We’ll never really know if the apfel strudel woman was right with what she said about Lüderitz, as we never really saw it. We got in after dark, and the next morning we were up early and back on the road, with no time to spend in Lüderitz itself.

It seemed cute enough. Though as we saw now driving out in the daylight: the surrounding area is harsh, ugly desert. Sands routinely blow across the roadway and obscure the road. Apparently, the winds at the sea are bitter and relentless.

Kolmanskop

We had a short drive out of Lüderitz to our first stop for the day, a ghost town called Kolmanskop. Founded in 1908, Kolmanskop was a boomtown fueled by diamond mining, and shockingly wealthy until its decline after World War I. It was subsequently abandoned, and has slowly been returning to the sands of the Namib desert ever since.

This makes for beautiful and strange pictures, attractive for TV and movie producers, and for tourists.

Intentionally, we got to the town just in time for one of their tours. Our tour guide, a native of Namibia, spoke British English with a German accent. Namibia has a mostly unpleasant history with Germany, as it was a German colony during the African colonial period. As tends to be the case in such situations, the Germans were not nice guests, and much genocide ensued, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Concentration camps, medical experimentation… an entire ethnic group, the Herero, was almost completely eradicated. Think of it as something of a trial run for the Holocaust. Nice people!

Not long after this campaign of genocide, diamonds were discovered in southern Namibia, and the diamond rush ensued. Almost overnight, the diamond mines and towns of Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay popped up, and the Germans did what they do: threw massive amounts of state-of-the-art technology at the problem and turned diamond mining into a science. And so here we were, touring the long abandoned town.

Anyway, the tour was pleasant, though toothless. It was unfathomably wealthy… here was the hospital… here was the swimming pool… here was the engineer, the architect. Here is left a bit of the railway that connected it to Lüderitz on the coast, where German labor came in, and mined diamonds went out.

It was a short tour, and then we were free to walk through the rest of the town on our own. Some of the buildings you could enter, some were too unsafe to enter. The sands are slowly consuming what is left, with massive dunes billowing out of windows and rising roof-high beside other buildings. Though, with it being a tourist location, I can’t help but wonder just how far they’ll let the sands get.

A Whitewashed History

In the back of the main building is something of a historical museum, with pictures and words describing some of the history of the town. There are copies of the labor contracts offered to Germans who traveled to Namibia to work there, and for the time the terms seemed pretty good. Sick leave, guaranteed vacation and trips home, stipulations for overtime pay.

Then, in the next room, were a series of stories about attempted thefts of diamonds by workers, that were discovered and stopped. Diamonds hidden in secret compartments in shoes; swallowed or otherwise, ahem, hidden within the body; even attached to crossbow bolts and fired over the walls and outside the premises. Really, no end to the creativity.

But the labor contracts were for German citizens who expatriated to work in the mines. And all the pictures in that exhibit showed German workers only… that is to say, white. What of the natives? What about the natives who were enslaved to work in the mines and most certainly did not receive sick leave, time off, or overtime pay? There was no mention of them, maybe one or two pictures where you could see them. Better left unsaid, apparently.

And of the exhibit on discovered theft operations, we just couldn’t help but marvel at the nerve. You all came down, massacred a people nearly to extinction, took the land for yours, found a diamond on it, and now have the nerve to punish and later publish about people stealing your diamonds. Your diamonds! The mind boggles.  

Overall, we just had a pretty sour taste in our mouths from this history according to the diamond industry, which, while no longer in Kolmanskop, is still very much alive in Namibia. Turning off the thinking part of your brain, and just walking around the town, it’s staggering and humbling to see the Earth reclaiming this town in this way. It’s fascinating to imagine this town being a bustling, glitzy diamond in the desert not so very long ago.

Then you think about what this was all the culmination of: Germans came and stole Namibia from the natives, executed a brutal genocide when those natives rebelled, a bunch of Germans were convinced to leave their homes and sometimes families to sail to Namibia, a whole city was built from nothing in the middle of an ugly, inhospitable desert, huge numbers of natives were enslaved and taken from their homelands and mistreated and abused and forced into labor, and all for what?

To dig a bunch of pretty rocks out of the ground.

God, we humans are stupid creatures.

Next Time, on Namibia Travels…

Leaving Kolmanskop, it’s time for us to dive headlong into Day 4 of the trip. There are wild horses, a castle, a spectacular sunset, and huge stretches of dirt road driving.  We hope you enjoyed this installment and come back soon for the next one!