For a whole six months, from late September 1968 until late March 1969, I lived and worked in this tiny town at the end of the world, squeezed in between two deserts, one watery, the other sand. It was a dead-end job in a dead-end town.
South-West Africa was then ruled by South Africa, and South Africa imposed 'apartheid'. Let me explain this innocent word 'apartheid':
The mostly Dutch people who settled South Africa from the seventeenth century onwards wanted to have the place to themselves which meant kicking out the people who were already there. Kicking them out didn't quite work, so a political system was devised that gave the white people all the goodies, and confined the black people to all the marginal land.
Soweto hadn't happened yet but already there had been Sharpeville, although South Africa was doing a great job of pretending to the rest of the world (and to itself) that the country was some sort of split-level paradise, but the rage and anger was bubbling away under the surface.
Despite benefitting from it, I felt uncomfortable with the apartheid system, and so, despite several other job offers (including one with the VOLKSKAAS in Cape Town), South-West Africa (now Namibia) became merely a staging post to earn enough money to get back to Australia.
In the short six months I worked there, I never had the time to see much of the country or even visit the nearby ghost town of Kollmannkuppe.
However, for another young German, whom I befriended there, it became "home" - see here. "There, but for the grace of God, go I!"
