By Rafael Rosas (’20)
Today we are traveling from Otjiwarongo to Etosha National Park in Northern Namibia. We have stopped for an hour-long lunch at a town with WiFi, which is a welcome change.
Namibia is a fascinating country on several levels. For starters, it is the closest thing I think I’ve ever come across to a “ghost town” on a national scale. It is a country with a tiny population of 2.2 million (for reference, San Diego, CA [my hometown] has a population of 3.3 million), spread over an area of 850,000 square kilometers (comparable to Texas or California), and ~23% of the population lives in Windhoek, the capital.
Me holding a guide to Namibian geology.
Like South Africa, and in part because of South Africa, modern Namibia is defined and haunted by its darkly racist past. Humans have inhabited Namibia for thousands of years, and the region for a long time was able to avoid colonization because there are about 150 kilometers of unforgiving desert inland from the entire coast. Until the late 1800’s, this desert-lined coast protected the indigenous people of the region from colonizing Europeans.
Then along came the Germans.
In the 1880’s a German geographer who later became infamous for being cited and honored by Hitler himself, released his theory that people needed space to expand to continue to live and prosper. At a multilateral conference of Colonial powers, Germany officially claimed Namibia, among other parts of Africa, in its attempt to ensure that it would have sufficient land to expand into, and thus, prosper. At first, not many Germans made their way south, as life in Africa was (and still is) ruthless and unforgiving. Yet, as famine and poverty continued to strike at the heart of major German cities, people began to move in larger numbers to Namibia.
At first, the colonists and the indigenous people lived in relative peace, but this peacefulness became incredibly unpopular amongst the new wave of colonialists who believed the Second Reich’s mandate that the Arian race was superior. They did not see the indigenous people as humans, let alone equals, and thus did not look favorably upon the negotiations that kept the peace.
The war that broke out was bloody and gruesome, the German general leading it ruthless. Eventually, the German army encircled the entire Herero (indigenous) population, man woman and child alike, while the Herero were assembled in what in their culture was an act of peace (instead of attacking the German capital, which they could have done). The Germans purposely left the encirclement open where the Herero could only escape into the unforgiving desert.
Tens of thousands of Herero were killed, and even those who had managed to escape into the desert, fell into another German trap. Troops had been stationed at the water holes of the desert, knowing that eventually the Herero people would have to go to them to drink. In this manner, German soldiers rounded up almost all the remaining Herero people, and transported them to centers that 40 years later would become notorious, for their use on a different people: the Herero were taken to Germany’s first concentration camps.
In this way, the Germans almost completely wiped out the Herero people, and buried the dead from the camps in mass graves on the outskirts of cities. The first Genocide of the 20th Century remains completely erased from history. Germany did not officially recognize the genocide until 2007, but their statement was that the genocide occurred when the Herero were encircled, not when they were put into concentration camps. Tourists today, completely unaware of the country’s history, use the sand dunes created by the mass graves for recreational activities like racing and all-wheel driving. It is not uncommon for people to find human bones as they do so.
Many of the soldiers who fought for Germany in the war eventually became prominent figures during Nazi rule. The German general who orchestrated the genocide returned to Germany and found an understudy who he believed to be a prodigy. He became determined to teach him everything he knew. He believed in his understudy so much that he even leant him $60,000 to buy a newspaper that would eventually serve as a propaganda machine. The name of the understudy was Adolf Hitler.
After Germany lost World War I, the League of Nations took all of its colonies, and gave German South-West Africa, what Namibia was named at the time, to South Africa. Since Namibia was technically a part of South Africa, the brutal Apartheid regime occurred here as well. The combination of genocide and apartheid have left black Namibians just as disenfranchised as black South Africans. Namibia gained its independence in 1990, and that is when Apartheid ended here. Every single president of Namibia has come from the group that led the armed resistance against South African troops during Apartheid.
We have spent the last three days camping on a private conservation reserve that belongs to the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). Namibia is the country in the world that has the largest remaining number of wild cheetahs in the world (~1200 of the ~8000-9000 left in the world), and much of the conservation efforts have been spearheaded by CCF.
Two cheetahs affectionately rubbing faces right in front of us (!!)
Their facilities are incredible. We were able to tour their genetics lab, pharmacy, scat (aka animal poop) lab, veterinary clinic, canine training farm and museum.
Lindsey Reitinger and I cuddling with a doggo trained by CCF to protect livestock from predators.
Cheetahs are a remarkable species that I never knew I loved so much until now. Cheetahs face extinction for two major reasons: the fact that they are the only large cat that is a day-time hunter and the demand for them in the illegal pet trade.
Everything about a cheetah is designed for speed. Unlike other predators, they do not rely on stealth of strength for a kill. Instead, they rely purely on their ability to outrun every single land animal on earth. The combination of the facts that they hunt during the day and don’t hide when they are makes them particularly easy for farmers to spot, and they are killed by farmers who think cheetahs are killing all of their livestock, though this is usually not the case.
For starters, cheetahs don’t actually like livestock meat, it’s not nutritious enough for them so they’ll only eat it as a last resort. Secondly, cheetahs are awful at fighting, but it is not uncommon for them to scavenge the carcass another predator left behind. Thus, if a lion or a leopard kills a cow and then eats its fill, but the animal did its eating at night, the next day when the farmer comes out he may see a cheetah eating what the other predator left behind, and wrongfully assume the cheetah killed his cow and then kill the cheetah.
The other major threat to cheetahs is the illegal pet trade. Until the 20th century, cheetahs were thought to be dogs, not cats, because of how relatively easy it is to domesticate them. In fact, it was legal to have them as a pet until 6 years ago here in Namibia.
A CCF caregiver preparing cheetahs for a demo speed run
Captivity is bad for cheetahs for several reasons. For one, in order for the cheetah to be successfully domesticated, it has to be cared for in a very specific, detailed and expensive way, and to avoid becoming violent later in life, must be accustomed to humans from a ridiculously young age (usually <2 weeks old). Cheetahs are also the surviving descendants of a genetic bottleneck, so every single individual animals’ DNA is vital for the future success of the species. Taking the animal out of the wilderness and into captivity takes that cheetah’s priceless genes out of the system and reduces genetic diversity.
Cheetahs already suffer from many genetics-related disadvantages. They live very short lives (in the wilderness usually 8-10 years). 80% of baby cheetahs don’t make it to two months. Many are born with physical mutations, like two heads, 6 legs and three tails, that kill them quickly.
This morning, our final activity with CCF was watching a Cheetah-Run. CCF has a course set up in one of their fields where cheetahs can chase a toy a remarkably small distance from spectators.
Imagine seeing the fastest land animal on earth flashing full-speed at most one meter (!) in front of you. That is what we witnessed today. Cheetahs are nimble and almost scary thin, but when they’re flashing by it sounds like a horse galloping on steroids. “Mad crack,” as my TA from Ireland would say. To be frank, the cheetah run rivaled the rhino microchipping on the epicness scale.
21 Oct 2018
The famous Sand Dunes of the sand sea within the hyper-arid Namib Desert, where we studied !nara population health and distribution.
Some of the metrics we used to determine overall population health were average !nara height and diameter, which we are measuring for one !nara mound here.
Our team exploring the coastal delta !nara populations approaching the Atlantic Ocean.
