Category Archives: Africa It is dark inside a wattle and daub Himba wattle and daub hut. As well as being dark, the huts are likely to be noisy with chatter, packed with bodies, and smoky from the fireplace, pipe tobacco, and incense. The huts are built from mopane wood – a local termite-resistant hardwood – plastered with a mixture of clay and animal dung. […]  Sitting on the benches overlooking the King Nehale Waterhole in Namibia’s Etosha National Park is a bit like being in a zoo in reverse: the people are fenced in, while the animals wander in and out freely. It is a great place for animal-watching. I was thrilled to finally be there; I’d been in Namibia a week and a half, and pretty much […]  It is a primordial landscape, born out of the very heart of the pre-Jurassic Gondwana super-continent. The Kunene Region in Northern Namibia is dry, mountainous, and underdeveloped. It is home to semi-nomadic tribes whose ways of life have barely changed for hundreds of years (see: Women of the Himba, and Himba Model Shoot). The Kunene River, which starts in the […]  “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.” -African proverb. It was the United Nation’s “Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” on Tuesday, August 9th. This year’s theme was a subject dear to my heart: the right to education. Article 14 of the UN Declaration […]  It was a beautiful scene: the red, rocky banks on the Angolan shore of Kunene River contrasting with the rushing green waters and the sandy foreshore on the Namibian side. A young man, recognisable as an unmarried Himba by his hairstyle, sat on a rock, stick in hand. It was, of course, a constructed image, not […] |
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