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.
For photos of my time in South-West Africa, click here
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 from 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 Kolmannskuppe.
The discovery of diamonds by the railway worker Zacahrias Lewala, who had come across some sparkling stones while sweeping the tracks, saw prospectors rush to this nowhere-place, named after Jani Kolman, an early Afrikaner trekker, whose ox-wagon supposedly had got stuck in the sand in this desolate spot.
By the 1910s, Kolmanskop (or Kolmannskuppe) was one of the richest towns on earth, supplying over 10 per cent of the world's total production of diamonds, and nearby Lüderitz was doing very nicely on the back of this trade, too. Jewels were so plentiful there that contemporary photographs exist of people picking them out of the sands, almost as if harvesting fruit. Although, most of those subsequently doing the picking were Ovambo contract workers who toiled in conditions close to slave labour and who were hardly to share in the spoils of those boom years. Especially after the German authorities declared Namibia's dismond fields a restricted zone and prospecting rights were reserved for a single elite national firm, the Consolidated Diamond Mining company (CDM).
Kolmanskop, meanwhile, grew prosperous, and acquired all the trappings of a solidly respectable German town. At its peak in the 1920s, there was a gymnasium, swimming pool, well-appointed residences, a concert hall, a post office, civic buildings and flourishing commercial properties - from bakeries to butchers - and a fully-equipped modern hospital with the first X-ray machine of the southern hemisphere (however, the acquisition of this machine was not only motivated by concern of the people living in Kolmanskop as it could also be used to detect the smuggling of diamonds).
But within a few short years its diamond stocks were nearly exhausted and the finding of far richer deposits further south at Oranjemund presaged a mass exodus. By 1943, CDM had moved its headquarters to Oranjemund and by 1956 Kolmanskop was done and dusted. The evershifting dunes of the Namib soon rushed in to fill the gaps left by its former residents. These days, although it remains in the Sperrgebiet, the diamond mining district that is officially restricted to the public, some 35,000 tourists are bused to the site every year.
Its surreal, almost Salvador Dali-esque quality was used as backdrop to the 1993 film "Dust Devil", and in 2000 the film "The King Is Alive" was also filmed there, with the town used as the film's main setting. The town also featured in a 2010 episode of "Life After People".
All this happened long after I had left again; however, for another young German, whom I befriended there, it has become "home" - see here.
"There, but for the grace of God, go I!"
