In 1968/69 I lived and worked in Lüderitz in South-West Africa, or what is now Namibia. I shared the company accommodation with another young German, Karl-Heinz Herzberg - more about it here.
I left again, and only after another thirty years and another forty jobs in more than a dozen different countries did I finally come to rest here on the South Coast of New South Wales in Australia.
Not so Karl-Heinz: he got married in South-West Africa and stayed put. Today, more than fifty years later, he's still in the same place, living with his wife Dorle on a farm in the semi-arid interior of the country.
We were still in occasional contact with each other-when I heard that life in the now independent Namibia is far from ideal. Not politically and not at all in agricultural terms. There are some years when they just get by with the sale of cactus-jelly they originally started as a sideline. Here are more pictures. (Oops! The website has gone blank which may suggest that Karl-Heinz no longer makes cactus-jelly)
This could have happened to me too, because at the time I was still a German and South-West Africa was a real piece of Germany with German spoken as one of its three official langugages (Afrikaans and English were the other two), and streetnames like Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse and Zeppelinstrasse. Lüderitz, where I lived, might have been a suburb from 19th-century Hamburg or Bremen, with its "Kegelbahn" and "Turnhalle" and cottages with names picked out in Gothic lettering.
When it became known that I was about to leave, the then Volkskas Bank immediately offered me a job, and even agreed to transfer me to Cape Town. I spent another month in Cape Town and loved it but not its 'apartheid', and so I returned on the next available ship to Australia.
"There, but for the grace of God, go I."
