Where Fire Speaks: A Visit With the Himba

By David Campion, Sandra Shields and Hugh Brody

On the wild river that divides Namibia from Angola, members of the Himba tribe herd cattle as they have done for hundreds of years.

But the world of the Himba sits in the shadow of third-world development and the inevitability of change that threatens their way of life; now, they are more likely to attend evangelical church services, congregate around the liquor trader’s truck, and pose for tourists’ photographs.

Sandra Shields and David Campion spent two months living with the Himba, and this book, a provocative melding of photography and narrative, tells of the profound changes in the lives of the Himba—both gradual and immediate—which echo those effecting indigenous people around the world.

Includes more than one hundred black and white -photographs.

David Campion and Sandra Shields met in South Africa, married a year later, and have collaborated for over a decade. Sandra has written for publications including Geist and The Globe and Mail, and David’s photographs have appeared in publications and exhibitions in Canada, Europe, and Africa.

PHOTOGRAPHY + TEXT = PARALLAX

Parallax, a new series of books from Arsenal Pulp Press, explore the far reaches of the modern world, proposing new perspectives on how we see ourselves through the eyes and the words of our most intriguing photographers and writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781551523125

David Campion

David Campion came of age in apartheid South Africa, an experience that gave him a distrust of dominant social mythologies. His work wrestles with notions of power and the means by which it perpetuates itself. His photographs regularly show in galleries and public institutions. David and Sandra previously collaborated on Where Fire Speaks: A Visit with the Himba (Arsenal Pulp, 2002), which won the BC Book Prize for Nonfiction and The Company of Others: Stories of Belonging (Arsenal Pulp, 2005).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Hugh Brody

Just about all human beings live with pressure: pressure to be ourselves; pressure to be more like someone else. The poorer we are, the more we are likely to feel pushed and pulled towards another way of being, some other, more secure way of getting the things we need and want. The more distinctive we are – the more rooted in an ethnic, racial, or religious identity – the more important it may seem to us that we hold on to who we are, or who our ancestors have been. Modernity – the global economy, homogenized values, freedom to move to where the money is – has intensified this split between the self that has roots in the past and the self that could, or must, belong in the future.

For tribal and indigenous peoples, this split is at the center of their lives and politics. The pressures can be extreme. A sense of self comes from community lands, shared history, defining myths, distinctive clothes, ways of raising children, a language. To lose these, they say, is for such people to lose their place in the world, their links to their heritage and, all too often, their rights to their own resources. The tribal world has its own kinds of wealth – in the form of high quality food and the wisdom to live in a sustainable economy. Yet the lack of European goods and technologies means that they are seen as very poor – at least by the standards of those who hold the power in the world. Hence the pressure to become more like someone else – farm workers with regular wages, men and women with good educations and true religions who wear civilized clothes and follow the rituals of those with the wealth. And a hope or a dream – these can be pressures too – of the tribal child of today becoming the truck driver, shopkeeper, politician, pilot, and doctor of the future. The two kinds of pressures sit, of course, at the center of arguments about development. Everyone who is aware of land claims, aboriginal rights issues, and the struggle of First Nations to hold onto their lands and cultures has heard the arguments many times over. It is an argument that is as vociferous in parts of Africa as it is in Canada and the United States.

The Himba are a tribal group whose lands lie in northern Namibia, a region of arid scrub, thinly wooded hills, and the fertile edges of the Kunene River. They are pastoralists, moving herds of goats and cattle, following the changes of season and climate, and using their distinctive understanding of land, animals, and their ancestors to live well despite the apparent harshness of their environment. The Himba have been among the most successful of African pastoralists, with large herds of animals and a secure economy in all but the worst periods of drought. They are seen as poor because of the relative simplicity of their technology and their appearance – the look of the primitive so fascinating to Europeans. So their real wealth is less important to outsiders than their appearance. This has two insidious consequences: they are deemed to need development because they are poor; and they themselves begin to believe they are poor, not counting their wealth in cattle and food so much as their lack of modern consumer goods and services. In the past twenty years, and especially since SWAPO came to power in Namibia and guerrilla war across the Namibia-Angola border ceased, the Himba have become a significant tourist attraction. They live in a spectacular landscape. They are beautiful, exotic, fascinating. Especially the women, whose braids, greased, and ochred skins and bare breasts are the object of intense interest – the focus of thousands of tourist cameras each year.

The look of the Himba and their lands has duly become a resource. Tourists negotiate a price with the women to photograph them in their Himba costumes, and with Himba families to photograph them at their fires, beside their mud-covered huts, dancing. That which is tribal (and therefore deemed to be ancient and traditional) has monetary value. So this pressure to be the version of themselves that appears to exist outside modernity comes from modernity.

At the same time, Namibian politicians have been saying that the Himba must give up their old ways, and accept development. There are plans for a dam to be built on the Kunene River, at Epupa Falls. In the arguments these plans have triggered, ministers in the Namibian government say that the government is determined to bring economic development to all our communities, and that the present lack of development in the Himba community is a serious human rights violation. The Namibian Minister of Trade has observed that the Himba must learn to wear shirts and ties and suits like me and everyone else. These are part of the pressure on the Himba to be more like other people – that is, more like those who are not so traditional and poor and uncivilized.

So pressure on the Himba – on the one hand to look as Himba as possible, on the other hand to develop – comes from outside. Displays of wealth by tourists and images of modernity appear in front of Himba eyes just about every day of the year. These have their effect on how the Himba see themselves, and are their own kind of pressure, reaching from outside to inside the Himba world. There are also the wider, more general pressures that originate in two ideas – one about the future; the other about the past. Both these ideas are somewhat romantic – idealizations, perhaps, of economic and social life in which wishful thinking and naïve optimism shape the so-called facts. Those who want beautiful, bare-breasted Himba women for their cameras are not interested in the realities of Himba history (with its complicated changes of society and relations with neighbouring cultures); those who believe in development do not speak about the extreme poverty of the many in their societies who are displaced, landless laborers. Two kinds of romantic myth – the one of tradition, the other of progress – dominate the arguments.

So what does the present, as opposed to fictions about the past and future, really look like? Who are the Himba of now? What is it like to travel there with a commitment to neither of the dominant forms of romanticism? David Campion’s photographs and Sandra Shields’ narrative – the two elements of this book – give answers to these questions. Two beautiful, laughing Himba girls, dressed in traditional clothes with their hair in magnificent braids, are at the center of one of the photographs; to the side, a little in the background, two tough-looking Himba youths, in western clothes, lean against a tree. In another photograph, a Himba woman sits in the foreground, but at the edge of the image: the rest is taken up by a group of white men repairing the engine of a jeep. Analogous juxtapositions appear in other of Campion’s wonderful pictures. A Himba and a Herrero woman, both in the clothes of their cultures, are looking over the lingerie, shirts, and shoes on sale at a roadside store; a young Himba woman squats in the dark corner of a small bar, her back to a heap of Coke crates. In photograph after photograph the different, and perhaps rival, elements of the real world of the present day are there to be seen. And the reader has the sense that this is incidental, rather than some plan, some political aesthetic. The images have rival images because realities of the present just do rival one another in the Himba world – as they do in all our worlds.

But one of the most striking photographs of all in this book is the X-ray of a skull. A doctor holds it up to the light to look, thereby obscuring her own head. The head of the Himba whose skull is thus shown sits alongside, looking down, far away, being helped, yet seeming imprisoned. This is an image full of power – not because it is exotic, but because it is all too familiar. The helplessness as our head is taken into an X-ray, examined by a stranger, whom we can not know but on whom our very life may depend.

In this book, the text makes the same kind of journey as the photographs – into the complicated, puzzling real. Sandra Shields allows the reader to come with her, both in the detail of the journey and in the unease the journey can (and probably should) cause to the traveler. She describes the way tourists buy the right to take photographs, seeking the trophy to take home that