Where the ancestors speak. A Himba experience

Author: Jill Kinahan
Publisher: Namibia Archaeological Trust
Windhoek, 2004
Soft cover, 27x21 cm, 68 pages, numerous colour photos and illustrations

How it all began:

The OvaHimba of Kaoko are a Herero-speaking people who live with their cattle, sheep and goats in the dry, mountainous areas of northwest Namibia.

Important to their existence is the Kunene River which brings flood waters from the highlands of Angola to this arid region. In years of good rain, the women cultivate small fields.

During the dry season, the Kunene woodland shelters and feeds all living things. Along the riverbanks many stone cairns mark the burial places of Himba ancestors.

In 1992, the Government of Namibia made known its plan to build a hydropower dam on the lower Kunene to help provide electricity to the developing country.

The magnificent Epupa Falls would be inundated. Fierce debate arose among a number of interest groups.

The OvaHimba vehemently opposed the scheme. Not only would a considerable area of their grazing be flooded, but so too would many graves of their ancestors. This issue runs deeper than outsiders might at first understand because the wellbeing of both the people and cattle is intimately related and dependent upon the blessings of the ancestors (pvakum).

All good fortune comes from them, and all bad luck, disharmony and illness stems from offending them. Himba ancestors give advice and guidance through the elders, who function as priests to link the living with the dead. Anyone in trouble, need or sickness may ask their eldest living male relative to intercede on their behalf.

The elder sits by the holy fire at the shrine (pkuruwo) of his father's lineage (pruzo), and asks for guidance, invoking his paternal ancestors by name from the most recently deceased all the way back as far as he can remember. The ancestors form an unbroken chain reaching back to God (Ndjambi or Mukuru).

The path that the elder takes from his house to the okuruwo links his people with their ancestors and is sacred; it is an insult for outsiders to cross it. In special cases, the elder may seek direct communication by praying at the graves. Disturbing, flooding, or removing ancestral graves from the living relatives is as unthinkable as "cutting a baby in half", in the words of a Himba spokesman at the time of the dam controversy The ancestors' advice in times of trouble often entails the sacrifice of sheep or cattle, which lubricates all social relations and restores harmony.

People are not only socially and economically dependent upon cattle, but cattle are an essential part of their spiritual life. Large oruzo herds are kept sacred and are subject to many taboos. Oruzo cattle belong to the ancestors in the spirit world and are kept for them until the death of their keeper, the priest and head of the lineage. When the elder dies, the cattle are slaughtered.

The elder is wrapped in the hide of his favourite ox, and buried facing to the east. His walking stick may be snapped in two and laid with his sandals, and sometimes also his beeswax horn for calling the cattle, on the burial mound. All the meat from the oruzo cattle is eaten at the burial feast and the skulls with horns put up on stakes at the grave. The elder will enter the spirit world accompanied by the holy cattle. His successor in the male line will become the new keeper of new oruzo cattle and a new okuruwo, and will intercede with the ancestors.

When he does this, he will first call upon the lineage head who has just died, and who has detailed knowledge of the concerns of his living family. Graves are mostly at dry season camps on the river banks, where people are most likely to die, or where elderly people will remain year round; they are also often on routes - perhaps as metaphor for the journey from life to death and beyond.

In simple terms, the graves may be taken to represent land claims. They mark the place of the lineage. Elders hold the land in trust for their communities, and may not "sell" or otherwise dispose of it; it is inconceivable for anyone to be compensated for the loss of it either. These two processes - of selling land or being compensated for it - do not exist in Himba customary law.

When my husband John became involved in the pre-feasibility study of the Epupa Dam scheme, I wanted no part in the controversial project. However, he thought it essential to find out what archaeological remains would be drowned forever were the project to go ahead in this relatively unknown area. The study, financed by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (NORAD) and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), planned separate anthropological and archaeological studies.

The anthropologists were to collect oral histories from the people, and research documentary sources, while the archaeologist was to survey the material remains of Himba culture in the proposed dam areas (there were alternative sites). As archaeologists, John and I had done most of our field research in depopulated regions, and we were used to working this way. It was an entirely different matter to investigate the archaeology of a people who were still around, and who furthermore were opposed to the envisaged project.

John set off north on his own. The results of his archaeological survey were tantalizing: the material remains did not support the extreme positions taken by the anthropologists (that the OvaHimba had lived there always); nor by the environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates (that the traditionalist OvaHimba lived in perfect balance with nature, following their ancient herding way of life, and should be left alone), nor by some government officials (that the OvaHimba were overgrazing and degrading the land).

What the evidence did show was that the archaeological remains of settlement in the area corresponded closely to modern Himba land-use. John discovered that two different kinds of sites occurred in both the remnants of ancient settlements, and in the occupied Himba settlements. One kind was the established village within an environment which had become degraded over time, with hard, barren ground and few trees or any other vegetation; and the other kind was small, ephemeral and in isolated surroundings. [...]