The caged fowl of Alexandrine Hanabis aka Kuku. Gravel plains, Die Kruising (“The Crossing”), D2342, Uis District, Namibia. December 2014
Dorothea Papier and her baby daughter Elneray take a nap in the shade of their roadside stall. Black Ranch Pos #2, Spitzkoppe, Namibia. January 2016
Dorothea Papier on her birthday. Black Ranch Pos #2, Spitzkoppe. 23 February 2016
Emanuel Kaibeb rests at a taxi stop shelter during the heat of day before setting off with his suitcase on a weeklong hike in the surrounding volcanic rocks in search of tourmalines. ǂGaingu Conservancy, Erongo Region, Namibia. 9 January 2015
Emanuel Kaibeb, two years later. 25 December 2017
Maria (the name she has chosen) at the entrance of her bedroom. She wears a string of beaded ostrich eggshells around her waist, a traditional Ovambo custom for children before they reach puberty. DRC, Swakopmund, Namibia. June 2015
Liskien Gawanas on her way from an aquifer, a daunting journey on foot up a rock sentinel and a gruelling descent underground. In 2016, owing to a three-year drought, the aquifer dried up. Erongo Region, Namibia. June 2015
“Water” (Nonatych): Namibia, with its history of repeated drought and failed dreams, is constantly challenged by modern-day needs for water. These photographs, set against a harsh backdrop that portrays the land, examine the extraordinary means by which the inhabitants invent methods for collecting the life-sustaining fluid. Various locations in the Namib Desert. 2014–2017
A morning at the ‘amphitheatre’ in the sand dunes. Dorob National Park, Namibia. April 2015
Ferdinand Matsuib’s dog ǂOebes. For fear of frequent animal poaching, Satan the donkey is caged until sunset when she will be released into the veld to graze overnight. Uis District, Namibia. October 2014
Boesman’s carwash and padstal (“roadside stall”) with firewood and trinkets. Soutrivier, Namib–Naukluft Park, Namibia. April 2016
Sara Swartbooi carries a sheet of scrap metal (Hoopverloor – “Lost Hope”) to build a shelter near the gravel road from Henties Bay to Usakos from where she will sell semi-precious stones to the occasional passer-by. D1918, Erongo Region. 11 July 2015
Refusing to go to school, fifteen year old Francois !Urikob believes he can eke out a living by raising pigeons and selling them to the local community. The family goats and donkeys have either been poached or have died with the drought of the past three years. Black Ranch Pos #3, Erongo Region. 9 August 2017
‘Francois pigeons’. Farm Black Ranch Pos #3, Spitzkoppe, Namibia. 25 Dec 2017
Across the country farmers lose their livestock during a three year drought. Tsiseb Conservancy, Erongo Region. 22 February 2017
Acid rain at the brick factory. Uis. 28 March 2015
Liam !Uri-Khob carries a cage of baby chickens home for the night, to warmth and safety from wild cats. The village of Spitzkoppe, beneath the distant inselberg ǂGaingu (the local name for Spitzkoppe), is where Liam and his siblings attend boarding school, paid for with chickens and goats raised by their widowed mother. Farm Black Ranch Pos#3, Erongo Region. 9 January 2015
‘Poison Tree’. Candelabra euphorbia (Euphorbia virosa). D1918, Erongo Region, Namibia. 18 July 2018
‘The Petrol Pump’. Sesfontein, Namibia. 27 October 2017
Alexandrine Xoagub. DRC, Swakopmund. 13 November 2014
Tulipelao at the illegal dump on the outskirts of town where she spent most part of her early years. Swakopmund, Namibia. April 2014
“Welcome” (Nonatych): These photographs were taken on several journeys across Namibia, a vast country of isolated spaces linked by gravel roads to villages, informal settlements and towns. The country is rich in natural resources, attracting investment by the global mining giants and tourism. In many places the environment is in crisis. The livelihoods of tens of thousands of Namibians are dependent on these roads in one form or another. Here, a community of small miners constantly reinvents ‘Welcome’ effigies. Vehicles speed past, covering everything in dust. The sellers’ ‘honesty’ tins remain empty, sometimes for weeks, in a violence of crushed hopes. Kunene and Erongo Regions. 2016–2018
Tattered by wind and burnt by the sun, an effigy made by Tolikie Dausab is meant to attract buyers/tourists to his pile of rose quartz stones on the side of the road. A road grader returns to camp for the night. Uis District, Erongo Region, Namibia. August 2015
Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain
With strong memories of my formative years growing up on the edge of the Namib Desert in what was then known as South West Africa, I have returned to explore my obsession with this place and my lifelong curiosity for the notion of shelter. I have covered thousands of dusty kilometres across remote plains, through dry river beds, over sand dunes and salt pans, through conservancies and communal lands to photograph families in desperate, forgotten outposts. I try to capture the ‘transhumance’ – the search for work, forage and water – and the remnants of former habitats alongside once productive land.
In coastal towns I move with women and children across stretches of desert from one garbage dump to another – often with the loot they carry in their quest to create shelter and eke out a living. I focus on human enterprise and failure, on the bare circumstances of ordinary women and men forced to negotiate life, and of an environment in crisis.
Namibia – a nation of diverse peoples and cultures in a vast land of seeming nothingness and unparalleled light – is rapidly shifting towards foreign popular culture. The momentum of urban development has triggered local populations to migrate from rural dwellings to the fringes of urban areas where they have settled on deregulated land – often falling prey to crime, alcoholism and abuse.
This transition of the social landscape is exacerbated by the scarcity of water and the implications of mining in a constantly drought-stricken land. In the desperateness of what is revealed on this landscape, I photograph what I care about – human intrusion, passage, negligence, waste, destruction and intervention.
Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain is about this space, these people, my place among them, and my existence at this time of my life.
Margaret Courtney-Clarke, 2017