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Skeleton Coast - 2001
Skeleton Coast - 2001
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-18 23:04:01
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love for her country. She's the custodian of the local museum in the small town of Tsumeb, and beneath the portraits of Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck, Hindenburg and Frederick the Great, she tells of the way of life and the myths of the local San bushmen. She empathizes
with them, seeing no contradiction. "It's all part of Namibia. We are all these things."
The pithead tower only a few hundred meters away from the museum in Tsumeb is symbolic of Namibia's past and present. Tsumeb is the oldest mining town in the country, which is rich in mineral resources. Large reserves of copper have been found here, as well as lead, zinc, cadmium, silver, germanium and arsenic. With the drop in prices on the world market, however, the mining operation is starting to look unprofitable. People are worried that the wheels in the pithead tower will stop turning some day in the not-too-distant future, leaving thousands of black mine workers to join the huge army of the unemployed.
The country has vast resources (of uranium and diamonds, among other things), but the mines aren't owned by Namibia, and the fall in demand on the world market has reduced their value. Foreign investors are needed to establish industrial production, but they've been surprisingly slow to respond, given the stability of this new country and the promise of profits. These days, you can't make much headway by exploiting the fishing industry, and farming has always had its back to the wall in Namibia. All that's left is tourism, and the owners of tourist ranches aren't the only ones making a living from it. But even there, the potential for expansion is limited if the country's delicate ecological balance is not to be put at risk.
So life for the Namibians remains a hard struggle for survival. After all, they've always had to fight, stubbornly and with great commitment. And their love for their homeland has grown out of this struggle. They leave it to the tourists to marvel at the glories of the Namibian landscape. Most of the 1.5 million people who live out in the wilds of this country, which is two-and-a-half times the size of Germany, have never seen those attractions, anyway. They haven't got enough money to travel around their own country. But that does nothing to alter the strength of their feelings for Namibia.
See photographs from:
Namibia Gallery
