The Best Women's Travel Writing (18 page)

BLAIR BRAVERMAN

I Think I Must Be Beautiful

Making scents of the Namibian Desert.

W
e were in the desert, and Komungandjera was disgusted with me. She shrugged away from the toddlers pulling at her leather skirt and came over to the bush where I was picking resin. I held out my palm—a few chunks of sap, sticks, and leaves, dried blood from where I'd scraped against thorns—and she plucked the sap with two fingers, like a bird pecking, then knocked the rest away with a slap to my wrist. She turned back to the toddlers, muttering.

Karen began to laugh. “She says you pick sap like a man,” she translated. “She says you should stick to counting plants.”

I had come to the site of the “Perfume Project” in the Kunene region of northwestern Namibia, where a tribe of Himba women gathered commiphora sap to sell to the European perfume market. Karen, a Namibian biologist of English descent, had founded the project a few years earlier. I was staying with her at a place called Marble Campground, which was nearly empty. A low mountain marked the edge of the nearby Himba village, from which the women came every morning, walking barefoot or riding stocky, thick-furred donkeys.

The entrance to the campground was framed by two white granite monoliths, moon-bright and alien in this dusty landscape. They were remainders from when this place housed a marble quarry, a Chinese-funded project abandoned when the village's single access road proved too rutty for the granite to be transported over. This made sense to me: it had taken me eight hours to make the one-hundred-twenty-mile drive from Opuwo, the nearest city, including two stops for popped tires and multiple breaks to allow elephants, giraffes, and oryx to cross the road at their leisure. The land was channeled with dry streambeds, like the markings left after a tide has rushed out.

When I'd arrived at the campground in early evening, a young woman met me at the entrance, introducing herself as Anna, the manager. Anna was from the Herero tribe, an ethnic group that split off from the Himba generations ago, “modernizing” with the first colonialists. She wore jeans and a short, slick-straight wig, and carried a ragged
Glamour
magazine in one hand, her thumb tucked in to mark a page. She led me down a path to a clearing busy with people.

In the center of the clearing, five Himba women sat quietly on a blanket, pressed together, their bodies coated in traditional ochre-red paint. Three of them clutched infants to their breasts. Their color bled indistinguishably from body to body, skin to leather to fabric, as if the group were a single sculpture carved from red stone. Only the whites of their eyes stood out. The women spoke their names one by one, then introduced their leader and spokesperson, Komungandjera. While the other women smiled, Komungandjera glared, at times sighing dramatically. She wore a blanket wrapped around her pregnant belly and frequently used the edge of it to swat the other women.

The Himba were preparing dinner—cornmeal porridge and spicy bean stew served from a cast-iron cauldron big enough to hold a goat—and invited me to join them. As I ate, I watched the others in the clearing. I noticed a conspicuous lack of men; what few there were wore Western clothing, track shorts and worn tanks. They seemed to come from a different world than their painted wives and mothers. Later I would learn that of all the Namibian tribes—except perhaps the Bushmen—it was the Himba who most retained their traditional way of life. Karen thought this was because of the culture's respect for women, and the rights it afforded them.

“Think about it,” she said. “Why would the women stop painting themselves, put on Western clothes? The moment they enter so-called modern society, they go from being first to second-class citizens.”

When I'd finished my bowl of stew, Anna came to sit beside me. We smiled shyly at each other. I felt like a child at a dinner party, seeking out others my same age, grateful and relieved to find one. “You live here?” I asked. It was a stupid question, and I blushed.

Anna didn't seem to notice. She turned and pointed to a small stone building behind a cluster of mopane trees. “This is my home,” she said. “Just me. And your home?”

I pointed to my tent. It was small in the distance, barely visible. After several months of traveling, it did feel like home.

“It is not often,” Anna swallowed, as if trying out the phrase, “that an American's home is smaller than my home.” She laughed suddenly and patted my shoulder. “I think this means we are meant to be friends.”

The local chief wandered over to us. He was tall and wore a long blue skirt, and he frowned and gestured to Anna's
Glamour
—which I noticed was over two years old. She handed it to him quickly. The chief flipped through the magazine, pausing at an article on Angelina Jolie, then again at “The Best Coats for Fall!” He rubbed his chin, handed back the magazine with a slightly pained expression on his face, and flashed me a quick smile before meandering off.

Later, as I set up my tent, Anna watched from a distance. When I waved at her she lifted a hand in return, then turned and entered the stone shed that served as the campground's headquarters. “How long will you stay here?” she had asked me over dinner, in rough English, and when I told her, she grinned. “Two weeks?” she said. “But you should stay forever!”

The Himba women got their color from a fragrant mixture of powdered ochre, butter, and commiphora sap. They blended the mixture in a hollow cow's horn, melting the butter with hot coals. With this they painted their skin, hair, babies, belongings—their whole world a sepia photograph. I'd heard theories about it protecting from the sun, or perhaps masking body odor, but it seemed to me that the paint's primary function—as with much of the Himba women's traditional costume—was to be beautiful. Their hair was woven into cords, coated with the ochre mixture so that each cord seem wrapped in leather, and the paint was so thick on their scalps that it cracked into pieces like an eggshell. Some of the women wore headdresses, and stacked layers of metal beads around their necks, wrists, and ankles.

The perfume project was Karen's idea. She was working for the Namibian organization Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), studying traditional plant uses, when she noticed the women collecting commiphora sap for their own perfumes and thought there might be a market for it. Before starting the project, she taught herself rudimentary Otjihimba—the Himba's language—and organized community groups, spoke to the women, tried to determine their needs. She said it was easy to form a friendship with them. “It doesn't matter the culture,” she told me. “Women can always make friends if they talk about jewelry or babies.”

Or commiphora, apparently, about which the Himba are passionate. Commiphora plants are stocky, low-lying bushes that bleed fragrant resin from cuts in their bark. In northern Africa, related plants include the biblical myrrh, frankincense, and the “balm of Gilead.” Although there are dozens of commiphora in Namibia, the Himba's preferred species is Commiphora Wildii, what they call
omumbiri.

The sap is produced during the dry season, a time when there is little else to be done—or to eat—in Kunene. In 2007, the first commercial year of the project, 319 Himba, mostly women, gathered five tons of omumbiri sap, with each ton valued at ten thousand dollars. At Karen's insistence, the gatherers were paid immediately for their work; IRDNC offices were not allowed to accept resin unless they had cash on hand. All end profits, too, went to communities, or toward supplies for the project itself.

“Since the omumbiri started,” an elder remarked, “we don't need to borrow food from our neighbors. If we are hungry today, we can go and harvest and get money, and tonight we can buy food.”

Karen was short and wore oversized black t-shirts and hiking sandals; her curly blond hair looked fastened to her head as an afterthought. She was, quite possibly, the last person you might expect to work in the perfume industry. But she'd managed to sell the omumbiri to major European cosmetics companies, including Estee Lauder, marketing it as “Namibian Myrrh.”

Unlike myrrh, though, the scent wasn't sharp. She described it as a mixture of citrus and pepper, with a hint of pine. The first time I rubbed a ball of sap between my fingers, I was struck by its stickiness; it seemed like once on the skin, it could never be fully removed. It smelled like lemons and saltwater and soil.

On my second day in Orupembe, I took a walk in the afternoon, a time when most of the others had retreated into shaded tents and awnings to wait out the sun's worst. After twenty minutes or so, I came to the Himba village. Huts were scattered loosely in a sandy plain, domes made of mud and sticks with occasional pieces of cardboard, PVC pipe, or plastic bags. A few sparse grasses grew, but mostly there was just dirt, packed with the layered prints of bare feet and donkey hooves. The plain was empty but for a little boy of around two, playing in the dirt by the roadside. When he saw me, I waved. The boy froze for a moment, staring, then ran into the nearest hut.

I stopped walking, startled. The boy was right: this wasn't my place. I remembered something Karen had mentioned—rules the Himba have about passing between a fire pit and a house, and the proper way to approach a chief's home—and decided it was wise to turn around.

As I did I heard a voice calling, “Hey, hello!” I paused. Anna ducked out of one of the huts, waving. She was carrying a large box of powdered soup mix. I took one side of it, and we started back toward Marble Campground together.

Anna wanted to talk about boys. Was I married? I was not; no, definitely not. I was twenty, I said. I didn't even have a boyfriend.

“I had a boyfriend,” said Anna. “Four years. When I was eighteen he came to my mother and said he would like to marry. He was Herero and older than me. He was handsome.”

“What happened?”

“He died in Khorixas. He was hit by a truck.” She said this apologetically, as if informing me of a minor inconvenience. “Now,” she continued, “I think I will wait some years, until I am twenty-three or twenty-four. I want to be like an American girl. I don't want a husband yet.” She laughed suddenly. “The Himba women, they feel so sorry for you! They think you are—that you cannot have babies. They think no man wants you, and your life is, what, a sorrow. And you are so far from home.”

This stopped me for a moment. Out of all the emotions the Himba might have felt toward me—indifference, curiosity, even resentment—I had never considered pity.

“They do not understand how you are so alone,” Anna continued. “I agree with them. I could never be so far from my mother.”

“Where does your mother live?”

“In Opuwo. I had to leave her to work here, but it is worth it. Because maybe here I can become permanent staff.”

By now we'd reached the campground. We dropped the box at the office, and then Anna invited me to her home. It was a single room, maybe six by ten feet, and the walls were covered with pages from fashion magazines—women in dresses, men with thumbs tucked into their jeans, clothing and perfume advertisements. A cot with a mosquito net was pressed against one wall, and an open Bible rested on the pillow. Anna pulled a few photos from a pile of papers in the corner, handling them delicately. Here was a little girl beside an older woman; here a young man in a Tupac shirt; here Anna standing in a heavy Victorian dress, beaming under a cow-horn headdress. “That is my Herero costume,” she explained, “what I am to be married in.” The dress was orange with black markings, like a cat's stripes, and I asked her if that meant something.

Anna frowned. “I don't know,” she said. “I think it means that I love Jesus.”

Just then there was a commotion, voices. We stepped outside to find that Karen had bought a goat, and the Himba were gathered around it for slaughter. It was dead by the time we reached it, hanging by its back ankles from a tree. One of the men skinned it quickly, spread the skin beneath the body, then slashed the stomach with a knife and released the organs, which puddled like jelly on the bloody side of the skin.

Anna clasped my hand in excitement. “Meat is my favorite food,” she said, “except for macaroni.” Then she hurried into the crowd of Himba and was gone.

The Himba had their own system of classification for the commiphora plants. What I learned by Latin name—C. Anacardifolia, C. Crenato-Serrata, C. Multijuga—they called omutuya, omuhanga, omuzumba. That is, they had names for species that were of use to them; anything else they called omunbungu, the “Tree of the Hyena.”

This wasn't the only case where Himba and Western names differed. Those Himba who worked closely with foreigners tended to adopt their own English names; Karen said that when she first came to Kunene, her three guides were named Capacity, Ability, and Never Lose. “And of course, with them on my team, the projects turned out splendidly,” she recalled. “How could they not have?”