Namibia weblog 2005

This despatch from Michael and Rosanne describes some hoeing, planting and harvesting - not to forget the "pluffing"!

Read all about it.

June 30th 2005

So it is winter here at last. Wait until winter comes, they all said, then you will be cool at last.

The winter solstice has just passed and it will get colder in the next month, but already the children are running to school wearing balaclavas and thick coats and boots. All the people in the streets are muffled up. But these mornings are like a perfect early summers day in England. The sky is blue and there is a faint chill in the air, which will ripen into a glorious hot day to bask in. The evenings come early; the sun is spilling down into huge fat red sunsets by five o'clock and then the cool starts to creep in. Sitting out to eat pizza at nine in the garden of SOS club, surrounded by cactus and banana plants, lit by a hurricane lamp, I wear a fleece. When we return from work there is a small moment to enjoy the garden’s warmth before it gets dark.

Watching the seasons for nearly a full cycle has been mystifying. I waited for the rainy season, thinking it would bring relief from the heat, but all it did was to create puddles, pools, rivers, lakes but remain white hot.

Watching the growing seasons has been a better way to mark the passing of the year.

We welcomed back the cows this week. When we arrived here there were cows everywhere foraging for food in the most unlikely places but after the rains came and the people had all planted every little scrap of field with mahangu, millet, all the cows were banished. It is the responsibility of the cows’ owners to keep them off the crops and so small boys or distant cousins or broken down old men herd the cattle away into the bush for the day and bring them back to the kraal for the night, or even keep them out for weeks at a time.

In November, waiting for the rains, people started to manure the fields, digging dung from the kraal into the sand, hacking at the ground with sharp hoes. And then it was planting time, sprinkling ten or so grains of last year’s best millet into a scratched hole. Some got an early start and had green shoots by January, others were still manuring and ploughing in May. Its called pluffing, here. The rains came short and heavy this year though and so the late farmers suffered a spindly and pathetic crop. For others, the tall green plants look similar to maize and were left to yellow and dry before harvesting.

I had joined Meme Delila and her family to do some hoeing mid season and so was eager to get out and join the harvest. This time Michael came too and also some Swedish friends, and we packed a picnic of rations for ourselves and victuals for the homestead - we had heard that they were worried about the expense of providing a grateful feast for guests. Required clothing: hats, long sleeved shirts to keep out chaff and burrs, long trousers, boots.

We arrived early, well before eight, but already Delila had baked a huge batch of fat cakes, the equivalent to doughnuts, to sell in their little shop and done many other household chores, and was at the gate sharpening stainless steel dinner knives to use in the fields. She surveyed an expanse, which looked infinite and told us we were going to crop from there to there and we worked in a long row, reaching up head high to cut a head of millet. Some were a foot long, thick and laden with round grains, others were thin and useless looking but we had to take them all and lob them into a tin bath. This we picked up and carried with us but it needed frequent emptying and the smallest girl child in the group had this chore….on her head, wavering as she went, to take it to the growing pile.

As we picked we chatted and Delila and her family sang. It was quite medieval, the community effort, the simple tools, the personal engagement with the soil. It was very pleasant, too. The work was not crippling, the sun not too exhausting. The social aspect of it was wonderful. Where do we get a chance to do such bonding? In hedge clearing or log chopping, I suppose. Down at foot level there were still some cow beans drying off; they had grown between the rows, and we picked them up too. We were clearing the field ready for the cows and goats to come in and finish off every edible scrap.

When the last of the expanse had been cleared we were all amazed. We had worked so unbelievably quickly. We gathered the last of the piles and stuffed them into the gathering baths and Margareta and I each heaved one on our heads and took them away. Surveying the pile was most satisfying. An expanse the size of a swimming pool had been prepared by, of course, the women. This had involved digging down below the sand to a layer of grey clay. They had then worked this into a smooth floor by sweeping it and trampling on it. On this all the heads of grain were heaped high, waiting for the roving tractor to come around and drive over the heap countless times to break the grain free from the husks. We didn’t get to see that bit or the next stage. But in the last few days I have seen the winnowing. A woman stands in the wind, throwing up a flattish basket of grain. The grain rises a foot at least and all the chaff blows downwind and she collects the clean grain in the basket as it falls. Its quite poetic for me to see, but probably backbreaking for her. The good grain is stored in enormous ali-baba baskets outside the homestead under little thatched roofs. This year is a good harvest for Meme Delila and her mother, father, and six dependents. There is enough, she says, for at least nine months.

Everywhere in this region, families are tilling the soil, planting and harvesting. Its not an occupation, it’s a way of life. Everyone goes home to the village for the weekends to work the fields. It’s the best conversational gambit - how is the mahangu? How is the pluffing? How is the harvest? And now it is all done, the fields are being grazed by the animals, everything is returning to desert. Welcome back to the street cows.

And so we wait for the big winds, the even colder nights, the trees shedding their leaves, all the grasses dying and then spring with green shoots, but no rain till November……

More to follow...

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