4 BEERS AND BULLETS, BEADS AND BULLS. DRINK AND THE MAKING OF MARGINS IN A SMALL NAMIBIAN TOWN Steven Van Wolputte

INTRODUCTION

In November 2006, two billboards welcomed the cars that drove into the city centre of Opuwo, the capital of the Kunene Region, north-west Namibia.1 The first one was an advertisement for Castle Lager, a South African beer brand locally known as “the petrol of town.” It depicted an African mask and carried the slogan “Perfectly balanced to satisfy Africa’s thirst.” The second one was part of a UNICEF-sponsored government campaign against domestic violence, warning that “All types of domestic violence are against the law.” It depicted a woman calling her husband lazy and stupid, and a man beating his wife. The arrangement of these boards was probably a coincidence. Yet, it nicely illustrated the dominant attitude of Namibia’s ruling el-ites towards drink: alcohol is a threat.

Not that people in the bars minded much. Turning right, onto Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue, one cannot help but notice the seemingly endless succession of pubs (called Cuvelai Bar, The Good Road Bar, Champ Style, or Opuwo Recreation Centre) along Opuwo’s main street, and occasional visitors such as tourists, NGO

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4.1. The entrance to one of the “Himba bars” on Opuwo’s main street, November 2008. Video still by Kaviruka Muharukua and Steven Van Wolputte.

workers or government officials, remember the city mainly for its empty bottles and its nightly disturbances, which, understandably, strain the relationships between the local tourism industry and the bar owners.

For many of these outsiders, Opuwo is a true frontier town, and tour guides refer to it as “the last isle of civilization” or “the gateway to the Last Wilderness.” Opuwo incarnates the ambivalent outlook of modernity. On the one hand, city life is compared to a tra-dition often condemned as backward and conservative. On the other hand, the rural hinterland is idealized (and commercialized) as au-thentic —the “true” Kaoko. Opuwo is a curse but also a blessing, and the bottle is the dividing line between vice and virtue. This duplicity is echoed in the two billboards on the edge of town, and reflected in the layout of Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue: bars run along one side of the street, government offices on the other, with the main-stream churches situated further down the road. Tourists drive trough Epupa (the informal market, lit. “the place that overflows [with alco-

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hol])” in minibuses, photographing the many liquor stalls and drunks there, before or after they are taken to one of the more rural Himba villages, sometimes making a long detour to enhance the impression of remoteness.2

For those inhabiting these more rural settlements, too, Opuwo is a borderland, between owetta (“law,” referring to state law and regulation) and ombazu (tradition, or ancestral heritage). The boundary between these two domains is marked by ondondu yozom-bara (the “mountain of kings”), a hill along the main road from Windhoek, just outside the city centre, where the leaders of the Otji-kaoko Traditional Council lie buried and where law and tradition “meet” (okuhakahaene). For them, Opuwo is a place of sorrow (as many people go there to solve a problem or situation), but also of ombusinessa (opportunity to do business) and desire. On average, about one third of the people in the city consists of these occasional visitors, who are in town only temporarily, but this number may vary considerably. This ambivalence is reflected in Otjihinamaparero, one of Opuwo’s popular nicknames. It means “the place where there are no trees to hide in the shade with your girlfriend.”

MARGINAL SPACES

Opuwo, indeed, has many faces, and this applies to drink as well. Therefore, this chapter investigates the many meanings of the differ-ent drinking places —different modes of drinking— in and around town. In so doing, it presents bars, shebeens, liquor stalls and beer drinks as marginal spaces and occasions where women and men ex-periment with and negotiate ambivalent and often contradictory no-tions of identity and belonging. Here, beer functions as a marginal commodity (an object of change and exchange) that mediates be-tween different systems of value that, at once, also are domains of belonging and models of identification. Also, the analysis explores divergent ideas on citizenship and modernity forged in the margins

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of the contemporary Namibian state. Bars, especially then the li-censed pubs along Opuwo’s main street, are places where people side with or contest the project, ideals and aspirations of the young Namibian state (also see Dobler, this volume). Important to note here is that these margins are not found at the state’s periphery: pubs and bars are not at the outside, but at the very centre of social and politi-cal life. They are places where boundaries are being drawn and re-drawn, places —and times— of change (see Van Wolputte and Fu-manti, this volume).

A similar usage of the notion of marginality is found in eco-nomic theory. In its most general formulation, “marginal” (cost, pro-duction, etcetera) refers to change in consequence or anticipation of altering conditions, change as a consequence of real or expected change. Applying this notion of marginality to economic transactions in Africa, Jane Guyer (2005) argues against the equilibrial, ceteris paribus models of mainstream economics and anthropology. Accord-ing to Guyer, the complexity of these transactions cannot be reduced to a logic of linear models, nor to local cultural practices. Economic transactions in Atlantic Africa, she argues, are hybrid institutions that have taken shape in the encounter between different actors (be them European merchants, colonial officials, African traders, officehold-ers, and so on). She demonstrates the co-existence of different cur-rencies (such as cattle, cowries, manillas, money, or slaves) that, to a certain extent, are commensurable. Yet, this commensurability is shaped by divergent and asymmetrical value scales and repertoires. By manipulating and exploiting these asymmetries or disjunctures, economic actors try to create margins of profit. These marginal gains are then re-invested in more enduring stores of value. Marginal gains hence refer to a condition of asymmetry purposely sought after by economic actors in the context of the borderland (the margin) be-tween various repertoires of values.

Of course, drinking is more than just an economic transac-tion. Yet, the notion of marginality in economics, and Jane Guyer’s work on marginal transactions in Atlantic Africa, allow us to identify

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4.2. Inside one of the metropolitan pubs along Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue, Opuwo, November 2008. Video still by Kaviruka Muharukua and Steven Van Wolputte.

two important qualifications of the notion of margin. First of all, “margin” does not necessarily refer to a “peripheral container” of people (see Das and Poole 2004). It is a locus of relational change that might be situated anywhere in time or space or, more in general, in experience. Secondly, margins are not dominated by a single value model, but by the co-existence of different repertoires and models of subjectivation and identification. This juxtaposition, however, is characterized by asymmetry and imbalance, by power inequalities and competition. Margins thus function as thresholds (Guyer’s term), as nodes or crossing points between otherwise discontinuous realms of experience and modes of identification.

Marginal hence refers to “boundaries-in-the-making,” a processual perspective clearly indebted to Victor Turner (1969), who regarded the liminal phase of ritual, the social limbo, as quintessen-tial to the functioning of society (also see Gluckman 1955). In his later work, moreover, Turner distinguished between liminal and

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liminoid, the latter referring to liminal-like performances and settings (such as pubs and bars) that are individual rather than collective, op-tional rather than obligatory, profane and playful rather than sacred and serious (Turner 1982:43, 53-53). Contrasting art and entertain-ment to ritual, Turner connects the liminoid to the rise of the state, of individualism and of urbanization, stressing the freedom actors have to engage in liminoid phenomena according to the rhythm of labour and leisure imposed by modern, industrial society. “Liminoid phe-nomena,” says Turner,

develop apart from the central economic and political processes, along the margins, in the interfaces and in-terstices of central and servicing institutions – they are plural, fragmentary, and experimental in charac-ter. […] One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid. [Turner 1982:54-55]

Turner’s notion of liminoid hence comes close to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (see below). Margins are liminoid places, that, like Foucault’s heterotopias, can be imagined as places of simultane-ity and transition, of experiment. As I will illustrate, it concerns places of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and identification (Fou-cault 1986; Turner 1982). A heterotopia is an “elsewhere”; heteroto-pias, for instance, constitute the “other city” (see De Boeck and Plis-sart 2004). Yet, one conceptual issue regarding heterotopias is the “here” to which they are an “elsewhere”: a heterotopia (or hetero-chrony) presumes a centre, an orthodoxy on “the normal life,” in spa-tial terms, a “centre” from which it can be different. In view, how-ever, of the fragmented identities and hybridity —the dystopia?— seemingly characteristic of the postcolonial, one can ask whether this centre can actually be located (see, most poignantly, Mbembe 1992; also Radhakrishnan 2003). Is not the city, for the villager, an else-where? Conversely, is the village not an elsewhere for the city-dweller? A bar or shebeen can indeed be considered as a heterotopia,

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outside the “normal,” routine practices of everyday life. But what if the bar becomes routine? What if the pub becomes the “here,” the “centre,” and the house the “elsewhere?” Foucault (1986) uses the image of the mirror to describe a heterotopia not only as a place of simultaneity, but also as a place of simulacrum (that nevertheless, through the mirror, is real). It would however be difficult (if not im-possible) to determine whether the bar is a simulacrum of society, or whether society mirrors life in and around the pub, especially in a context of widespread poverty and exclusion. It is this boundary be-tween “here” and “elsewhere” that is made problematic by the mar-gin metaphor: boundaries are given, but also enacted or embodied in answer to, or anticipating, changing circumstances and context. A heterotopia constitutes a bounded-off space; margins refer to place, to the lived experience of boundaries and boundedness, to the prac-tices of change (see Casey 1996).

OPUWO: THE SETTING

Until the early 1970s, Opuwo was an administrative outpost quite lit-erally at the fringes of the South African state. Then the war for the liberation of Namibia spread to the north-west of the country and, af-ter the Alvor Agreement of 1975, became entangled with the civil conflict in Angola. Opuwo became a military centre, housing be-tween 8,000 to 10,000 soldiers and police officers. Like elsewhere in Namibia this militarization led to a rapid monetization of the econ-omy (see Gordon 1992). It also had a profound influence on daily life, an effect that was amplified by a severe drought between 1978 and 1981. A consequence of this first boom of Opuwo were the many bars and bottle stores set up in the early 1990s, and often ran by former soldiers.

By 2006, quite a few of these businesses had closed their doors, making space for the more “professional” (fully licensed) bars

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4.3. View on one of Opuwo’s new extensions, along the concrete remnants that under apartheid segregated the centre from its suburbs, November 2006. Photo-graph by Steven Van Wolputte.

and bottle stores in town. That year as well, the metalled road be-tween Opuwo and Windhoek was completed. Until then, Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue had been the only stretch of asphalt in the entire region. The new road signalled the further “democratization” of tour-ism in the region that during the first years after independence mainly targeted the market’s elite segment. By 2006, Opuwo (de-clared a city and administrative seat of the entire Kunene Region in 2004) was witnessing a rapid expansion of its corps of officials, housed in new extensions and occupying newly built offices along Opuwo’s main street. To cater for these growing numbers of tourists and civil servants, a South African supermarket chain opened up an outlet at the newly built business park, which also housed the city’s second fuel station, a mobile phone shop, a curios shop, a conven-ience store, and other services. Two banks opened up office in

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Opuwo, and on the hill, overlooking the mountains to the west, came a new luxury hotel and campsite, complementing the growing num-ber of downmarket guesthouses downtown. Despite the fact that the Namibian government remains the most important provider of sala-ried employment in Opuwo, tourism (even if not new to the region, see Henrichsen 2000) has indeed become the most important source of income to many, including the vendors of souvenirs and the many licensed and unlicensed tour guides and interpreters.

This second boom (and second wave of monetization) dra-matically changed Opuwo’s outlook. New extensions and informal settlements, stores and market stands have filled the empty spaces along Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue. Yet, the overall lay out of the city has not changed much since apartheid: the main road still con-nects Ozombwapa (“the white houses,” the former city centre) to Katutura (“the place where we do not live”) and Otuzemba (lit. “the place that smells like shit”), the two former so-called townships (orokasie) found at the outskirts of town. The new layout, as it were, follows and overlays this former, rigid, segregated structure, the re-mains of which are still visible throughout town. These concrete foundations of what once were the fences separating white from black, centre from township, or military from civilian, are nowadays used as “natural” markers of individual plots of land or neighbour-hoods.

NEGOTIATING BOUNDARIES

The number of bars in Opuwo kept abreast with the intensity of the conflict in northern Namibia and southern Angola. The first alcohol license was issued in 1968, when, also, the first PLAN (People’s Liberation Army for Namibia, the armed wing of SWAPO) fighters made their appearance in the region. This number rose to three in 1975 and five in 1982. That year, at the height of the conflict, the ar-chives also mention the existence of a great number of unlicensed

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shops selling alcohol (Kommissaris Administrasie vir Hereros 1982). Nowadays, licensed bottle stores and bars are found mainly on or in the vicinity of Opuwo’s main street, opposite the government offices from which they draw an important part of their clientele. In compli-ance with the 1998 No 6 Liquor Act (that was being implemented in the course of 2006, see Dobler, this volume), they all have a concrete or tiled floor, separate toilets for women and men, and so on. On the wall, one often finds a television set tuned to Namibia’s National Broadcasting Company (NBC), next to posters advertising Namibian and South African beer brands, such as Windhoek, Tafel or Castle. Inside one also finds a jukebox, a cigarette vending machine, two or more slot machines, and —last but not least— one or two pool ta-bles. Quite a number of these bars (such as Sbongae no4, or Cuvelai no2) form part of a chain of pubs and bottle stores —a true local beer emporium. Some owners from other parts in Namibia opened up an Opuwo branch; others invested the money they had earned in Opuwo in new outlets in the more rural areas of Kaokoland. Yet, all these pubs have a similar look and feel. In November 2006, for instance, the same song (Zemburuka, “Remember,” by Bullet ya Kaoko Con-cert Group, the most popular local band) was blaring out of the speakers in almost all the bars along Opuwo’s main street. When strolling along Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue, one could hear its in-tro in the first, and the next measures in the adjacent pubs. These fully equipped, licensed metropolitan bars are not the only drinking places in town, let alone in the northern Kunene Re-gion. In Opuwo, one also finds bars without the modern parapherna-lia, such as pool tables or slot machines, and as one turns away from the city’s main street, into Katutura or Otuzemba, drinking places get smaller, shabbier, darker, and louder. These shebeens, often consist-ing of little more than a counter and some shelves, offer a mix of western strong drinks and local brews and distillates. Further down the spectrum, there is Opuwo’s “open market,” Epupa. Located at the very city centre and next to the new business park, the various stalls in this shadow market offer meat, second-hand clothing, make-up, or

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4.4. A truckload of cheap and strong “Himba beer” (Carling Black Label), alleg-edly only a weekend’s supply for this bar. Opuwo, November 2008. Photograph by Steven Van Wolputte.

cigarettes. In Epupa, one finds butchers, bakers, shoemakers, and mobile phone repair services, neatly arranged in makeshift shelters of wood, reeds, and corrugated iron. Behind, however, are several smaller and bigger stalls where people gather to empty the barrels and bottles of ondombo (maize beer) and okandjembo. This is the largest section of Epupa, a place that came into being after merchants and mongers relocated their business from Otuzemba and Katutura to the city centre. Members of the “market committee” (as people call the organizers and spokespersons of this seemingly unorganized market) depicted this move as a reaction to the municipality’s at-tempts to clear the former townships of the many unlicensed vendors and drinking stands there. The bulk of the latter’s clientele is made

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up by villagers and mountain dwellers visiting the city, and by im-poverished urbanites. Needless to say that this “unwanted develop-ment” remains a thorn in the side of the city authorities.

Of course, drinking does not only take place within the city’s confines. Also in the countryside, especially in the larger settlements (such as Etanga, Kaoko Otavi or Okangwati), one finds bottle stores and bars. Catering for the nearby villages, they also profit from the vicinity of schools, police stations, nursing posts and the like, offer-ing a mix of bottled beers and liquors with their home-made equiva-lents. Often, these bars (with their cement floor, pool table and their offer of bottled beers) present a slice of the city in the village, and it is not uncommon that they form part of a larger chain of bars or bot-tle stores with a “parent” bar in Opuwo or elsewhere in northern Namibia. Away from the city, though, there are other ways of getting hold of alcohol.

As far as memory goes back, alcohol was always part of the livestock trade between Kaokoland and the North-Central regions and, especially, between Portuguese traders and Ovimbundu mid-dlemen in southern and central Angola. Nowadays, this trade in al-cohol (before, Castello and Mint Punch, now mainly Carling Black Label beer) and other commodities such as ochre, beads, or blankets, is largely in the hands of licensed or unlicensed smous (traders) op-erating from Opuwo or Oshakati. These commodities marketed mo-kuti (“in the bush”) are usually in high demand. This is also true for alcohol. Drinking usually accompanies major festivities and ceremo-nies. A crate of beer or Castello, for instance, usually is part of the bride price, or at least a means to start the marriage negotiations. Drinking, though, does not necessarily take place in a ceremonial context, and traders are attracted by the many people who gather around a dam or other water place, especially in the aftermath of a good rainy season.

Within this village Gestalt, drink is reminiscent of the long and sometimes perilous trading (and, sometimes, raiding) expedi-tions young men undertook to Angola or the North-Central Regions

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4.5. Smous (traders) visit the mountain villages to buy livestock and sell beads, ochre, blankets, and booze, May 1995. Photograph by Steven Van Wolputte, © Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, No 95.01.10.12a.

in Namibia. In that sense, drinking refers to the heroic escapades of the lineage ancestors who are offered alcohol “to taste” (okumakera) on each solemn occasion. The drink is then “tasted” by the “bull” (ondwezu, the region’s senior) who then further distributes the drink to his dependants, age-mates and other participants. Here, masculin-ity is not defined by the weight of your ombaberas (hangover), but in reference to the notion of omuhona (patron or big man): someone who provides for his dependants (clients and descendants), who is generous and magnanimous. He is the one who decides what and when to drink, who offers a sip to the ancestors “to taste” (okumak-era), and who, analogous to the milk drinking ceremony, drinks (or tastes) first before passing round the bottle or cup to his peers (the other elders), age-mates, and other ovandumbo (married men). These divides of gender and seniority are crosscut by the many jok-

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4.6. Ronaldo (left) in action during the therapy session on March 23 1995. Photo-graph by Steven Van Wolputte, © Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, No 95.01.05.08a.

ing relations that characterize village life: men will also share the bottle with their (female) cross-cousins or grandson, or prevent members of their joking matriclan from drinking. Values at stake are, in other words, commensality, kinship, authority, and dependency. This also is reflected in the idea that a senior is entitled to the oru-koro (breastbone) of every animal “eaten” or sold by his descen-dants. Translated into bottle currency, this means that he is entitled to

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one or two bottles from every crate of wine or beer bought by his daughters and sons. Besides this political (authority) and social (kin-ship) dimension, drinking also alludes to a spiritual dimension, and is said to open up one’s head to the otherworldly.3 Ancestors are of-fered a libation to include them in the ceremony; diviners use alcohol to get themselves and their clients in touch with the spirit world.

What these ritualized drinks have in common with un-prompted drinking occasions at a dam or with the drinking that takes place in Opuwo’s bars and shebeens, is that they all constitute “else-wheres,” or liminal (or liminoid) places and times. Each drinking oc-casion, whether in the bush or in town, constitutes a marginal place, an imaginary borderland where boundaries of inclusion and exclu-sion can be negotiated. The design and build of a bar, its diverse cli-entele, music, the symbols that decorate its walls, but also the spatial arrangement of the drinking space (for instance, around the ancestral shrine, or around the bull’s chair) and, last but not least, the com-pany, make each drinking occasion into a particular arena for making self and identity. The metropolitan bars in town, for instance, mainly aim for the city’s middle class employed in the offices across the street, but they are frequented by the less fortunate as well. Here, the ideal of patronage is confronted by the ideology of self-achievement; in these bars, a logic of the gift enters into competition with a logic of individual purchasing power.

In Opuwo, first of all, beer consumption is shaped by brands, class boundaries, and political preference, all with clear ethnic over-tones. Carling Black Label, for instance, is nicknamed “Himba beer” by the Opuwo middle class: they perceive this brand as (too) cheap and (too) strong, as unsophisticated (also see Krige, this volume), and some of the bars along Opuwo’s main street do not sell it; others, in contrast, thrive by it. Some bars are perceived as “SWAPO” (South West Africa People’s Organization, the ruling party), others as “DTA” (Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, the main opposition party in Namibia), some as “Ovambo,” others as “Herero” or “Himba.” Here, beer and bars function as boundaries, as markers of identity

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and spaces of exclusion, appealing to how one perceives oneself and how one wants to be perceived.

Secondly, however, pubs, shebeens, and drinking stalls are also places of inclusion, where these boundaries are being made, unmade, reaffirmed, and crossed —sometimes literally, as many rev-ellers move between different places on an evening out, sometimes metaphorically, as many identify themselves as both Himba and Her-ero, depending on the context. Such boundaries are negotiated, for instance through the choice of drink, the choice of brand, or the choice of pub or company. What it boils down to is that pubs and shebeens offer an occasion to experiment with these discursive cate-gories by offering a place where different models of identification are present. This inclusive dimension of bars is exemplified, for in-stance, by the music they play: the songs by Bullet ya Kaoko offer a contemporary interpretation of the existing genre of Herero praise poetry. With keyboards and drum machines they present a contempo-rary blend of highly cryptic phrases praising local celebrities, kins-men, and places in Kaokoland with evocations of national identity and citizenship. This mix of local belonging with markers of a more discursive identity makes these songs popular in all the bars along Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue, across ethnic and political divides, and among both the old and the young. Of course, this inclusive di-mension of pubs and bars does not mean that the boundaries exem-plified by beer cease to exist. On the contrary, bottles and barrels function as thresholds or nodes, where these models of identification meet, where different boundaries cross.

The case below documents this marginal character or thresh-old potency of drink. It also questions the validity of Turner’s dis-tinction between the liminal (ritual) and liminoid (play). It is set against the then background of a newly independent (and by tourists, film crews, and anthropologists, “recently discovered”) Namibia, during my first month of fieldwork in 1995, in a Himba village some 120 kilometres west of Opuwo. In March of that year, I met with Ronaldo, a former FAPLA captain but also one of the most reputed

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therapists along the Namibian-Angolan border.4 When making our acquaintance, he greeted me by referring to Belgium’s achievements in the 1986 Soccer World Cup, as he had seen quite a few games when on military training in the USSR.5 Ronaldo had been sent for by my host, the “bull” of Omirora, who wanted to put an end to the wave of misfortune and affliction that had hit hard upon his daugh-ters and herd. What follows is an (edited and shortened) transcript from my diary then.

Thursday March 23

My first ‘real’ ritual (one not staged by Manual, [my assistant]) ended in a feast of yelling, blood, and intestines, and while the meat of the ox was cooking, I interviewed Ronaldo. We were just getting started, though, when the arrival of Heinrich and his film crew interrupted our conversation. They were disappointed at be-ing late, but the therapist told them there would be another, big, ceremony in the days to come, with a big sacrifice. Still, they per-suaded Ronaldo to repeat his performance with the leftover blood and stomach contents. Two girls were pointed out as “volunteers” and rubbed themselves again with the mixture of blood, stomach contents and omiti (“medicines”). Meanwhile, Heinrich directed Ronaldo to step up some dust, look this way or that way; he also asked Kapindika [one of the sons-in-law attending] to either take off his T-shirt, or “step out of the picture.” Kapindika preferred the latter option.

Saturday March 25

Yesterday, in his turn, the bull of Omungwindi sent for Ronaldo. We walked to the village, but the therapist was nowhere to be seen; people said he went looking for booze in Etanga.

Sunday March 26

It all started early in the morning; when Manuel and I arrived in Omungwindi, Ronaldo was busy treating one of the Zemba travel-lers in the village. However, as the film crew arrived chaos broke

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out. […] Apparently, since we met on Thursday, the crew had been chasing Ronaldo back and forth between Omungwindi and Etanga. As the director got out, he was enraged (and would stay so for the entire day) that they had started without them. Also, he demanded that the big ceremony (with the ox) would be performed today.

In his turn, Ronaldo demanded that they first bought him something to drink. Now, however, also the head of the homestead (the bull from Omungwindi) stepped in, demanding compensation, two crates of Castello, for the interrupted therapy session as this meant his therapy was delayed as well. This then led to a second discussion (Manuel told me it was a real fight), this time between the bull, his younger brother and sister regarding the question whether or not to sacrifice an ox for the therapy session the next day. The younger brother thought it was too expensive, the senior one thought it was appropriate. The case was decided to the advan-tage of the latter.

After this dispute was settled, Ronaldo and a few others climbed in the car of the film crew to go to the Etanga bottle store. It did not go far, though: the homestead’s head went to stand in front of the vehicle, and demanded his compensation. A few times, the sound operator stepped out to chase Ronaldo from the roof of the car, where he had seated himself. Eventually, after ninety min-utes or so, the car took off, leaving Ronaldo behind but taking his medicine bag and calabash. Angrily he withdrew into one of the houses, together with some five to six women, Manuel, his last bottle of Mint Punch, a cup, and me.

Monday March 27

Yesterday was a long and strange day: in Omungwindi, Ronaldo dragged me into one of the huts, where I spent most of the morning drinking with him, a handful of ladies, and Manuel. Afterwards his driver took us to Etanga, to fetch his medicine bag and, of course, get a drink. The nightly ride back was an adventure of its own, with the old Toyota bakkie (pick-up) filled with singing, drinking, joking, drunken men stopping every few hundred meters (to “shake the gas tank,” pump a tire, kill the goat they brought along, or just

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to have a break). To the great frustration of Heinrich and his crew: again no ritual today […].

Tuesday March 28

No people around in the morning (they are still having a hangover, I guess). The session that started on Sunday was continued in the afternoon. Again it was interrupted by the arrival of the film crew —as usual. However, the therapy turned into a spectacle, with a tipsy, laughing and yelling audience, and a therapist in the role of comedian. Heinrich even filmed the audience, “to explain the laughter.” Like with Kapindika, he judged me not to fit in, and asked me to leave the scene to have his shot. The climax: obvi-ously frustrated by this lack of seriousness and sincerity, Heinrich and his crew packed their stuff and left in anger when it turned out that the sacrifice was a chicken and not the ox promised yesterday and the days before. Wednesday March 29

The therapy session took place today; out of sight of the cameras, in all serenity, no drinks, no drunks.

These few days turned out to be a crash course into the reali-

ties of daily life (into the modernity and heterogeneity of “tradition”) in the northern Kunene Region, even when set in the context of a relatively remote mountain village. This experience was quite distant from the idealized discourse on desert-dwelling nomads I knew from existing ethnographies and glossy coffee-table books. In this particu-lar case, alcohol functioned as a marker of distinction, of who was to be included in, or excluded from, and who was in control of, the therapy proceedings. Alcohol also served as a means to undermine an imported, orthodox, understanding of “other” and “tradition” em-bodied, in this case, by the film crew. Therefore, therapy and drink created a marginal space of transformation, of simultaneity and dis-simulation, an elsewhere that allowed participants to experiment with the received boundaries of gender (Ronaldo drinking with the

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women), seniority (the row over the sacrifice), and ethnicity (as therapist, host, and patients all came from different ethnic back-grounds). Also, this space in-between allowed the participants to (lit-erally) fool around with notions of truth and untruth (see, for in-stance, the mocking performance in front of the camera). This am-bivalence was embodied by Ronaldo himself, being a local from abroad, a healer and charlatan at the same time.

THE CITY IN THE VILLAGE, THE VILLAGE IN THE CITY

When, in November 2006, I left Opuwo for Omirora (the place where between 1995 and 1998 I did most of my fieldwork), I got a flat tyre caused by a row of broken bottles buried half into the gravel road. A few kilometres further down that same road, I barely man-aged to evade a second row. Once at my destination, when walking past the cattle posts I had lived in, I could not but notice the many piles of broken beer bottles, always the same Carling Black Label brand. For sure, drinking —even if rather occasionally— had always been part of village life. Yet, something was different. Traders used to sell crates of Castello or Clubman Mint Punch, or, sometimes, bot-tles of home-distilled okandjembo (the “little gun,” a usually very strong liquor), but no beer.6 Now, neatly gathered heaps of shattered beer bottles dotted the landscape, as a quiet testament to beer drinks that took place not that long ago. Even though disturbing at first, it seemed as if these heaps of broken bottles were left there intentional-ally. With my flat tyre in mind, the thought crossed my mind that the “traditional herders” I was with were perhaps spoiling the scenery on purpose, as a kind of silent protest against the many tourists en-chanted by the pictures of a robust, authentic and timeless desert landscape found in many glossy tourist brochures and coffee-table books.7 I recalled how already in 1996 people discussed the possibil-ity of blocking the roads for tourist cars. I remembered how local discontent forced the main tour operator in this part of Kaokoland to

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close down his campsites: this was then die Letzte Wilde (“the last wilderness”), the distant mountains so idealized and so contrasted to the dirt and dust of a town thirsty for modernity, now littered with broken glass. The countryside was starting to resemble the city —or was it the other way around?

It is tempting to see in the town bars a celebration of ostenta-tious consumption, individual achievement, or personal success (erau, to be in good luck, symbolized by the beeps of the slot ma-chine), values vaguely associated with modern life, but also with na-tionhood, state, and citizenship (see, for instance, Pile 2006). And indeed, spending money in the bars along Mumbijazo Muharukua Avenue is a sign of success, not only for the urban professionals working across the street, but for all those tempted by the taste of success and achievement. For them, the consumption of bottled beers, or playing a game of pool, is an attempt to inscribe themselves metaphorically in the development project of the young, Namibian nation-state; it is an attempt at being a “good citizen.” It does not even require a thorough analysis to see: some spokespersons de-scribed these bars as “belonging to” or even “being” the state.

It is equally tempting to oppose these modern values to the values of seniority, kinship, authority, joking relationships, and age-group membership that often structure drinking parties in the moun-tains. Yet, as we saw, the traditional is not traditional: Himba cele-brate on bottled, industrially produced beers as well (despite —or may be because— the fact that the 1998 Liquor Act outlaws the trade of animals for alcohol, and stipulates that alcohol can only purchased with cash). As one woman put it: “What else can we spend our money on?” Also Epupa is a case in point: this shadow market and main drinking place is located right at the city centre (and no longer in the former townships), next to the business park and close to the licensed bars along main street. From this point of view, the mere lo-cation of Epupa, in fact a well-run communal business project, can be regarded as a political critique of the orthodox notion of develop-ment and citizenship as proposed by the Namibian government and

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4.7. A bush brewery: travellers offer their services to the Himba mountain vil-lages: the men offer their labour, the women their beer, October 2006. Photograph by Steven Van Wolputte.

Opuwo municipality.8 This “unplanned development” places the vil-lage idiom right at the heart of the city, the same way the many met-ropolitan bars in the countryside present the city (and, hence, citizen-ship) amidst the mountain villages.

Most people in Opuwo frequent different drinking places, and move between bars and between bars, shebeens, and drinking

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stalls in Epupa to piece together their belonging and identity. In these city bars, in the township shebeens, in Epupa, during ceremonies or at the drinks occasioned by the arrival of a trader or brewer, one sees that different Gestalts or domains of belonging (“the village,” “the city,” “the church”) are simultaneously present: young herders, for instance, play a game of pool before they and their cattle continue their daily route to the water pump; officials —with their shades, striped shirts, and shiny shoes— may suddenly burst out in cattle praise songs. These domains of belonging are cross-cut by other forms of identification relating to, for instance, ancestors and state, or to ethnicity and political affiliation. Abstention can be a political comment, for instance when beer or liquor is referred to as a plot “by the others” or “the government” to “keep us down with poison.” Also, it can be moral critique and a way of asserting one’s belonging and self, for instance for the many churchgoers who frequent these bars but consume soft drinks instead of alcohol. Yet, one also ob-serves thirsty converts “switch church” (okutanaura, “turn around”) for the night, to allow themselves to get drunk.

One could therefore describe these domains of belonging and dimensions of identification as broken and discontinuous, or, more appropriately, as fragmentary and contradictory, as partial and con-textual. What drinking does is to highlight this heterogeneity and challenge the hierarchy between the different models and metaphors of identity and belonging. Yet, most people seem to be able to live with these paradoxes and competing models without much effort: like ritual, drinking occasions also provide a context —a margin— in which a (temporal and, again, partial) integration of these models and fragments of self is made possible. Is it because of the emotions that may flare up in the evening? Is it because the body-self is confronted with its physical boundaries after the consumption of sufficient quan-tities of alcohol? Or is it because of the overflow of dominant meta-phors in the context of a bar or shebeen?

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CONCLUSIONS

OmOpuwo

mOzonduombe zamatenda Omukoseka kamuMbu Naugara mbe kauhara

Otjimba karira omuture mOpuwo kaumiharua

Mokaseka kau makauharua oune kamuMbu

Omuatje enga te Ina masarokukarianga

omOpuwo

In Opuwo In the place of the iron oxen Where lots have settled on the land of Mbu I wanted to go there and spend the day But there I settled You cannot [just] visit Opuwo In this place with lots of people This place of Mbu The child will [fall and] die Its mother can now continue walking In Opuwo

The epigraph above is a well-known proverb among the villagers and urbanites of the northern Kunene Region, who usually explain and summarize “[Opuwo is] the place where women drink so much that their baby falls from their back and they are too drunk to notice and just continue walking.” This popular exegesis illustrates the ambiva-lent place Opuwo occupies in the local imaginary. The “place of Mbu” is a place of plenty and pleasure, but without shade to enjoy it, a place of desire but also of sorrow. This is especially true for the ur-ban poor who find themselves betwixt and between village and town, without cattle to be somebody in the former, and without money to make it in the latter. At best, they derive a low and irregular income from menial labour, petty trade, or from their efforts to tap the flow of money generated by the tourist industry. This ambivalence of city life is epitomized by the Opuwo’s main street, Mbumbijazo Muha-rukwa Avenue, until 2006 the only stretch of metalled road in the re-gion, now hemmed in by government offices, churches, stores, and bars. Beer is the petrol of town. Also to more exotic visitors and passers-by (including tour-ists and government officials) and to more affluent urbanites, Opuwo is an ambiguous place. They experience the town as a dusty and dirty

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4.8. Drinking at market in Epupa, near the Opuwo Business Park, November 2008. Video still by Kaviruka Muharukua and Steven Van Wolputte.

abode with too many bars, too much loud music, and too many drunks. Ironically perhaps, this image of a frontier town drinking its way into modernity is used to market the pristine and unspoilt char-acter of the rural hinterland beyond. But the city also evokes fascina-tion. It is, after all, the last isle of civilization.

On most evenings, the ordinary buzz of city life is penetrated by the singing and handclapping of the women and men in Epupa, Opuwo’s shadow market. They “beat” (okutona) the ondjongo, a lo-cal dance that on ritual occasions is performed to invite the ancestors and spirits. Often, the dancers are joined by the deep sound of the “Himba trumpet” (ondata), a horn that is blown to inform the ances-tors of a pending move to or from the cattle post, or of the death of a senior elder (see Gibson 1962; Van Wolputte 2003:282). Performed at the very heart of the city, near the Opuwo Business Park, the

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drunken dancers illustrate the thin line between liminal and liminoid, or between sacred and profane, ritual and pleasure.

This is one of the reasons why we opted to characterize bars, shebeens, drinking stalls, and other drinking occasions as marginal places: these are places where the indicative mood and the optative mood meet. On the one hand, bars and shebeens are characterized by strong symbolic boundaries represented by the various kinds of beer, by brands and labels, and tokens such as clothing, umbrellas, shades, or mobile phones. They represent fragments of identity and models of identification. On the other hand, drinking occasions are charac-terized by the simultaneous presence of these models, and by the possibility to negotiate the boundaries between them. As Stallybrass and White (1986) already pointed out, each attempt to establish a strong symbolic division (between Self and Other, us and them, city and village, upper and lower …) also results in desire and disgust expressed in metaphors of transgression and boundedness (also see McClintock 1996). Bars, shebeens, ritual drinks, and occasional drinks are thresholds where people can express their aspirations and ambitions through, for instance, the choice of drink or drinking place, where they explore and experiment with the boundaries of so-ciality, self, and identity. These experiments do not take place at the fringes of society. They are at its very heart.

NOTES 1 This chapter is based on anthropological research conducted in the western part of the northern Kunene Region (often referred to as “Kaoko” or “Kaokoland”) be-tween 1995 and present. This research was made possible by a postdoctoral fel-lowship and successive research grants by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). The bulk of my fieldwork took place in the mountain villages of Omirora and its vicinity, some 125 kilometres west of Opuwo, among the Himba living there. After 1998, my focus shifted from this rural setting to that of Opuwo. I would like to thank Richard Werbner, John Friedman, Mattia Fumanti, Murray Last, Peter Crossman, Katrien Pype, and Filip De Boeck for their suggestions and comments. However, all mistakes and (many) shortcomings are entirely mine.

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2 This name is undoubtedly also an allusion to Epupa (or Otjipupa) Falls, on the border with Angola, itself a source of tension between the local population and the Namibian Government. 3 The same is true for “drinking” tobacco (okunwa omakaya). 4 FAPLA (Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola, the Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola) was the armed wing of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) during the Angolan civil conflict, and enjoyed military and other support by, among others, Cuba and the then USSR. 5 Having defeated the then Soviet-Union 4 to 3 in the second round of the FIFA World Cup in Mexico, Belgium lost the semi-final against Diego Maradona’s Ar-gentina. 6 Castello is a cheap, sparkling wine; Clubman Mint Punch a liquor; okandjembo is a local distillate made from maize and sugar, with a variable but usually high alco-hol percentage. 7 The reason for the heaps of broken glass was, as so often, more pragmatic: bottles were broken and heaped well in sight, to prevent children and animals from wounding themselves on hidden pieces of glass. By throwing them all on one place, they were easier to see and to evade. 8 This so-called informal market has an organizational committee, with an elected leader, that rents out market places, controls and invests the revenue, and maintains order.

PART II

STATES