Type Kolmanskop into YouTube.com and you find scores of video clips of this amazing ghost town in the Namib Desert, just a dozen kilometres away from Lüderitz where I lived and worked in 1968/69. I had no car then and Kolmanskop wasn't a tourist destination yet, as it was inside the "Sperrgebiet" of the diamond-mining company that owned the lease, and so I never saw it.
(I didn't have a car because I didn't have much money, and I didn't have much money because I wasn't paid very much and I wasn't paid much because I was still very young and inexperienced. I could not make myself much older, but I could make myself more experienced by taking on jobs which didn't pay very much, and in so doing I was able to gain more professional experience than I could ever have gained through any formal studies, in addition to which I was also able to travel the world.)
Kolmanskop began as a railway stop in 1908, part of the new line connecting Lüderitz to Keetmanshoop. According to local legend, it was named after a Nama man named Coleman, who tragically perished at the site after his ox wagon got stranded and he succumbed to thirst.
Fate of this lonely outpost changed forever when Zacharias Lewala, a railway worker, found a curious shiny stone in the sand. He brought it to his supervisor, August Stauch, a hobby mineralogist. Stauch suspected the stone was a diamond and, with the help of mining engineer Söhnke Nissen, staked claims over a 75 km² area, launching one of the most remarkable diamond rushes in history.
When word got out, a town was built in the middle of the desert even though there was no water, no soil and also no rain - only sand, heat and sandstorms. Nevertheless, the town at one time had as many as four hundred inhabitants and was even considered the 'richest city in Africa', but after a little more than twenty years richer diamond grounds were found elsewhere and most of the residents left.
Today it is a major tourist attraction with guided tours regularly leaving Lüderitz. It has also served as background to several movies, including "The King is Alive" and, a little farther east, "Flight of the Phoenix".
Today being the last day of the year and with little more to do than putting a bottle of wine in the fridge, I like to think back to the many places I celebrated previous New Year's Eves in. The photo below shows what was the residence of the company's "Buchhalter" or book-keeper.
Not everyone has their house immortalised on a postage stamp
SWA stands for South West Africa or Süd-West Afrika before it became Namibia
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The book-keeper's name was 'Herr Wiese'. His grandson, Dieter Huyssen, who now lives in Switzerland, speaks to Megan Jones of the BBC about his memories of revisiting in 2013 the town of 'Kolmannskuppe' which he and his family once called home:
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And to think that in another time I could've lived in that house! By the way, may I suggest that just before the clock strikes midnight, you raise your left foot? That way you start the new year off on the right foot.
