There are only two in 1,600 kilometers. They are called Walvis Bay and Lüderitz and they are the only ports in Namibia, a young country, which became independent from South Africa in 1990 and which, during the period 1884-1919, bore the name of German South-West Africa. The founder of that colony was the merchant Adolf Lüderitz, whose name was removed from the list of streets in Berlin a few months ago to erase that episode a little more.
In Namibia the name of the town was also officially changed to !Nami=nüs (sic), in the Khoekhoe language, but it is so difficult to pronounce that the merchant’s surname has won the game and the town continues to appear on maps as Lüderitz, and the white and blue signs continue to mark the streets with this Germanic Gothic script. The visitor is surprised when he sees that this city in southwest Africa, 9,000 kilometers from the German capital, maintains a good number of Art Nouveau buildings. The houses and public centers in Central European style contrast with a desert that surrounds it everywhere, except for the coast: an ocean through which Bartomeu Días, sailor and explorer, arrived. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot on the site in the 15th century, but it wasn’t until the 19th that the area began to be economically exploited with the hunting of whales, seals and the exploitation of guano. Killing animals and using the droppings of seagulls as fertilizer enriched Germany in the far south.
The city, which today does not reach 15,000 inhabitants, has grown around the port and the bay. Walking through the center, on Calle Bismarck, a three-storey building crowned by a 1914 surrounded by laurels catches your eye. It is the railway station, an infrastructure that has behind it a history of suffering and death. When you get to know it, the unique road that crosses the town from end to end, with a branch that extends to a pier, is not so nice.
The railway was considered a strategic infrastructure for the economic growth of the colony, but above all for the dominance over the locals, since it allowed to move troops there more easily. In the neighboring British colony of the Cape, its governor, Cecil Rhodes, a bookish supremacist, was clear about the value of the train: “In the colonies, railways are cheaper than guns and have a greater range,” he said. In the German part, the first route extended between the capital and the closest coastal part, to the north. The Lüderitz to Aus branch, about 130 kilometers long, was built between 1906 and 1907 using labor from inmates from the Shark Island concentration camp, where rebels who did not accept German rule were held .
Working in very precarious conditions, without any medical assistance and malnourished, the statistics of that railway project ended up being terrifying. According to the figures contained in the records of the German Colonial Administration, 2,014 camp prisoners were used between January 1906 and June 1907. Of those prisoners, 1,359 died while working on the line, which meant a mortality rate of 67% of the workers or that every 100 meters of track one person died.
The services of this railway branch experienced a time of splendor when new stations were opened. They were raised in mining areas where diamonds were extracted under degrading conditions similar to road construction work, with fierce vigilance added so that the miners did not keep any of what they mined underground for the owners of the exploitations. Kolmanskop’s closed mines today are an attraction for the few visitors who make it to the area. The sand has bit by bit eaten away at the facilities and given the village a ghostly air, where it is still clear that the differences between the Europeans and the locals were abysmal.
The 140 kilometers of railway were closed in 1997 due to the poor state of the infrastructure and were completed five years ago, although there are now no regular passenger services. The centenary station is home to the head of service, his family and several employees of TransNamib, Namibia’s state railway company. Now they see passing, very punctually, long freight trains loaded with magnesium to be loaded at the dock. No more travelers or diamonds, just a lingering colonial shadow that still lingers in a decaying city that has little to do with Namibia’s mighty north.
