Khorixas

Khorixas takes its name from Khoekhoegowab, the language of the Damara and Nama, and the springs and grazing of the area were used by Damara herders long before any town existed. The surrounding country, with its rock engravings and painted shelters, carries far older traces of hunter-gatherers who lived along these dry river valleys.

The settlement as it stands today is largely a creation of South African rule. Under the Odendaal plan of the 1960s the administration divided South West Africa into ethnic homelands, and in the 1970s Khorixas was built up as the administrative capital of Damaraland, the homeland designated for the Damara. Offices, housing, schools and a hospital were put up on the plain, and people were moved into the town and its constituency from a wider area, giving it a size and a street grid out of proportion to the thin economy around it.

With independence in 1990 the homelands were abolished and their boundaries redrawn; Khorixas lost its capital status and became a constituency seat in the new Kunene Region, and later a town council. Since then its fortunes have rested on two things: its place as the supply point for a large area of communal farming, and the growth of tourism at Twyfelfontein, whose engravings were inscribed as Namibia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007 and which brought guiding, craft and lodge work within reach of the town.

Khorixas is one of the main Damara towns of Namibia, and Damara identity is strong here. Khoekhoegowab, shared with the Nama and marked by its click consonants, is heard everywhere, and Afrikaans and English serve as the languages of trade and administration. The Damara traditional authority and its annual gatherings, church congregations and choirs, and family networks spread across the communal farms give the town its social shape.

Churches are central to public life. Lutheran and Catholic congregations founded in the mission era stand alongside newer Pentecostal churches, and Sunday morning belongs to them: choirs in uniform, long services, and family meals afterwards. Women's long Victorian-style dresses and headscarves, adopted in the mission period and now a marker of Damara and Nama identity, appear at weddings, funerals and festival days.

Craft and guiding have become part of local culture through tourism. Curio stalls along the roads sell carved wood, ostrich-eggshell beads and stone, and guides trained in the area lead visitors around the engravings and explain them in Khoekhoegowab as much as in English. There is a quiet pride in the rock art as Damara heritage rather than as scenery, and in the conservancies, where residents manage wildlife on communal land and take a share of tourism income in return for living beside elephants that raid gardens and water points.

About 9,000 people live in Khorixas, and the town serves a far larger scattered population of communal farmers. Most households depend on some mixture of goats and cattle, a government salary or pension, casual work and money sent home. Unemployment is high, and many young people leave for Swakopmund, Walvis Bay or Windhoek.

The working day starts early, before the heat. The fuel station, supermarket, bank and government offices along the main road do most of their business in the morning; by early afternoon the streets are quiet and shaded stoeps fill up. Water, delivered to standpipes and yards, is a constant preoccupation, and repeated droughts have forced herders to sell stock or drive it long distances to grazing.

Tourism is the other economy. Lodges, campsites, guiding at Twyfelfontein and the conservancies to the west, and craft selling provide the cash jobs that farming cannot, although the work is seasonal and concentrated in the dry months. Electricity, a regional hospital, schools and mobile coverage reach the town itself, while settlements out along the gravel roads have far less, and more specialised medical care is hours away by road.

Eating in Khorixas is plain, meat-centred and shaped by what keeps in a hot, dry place. Maize meal cooked into a stiff porridge — pap, or mieliepap — is the daily staple, eaten with a stew of goat, beef or offal and a tomato-and-onion sauce. Goat is the everyday meat of the communal farms, and a slaughter for a wedding or funeral feeds a large gathering.

Grilled meat is the social food. Kapana, thin slices of beef cooked fast over coals and dipped in salt and chilli powder, is bought by the handful at street stalls, and a braai over a wood fire, with meat and roosterkoek, bread rolls baked on the grid, is the standard way of marking a weekend. Biltong and dried sausage travel well and are sold in the shops. Game from the farms and conservancies — oryx, springbok and kudu — turns up as steaks and stews on lodge menus rather than in home kitchens.

Vetkoek, fried dough eaten with mince or jam, and fat cakes from a street pan are the usual snacks, and bread and tinned goods from the supermarket fill in the rest. Traditional Damara cooking still uses wild foods from the veld — bush berries, tubers and the seasonal fruit of desert plants — and soured milk. Tea with plenty of sugar, rooibos, and Namibian lager or home-brewed drinks are what people drink.