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Today's quote:

Saturday, September 24, 2022

What's in a name?

 

 

Welcome to !Nami≠Nüs!

 

Where the first exclamation mark is for pronunciation,
and the second exclamation mark is for punctuation.

 

 

 

Fifty-four years ago, I lived and worked in Lüderitz, a small town on the Atlantic coast surrounded by the diamond-rich "Sperrgebiet" in the Namib Desert in what was then the ex-German colony of South-West Africa and is now Namibia.

 

The "kantoor" in Lüderitz in which I had to spend my entire day was straight out of Dickens: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who treated the blacks abominably. Apartheid sucked and the job was completely dead-end!
Dis 'n lekker lewe, tussen die Bucht se krewe! I didn't think so. Check it on GOOGLE Map

 

South-West Africa was then governed by South Africa under its inhuman Apartheid regime which turned the white minority into an elite simply because of the colour of their skin. It couldn't last - and it didn't! - and I had enough foresight to leave again before things turned ugly - which, surprisingly, they never did, except for small changes like now calling Lüderitz by its local name !Nami≠Nüs. Luckily, they have no brewery; imagine asking for a pint of !Nami≠Nüs Beer, even before you got drunk!

 

 

We've just come back from our morning walk through the village, and noticed Council workers installing the above new sign. Not as bad as !Nami≠Nüs but why not leave it as it has always been: "Nelligen" full-stop? At least, we all know how that name came about, don't we?

A certain Nelligen butcher had a wife by the name of Nell. Apparently, he did away with her and threw the body in the river. Unlucky for him, the Clyde is a tidal river and on every rising tide her body would float back up again, prompting locals to exclaim, “Here comes Nell again”.


Googlemap Riverbend