into the mountains downstream of the Epupa Falls. He was heading west, directly towards Okaninga, the massive cliffs below its summit making it look impossible to climb, but he had been there, on the top, with his friend Josiah. They had spent a day climbing it from the west and a night on the top.

He remembered the advice: You must go there in a spirit of joy, Adam. It is a joyful thing to be in the presence of the spirit. If you are unhappy or full of worry the spirit will not talk to you.

The spirit had not talked to him and maybe it saw all of his ghosts, the ghosts of the men he had killed in Iraq and maybe also the ones who had died at his hand not too far away, in a hidden valley in the Zebra Mountains. Maybe the spirit did not like what it saw in Adam when he was too contemplative.

It was a pity for he had wanted to hear, had opened his heart to the possibility, encouraged by his friend. Nyambi had felt it. Adam had seen the almost ethereal rapture in the face of the Tjimba man, reflected in the firelight. They had seemed to be on top of the world on that windless, cloudless night, the crackling and hissing of the fire the only noise to accompany them.

The memory made him glance often at the mountain as he approached it and then swung to the north to travel around it, until he could see the break in the serried cliffs, the green belt which afforded them the passage to the plateau on the top.

The Freelander breasted a small rise between two hills and the land changed: red soil giving way to stone, mopane diminishing until the predominant bush cover was Three Thorn trees, grey-green leaves with smooth thin stems, shining like copper pipes in the slanting sun of the late afternoon. Adam knew this section by its Otjihimba name, Karibi Kare, beautiful country with many springs and perennial grasses. He would find cattle here, but it was also more difficult terrain for the vehicle and he came soon to the first real obstacle, the boulder-strewn dry river bed of the Orahare River, the river the first Dorsland trekkers had called Grootfontein.

Adam stopped the vehicle and got out. Despite the waning day it was still monstrously hot, and humid from the first real storm of the summer which had hit their camp on the Kunene River with a fury two nights earlier, causing havoc as it tore away small tents and caused long, heavy fronds of the Makalani palms to come crashing to the ground.

He walked the road course through the river bed which twisted and turned to escape the bigger rock outcrops. His concern was the ground clearance of the vehicle as it bumped its way across, and he made the passage easier by moving some of the bigger boulders, sweating in the heavy air, giving his back some welcome exercise after the sedentary life of the last few weeks.

The Freelander made it slowly across the course he had chosen largely unscathed, only a few bangs marking where boulders tested the metal chassis and floor pan of the vehicle. That did not worry Adam; it was a rental after all, function not form his main concern. What worried him were the first real gradients which he came to a few kilometres further in the last light of the day.

Once again Adam got out of the vehicle to assess the situation. He remembered the deep valley. He had no concern about descending to the flat valley floor, only the climb out, more precipitous on the far side, slippery with loose boulders. The problem was that the older model Freelander he was driving had neither low range gearing, nor diff lock. He did not think the vehicle would make it but he would attempt it and if it worked he would be able to continue for another kilometre, where he knew a pass to the last ridge before the Baynes Mountains would definitely be beyond the capability of the vehicle.

The Freelander stuck on the first steep upslope with neither the power nor the gearing to progress further. He backed down slowly, using the compression of the engine in reverse to minimise the braking and the danger of a slide turning the vehicle sideways.

Adam was not one to announce his presence. In Iraq they had learnt the advantage of surprise. He had passed a small Himba village in the Karibi Kare section and had seen cattle elsewhere so knew there would have been herders in the vicinity. If the people from Epupa came looking for him those people would say he had passed, but they were not curious people, they would not speculate. Yes, they’d say, a brown car had passed. Who was in it? They didn’t know.

He found a place to hide the vehicle in the flat bottom of the valley, a few hundred metres upstream, an outcrop of boulders behind which he parked. He had left the main track where it was rocky and was satisfied that a cursory search would not find his tracks.

Adam retrieved from the vehicle his small backpack and the two water bottles. He had no weapon other than the military knife he carried in his pack, useful for many purposes beyond its defensive role. There were no longer lions in the area, the last animals having been driven west into the pre-Namib. Sadly too, black rhino and elephant were also almost gone, shot out by the South African Defence Force and their political bosses, who had regarded the Kaokoveld as their private hunting grounds.

He decided to walk out of the valley, up to the ridge from where he would see the Baynes Mountains in the first morning light. Up there it would be cooler and it would leave him a walk the next day of around fifteen kilometres to Josiah’s village. He welcomed the chance to stretch his legs in the cooling night, with enough light from the heavens to make out the twin track of the road he was following.

Chapter 2

The village was deserted. Adam watched closely from his vantage point, a small hillock, about four hundred metres out. He had not mistaken it; he did not make mistakes about matters of place. Quite the opposite.  His sense of direction and ability to remember places was uncanny. It had stood him in good stead when he had led his small command of mercenaries in the desert of the upper Tigris. That empty place was a very different environment to this arid mountainous bushveld, but he knew that village down there.

Nothing had changed since his last visit. He figured it out. It was October now and he’d visited the village the winter of the previous year, maybe June or July. The Tjimba were more mobile than their Himba cousins, preferring a hunter-gatherer existence, living off the land, veldkos and wild animals their staple diet. But they had changed in recent times, forced to do so with the demise of the herds of springbok and mountain zebra. Now they kept cattle and goats and ate maize when they could get it.

So that village down there was a little different.  The structures were less permanent, the stockade less substantial, the huts the same mopane construction, like a small tepee, but without the mixed mud and cattle dung outer skin, replaced with plastic when it rained, one of their few concessions to the modern world.

Adam worked out the timeline. Josiah had walked out of the meeting at the Epupa camp on Wednesday morning. He would have reached the village down there on Thursday evening. It was Saturday morning now, just after nine. Had something frightened the Tjimba headman, frightened him enough to have moved his family and stock from this place in a day? It was very unlikely. When last Adam had visited, the family had consisted of Josiah and his two wives and a sister. The one wife, the older one, had three children ranging in age from four to a toddler. The other wife had only a single child and was pregnant with a second. The sister was older than Josiah and her children had moved on. Four adults and four children, five by now.

There seemed to be only one logical conclusion: Nyambi had moved the location of his village in the time since Adam had last visited him. But that village down there showed no signs of long term abandonment. His eyes searched the surroundings, along the base of the huge mountain, the first of the Baynes range. And along the valley, south, the way he had come; and north, towards the river and Angola. There was no smoke, no sign of human habitation. Far to the north, maybe five kilometres away, there was movement in the air. Big birds, vultures. Something had died out there.

That thought got him moving, walking fast. Many things died daily in the veld in northern Kaokoveld, but the combination of an abandoned village and vultures was cause for alarm.

There were signs everywhere that the village had been abandoned in haste, and within the last day or two. But when he went into the huts he knew that they had not left voluntarily. Too many valuables had been left behind. In the hut of one of the wives there was her prized necklace, a beautiful piece with the twisted wire ring and the conch shell hanging below it. Those necklaces were handed down from mother to daughter. It would never have been left behind.

Whoever had forced them to leave had taken the cattle and goats, the fresh tracks heading north towards the river, towards the distant circling vultures.

Adam did not try to follow the tracks. He knew where they would lead and he started to run. Maybe someone was still alive out there. Maybe they had killed only one of the beasts, and its remains were the attraction for the huge ungainly birds.

He ran for nearly half an hour, an awkward run with the two water bottles banging against his side and the straps of the backpack chafing across the shoulders. When he was close enough he slowed to a walk, circling to come in from a different angle. If they were still there they might have heard the sound of his running and be expecting him to come from that direction.

The first movement was a pair of jackals, running from the thicket that he was approaching. Then a hyena came out, looked at him and loped away. He would have to move fast now. That hyena would come back within minutes, the temptation of the feast overcoming its fear of the man.

There was no longer need for caution. No humans were alive in that thicket. He started to run again and he heard the crashing as the vultures took off in panic and then saw them as they cleared the shrubs and flapped heavily towards surrounding trees.

It was a butcher shop in there. Adam had seen many dead people, but never a sight like that. And never had a friend of his been murdered as brutally as his friend Josiah had. In the end they had shot them all but they had tortured them first. The older wife had obviously been pregnant and they had cut the foetus from her womb. Only parts of the umbilical cord remained, the unborn child would have been the first to be eaten by the carnivores.

Despite the flesh torn by the animals and birds he could still see the stab wounds around the genitals of the two younger women which probably meant they had been raped. He had heard of that happening, the stabbing a symbolic act to dishonour the women they had used.

The heads of the younger children were smashed, probably swung against a tree trunk. Josiah had been brutally beaten before they had killed him, his face bearing the wounds of rifle butts, one eye dislodged from its socket.

Adam had heard of killings like this during the war of liberation. Specialised units whose job it was to terrorise the local population so that they never simply killed, for that would not be enough to elicit a sense of horror and fear. It had to be rogue remnants of those past atrocities. Only men who had done this before and lost all semblance of humanity could perform such an abomination.

The warning growl of the hyena reminded him that he had to leave. He could not bury them, could not defend himself against the hyena if it chose to attack.

He found the tracks of the stolen animals and started to follow them, heading towards the river. What he had witnessed told him a little of what he faced. The killings had taken place before he was in the vicinity for he would have heard the rifle shots on the Friday evening, even from twenty kilometres away. That meant he was a day behind them but would catch up if they continued to drive the stock which, by his best estimate, were about twenty goats and five or six head of cattle. The cattle were the valuable ones and they would hobble them if they bivouacked for the night.

The empty cartridge cases left carelessly at the kill site were 7.62mm, shortened cartridges so they would be AK47, not R1 automatic rifles, the two principal infantry weapons of the war. If the men were from a counter insurgency unit that had operated during the war and who were known to use terror tactics like the ones he had just witnessed, they would be older men today, in their forties, unlikely to be as fit for a fight or to run as they would have been in their teens and early twenties.

The animal hooves had disturbed the footprints of the men but he thought he could make out at least three distinct prints. Minimum three men. Three men that he would surely kill.

Chapter 3

He tracked them all the way to the Kunene River. At first it had been difficult for he had to assume they had remembered their training and one of them would lie in ambush for any pursuers. To avoid that possibility, he had followed a parallel track to the way he assumed they were herding the animals. At first he had walked west of their tracks, along the base of the Baynes, broken country with many small ravines which slowed his progress.

After an hour he returned to the middle of the valley leading to the river and found the spoor again. They had made no attempt at subterfuge. That told him they were either arrogant or did not expect pursuit. If it was the latter it meant they knew the police, and that in turn would mean they were Namibian and Ambo people, more commonly called Ovambo.

The police base at Epupa was small, still housed in tents. Only fifteen officers were stationed there, commanded by a Warrant Officer, and nearly all of them were Ovambos. One of their tasks was patrolling the borders but all of them had been in camp when he had left the previous day. The police were thin on the ground. There was another small station 50 kilometres upstream at Onungura and the closest station south of the river was over 80 kilometres away at Okongwati.

The dominance of the civil service and the military, including the police, by persons of the Ovambo tribe was a source of discontent for the Himba and Herero. Why could they not be administered and policed by persons who understood their language and culture? It went deeper than that. During the war the Himba in the Kaokoveld were caught between the South African Defence Force and the SWAPO insurgents. Both sides accused them of collaborating with the enemy. It was impossible for them to stay neutral and, as a result of that bitter experience, the Himba and Ovambo disliked and distrusted each other.

After his discovery that the herd of animals was heading directly down the valley to the river, Adam was able to be less cautious and he took a route a few hundred metres east of them, in country easier to traverse.

The river level was low. It was the end of the dry season. The thunderstorm they had experienced a few days earlier was the first of the wet season. It would start raining in earnest soon, in the highlands of Angola, the headwaters of the river.

Adam was observing the scene from the shelter of the riverine bush, hidden from the sight of eyes across the river. He could see where they had led the cattle and goats into the water and where their tracks emerged on the other side. They were bold:  the Kunene was infested with crocodiles. But it seemed they had chosen well, a disturbed section of the river, wider and shallower and faster, not what crocodiles preferred.

He could not cross at that point. Once across the river they would have felt safer and may well have laid up inside the vegetation that flanked the river, resting and eating and watching their back track. He went upstream and around a corner and there he started looking for the safest place to cross.

There was spoor of crocodiles on nearly every sand beach, but he never saw any of the reptiles. Eventually he came across a likely spot where the river quickened between some large boulders. The crocodiles would be downstream of that turbulence, in the slack water of the deeper pools. His only risk was to lose his footing and be swept into their territory, but he negotiated the danger safely enough and was soon heading back downstream, now in Angola.

Adam had been right. They had rested up after crossing the river, and they had eaten there. Remnants of the fire they had made and the stones they had positioned to hold the cooking pot, told him it was either the evening or morning meal, most likely morning because there was no evidence of a slaughtered animal. They would eat meat in the evening, would be unable to resist it with all of the animals they were driving. If he was right they would be no more than four or five hours ahead of him and he headed out with renewed vigour, ignoring his own hunger pangs.

There were not too many hours of daylight left and Adam took a chance, travelling directly in the tracks of the driven animals, alternately running and walking. He had to try and catch up that day for they would surely be meeting others within the next day or so, the ones they would have arranged with to purchase the stolen stock.

He worked it out. He was travelling more than twice the speed they would be able to accomplish. If they were four hours ahead of him he would catch them in three hours, before nightfall. There was plenty of margin for error and he slowed his pace after two and a half hours, and proceeded more cautiously, cupping his ears occasionally, alert for the lowing of the cattle or bleating of the goats, or even the voice of man.

He heard them when there was still enough daylight to be able to catch up cautiously and observe them before it became dark. The first sounds were the bleating of the goats, the highest pitch of the noises they made, and then the low rumbling of men’s voices. The noises were stationary, they had stopped for the day.

Adam immediately changed direction, beginning a wide circle to approach from the opposite side. No matter how confident they were, there would always be some expectation of an approach along the route they had come. He would come from the other side, and he needed to move quickly while he was at some distance because when he made the close approach he would be deathly slow. A knife against automatic weapons would have only one outcome in daylight.

In the end he became quite desperate as the light was fading fast and he needed to make an assessment of their numbers, weapons and position if he was to stand a