Namibia Road Trip – Days #5 and 6: Swakopmund
German War Monument in Swakopmund, Namibia. No doubt they were facing Herero women armed with sharpened mango slices…
The Brauhaus is one of the “real” German beer halls in the Teutonic Brigadoon of Swakopmund. It’s located in an outdoor shopping mall reminiscent of a German Altstadt (“Old Town”) and sitting there, I felt I could have been any traditional restaurant in Germany. The place eventually filled up with what I assumed I was a mix of locals and German tourists.
I was wrong.
Speaking to our waiter, I learned that all the Germans in the place were Namibians; there wasn’t a single German tourist among them (not from Germany anyway; German Windhukers, however, love to take their Summer vacation in Swakopmund).
This impressed me immensely. The German Southwest Africans were cut off politically from Germany in 1915. Despite being on their own for almost a century, they’ve been able to successfully maintain their language, culture, and society through a lot of tough times. They’ve only had television as a cultural, lingual, and informational link with Germany since the dawn of home satellite service, but they don’t look or sound any different from, uhm, German-Germans.
I detected no accent whatsoever amongst those I spoke to. Our B&B hostess explained that some German-Namibians do mix in Afrikaner words, especially those whose ancestors arrived speaking Plattdeutsch (a dialect spoken in Northern Germany that incorporates a lot of Dutch words), but she also knew a few locals who, 100 years on, still had perfect Bavarian accents.
“Bavarians,” she snorted. “They are a special exception.”
“Lady, you don’t need to tell me that. Believe me.”
As much as I love to poke fun at ze Germans (be they in Germany or Namibia), they’ve done an amazing job in Swakopmund:
1.) The streets are all paved and immaculate.
2.) The grass lawns of the municipal parks (two of ‘em) are thick and well-watered.
3. ) They’ve constructed what look to be the first bike paths in Africa(!)
4.) The boardwalk and beach are spotless and safe.
We even did an early morning jog on Day #6, and were joined by a number of other runners and residents walking their dogs. The bike paths were being dutifully utilized by old women on three-speeds wearing gaily-colored crash helmets.
Swakopmund had German schools, German social clubs, a chamber of commerce, a radio station (right next to the Super Spar!) and all other possible social mechanisms to keep their cultural coherence. (I would be even more impressed at the Swakopmunders’ successful efforts after I visited Namibia’s other “German” city of Luderitz – where the local Germans have failed miserably to maintain themselves.)
What really threw me off kilter in Swakopmund was that the local Germans proudly sport the colors of the Kaiser’s Germany: red, white, and black. In Europe, these colors and the Kaiser’s flag have been co-opted by Neo-Nazis to get around explicit bans on swastikas and other Nazi symbolism. (With its impressive eagle and iron cross, the Kaiser’s standard is adequately militaristic for Neo-Nazi purposes.) In Swakopmund however, I saw it readily on t-shirts and bumper stickers. One portly gentleman even walked into the Brauhaus sporting a reproduction Suedwester slouch hat (kind of like an Aussie outback hat) with a red, white, and black cockade. He also had an amazing beer gut. (We couldn’t stop staring. He stuck it out like a badge of honor!)
“Collect the Whole Set!” Germanic bumper stickers for sale in a Swakopmund store. The rider in the slouch hat (top right) is the German Monument in Windhoek. The eagle sticker (lower right) says “I’m Proud to be a German”.
It was a kind of pride or nationalism that you never see in Germany today.
In one of the municipal parks, there stands a war monument to fallen German soldiers. It’s an impressive monument with two larger-than-life figures. I assumed the monument commemorated German dead from World War I, but was surprised to read a plaque with the names of soldiers who’d all fallen in 1904 and 1905. That meant these guys were killed fighting Hereros and Hottentots. At least one of them was killed during the final slaughter of the Herero during the Battle of Waterberg.
There’s no monument for the Herero dead here. There’s nothing to commemorate the Hottentott POWs that all perished from the flu during their internment by the Germans. Although these facts and the Herero genocide haven’t fallen down the memory hole in Germany (the German government apologized publicly), they seem to have here in Swakopmund.
No living German-Namibians carry war guilt from the Second World War, and the Herero genocide aside, I don’t blame today’s Swakopmunders for their ethnic pride. You can’t successfully maintain a coherent society in a physical and cultural oasis without being fiercely proud of your culture and your history – warts and all.
So there will never be any stigma attached to the red-white-and-black here. Not so long as it’s a question of survival.
1 Comment
January 3, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I glad you like our town – but Germans don’t run the town. The Namibian government and municipality obviously does and mostly include native Namibians so you should thank them for keeping the peace and cleanliness of the town.