21 July 2009

Bottrop Heimatmuseum in Namibia

Warning: This blog entry contains many German words. This is intentional - I haven't suddenly lost the ability to write the English language. If you want to know what they mean, look them up.


DSCF7027.JPG

After Etosha we are heading to Botswana, via a small town called Tsumeb. The savannah of Etosha had given way to woodland and some hills, the trees showing an amazing range of colours in their leaves, from bare grey branches to reddish brown and dark green leaves, silvery shades and yellow leaves where the sun has bleached the growth. Tsumeb is a small mining town with a very big mine. The mine had closed 18 years ago and the town was now trying to find a purpose serving the farming community. Mining in Tsumeb was for minerals, metals and crystals, a crazy mix of materials pushed up in a pipe during the making of the world. MAny minerals are only found here, and the crystals and gems have made-up names like Tennantite and Anglesite, or sponsored names like Smithsonite. Down Main Street, past signs for the Copper festival, the Youth Festival and the banner announcing Karnival (at the end of July?!?) we came to the jewel of the town, the Tsumeb Museum: "Ethnological-colonial and mine history under one roof!". Entering it I found myself returned to the old Heimatmuseum in Bottrop, with an African twist. The lady at the desk spoke German, of course, and the rooms were labelled in German, Afrikaans and English, displaying the utterly complete German influence on the town despite the fact that the Germans surrendered to the Brits in 1915 and never regained Namibia as a colony. The museum rooms resemble nothing more than the average German Heimatmuseum, polished wooden display cases filled with dusty, badly labelled artefacts: diaoramas illustrating 'traditional life' (in this case a Herero village) built from found materials by a volunteer, trees fashioned from cotton balls dyed green and held up with brown sticks; fading photographs and educational writing taped to the walls; jewellery displayed on inappropriately coloured mannequin heads; old medals and war uniforms labelled with the donor's name.

The 'mine display room' was copied directly from the Bottrop museum, showing as it did the mine worker's implements, a Gesellenstück made for an exam in the shape of a parrot, but really a cigar cutter; charts and maps of the mine payout, models of the mine workings and photos of Victorian families and their black servants at Christmas. Then there were targets from the Schützenfest, medals from the Reit und Fahrverein, trophies for the Kegelmeister, a banner from the Männerturnverein and costumes from the Karnevalsverein. Also Pfadfinder flags and Mark pieces of the official Otavi mine currency, to keep people's pay in the family, so to speak. It could not have been more German if it tried.

We left Tsumeb eating Apfel und Karottenkuchen from the Etosha Cafe and Biergarten.

2 comments:

  1. I hope you greeted the lady in the museum with a cheery 'Gluckauf!' (only with the Umlaut, which doesn't seem to work in Comments, in the right place, of course). Now there's a delightful German word I don't get to use every day. Or every year, quite frankly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That would have been so great! You can tell I am too middle-class to have miners in the family, so I never even thought of it.

    ReplyDelete