Why an African tribe wear 100-year-old German uniforms
telegraph.co.ukThe Namib is the oldest desert in the world, a vast, sun-bleached expanse whose western-most edge skirts the Atlantic Ocean. “It’s like nowhere else,” says British photographer Jim Naughten, who caught his first glimpse of Namibia – a German colony from 1884 to 1919 – from the peeling leather seat of a rusty, clapped-out old motorbike.
After graduating from Bournemouth art college in 1993, he’d ridden it all the way from Cape Town, a distance of some 900 miles.“I knew almost nothing about Namibia,” says Naughten, who is now 52. “There wasn’t a lot in the guidebook, about the country or its tribes.
But as I rode towards Luderitz” – a former diamond mining town on the southwestern coast – “I met my first Herero, walking over the sand.” He had just ridden past the German ghost town of Kolmanskop “and the whole thing was so incongruous.
I felt like I was in an early episode of Star Trek, where the wrong people had been ordered for the planet”.That encounter stayed with Naughten long after he had returned to Britain.
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