Oshivambo hangover breakfast in Katutura

Sunday morning I was lying in bed, thinking about doing laundry (only thinking, mind you), when Wi11bed0ne called me, in her usual fashion, to tell me that she was taking me out to lunch at this restaurant called Xwama. Luckily this was at 11:30AM and not 7AM like she had called the day before, but I had actually gone to bed at 7AM that morning so I was feeling just as tired, and maybe a little hungover.

We stopped off at one of the university residences at Polytech to pick up Micheal, Darko, and this French guy whom I had found out the night before was twenty-three years old. We also brought along this guy that we had met at the party the night before, who was one of those Americans who claim not to be very American because they’ve lived all over the world and haven’t lived in America in a long time, but still act like a stereotypical American when it came to cultural sensitivity to the local.

Xwama is a restaurant in Katutura specializing in traditional Oshivambo food. Wi11bed0ne used to come here with her friends quite regularly. It’s a cute little building looking like a big hut, dirt floors, bright coloured fur decorations on the wall, waitresses donning those lovely pink Oshivambo coloured aprons, and chandeliers made of Tafel beer (very traditional).

We ordered a jug of traditional beer. Nobody was sure they liked it at first, but we were surprised to discover that the more we drank it, the more we liked it.




more, more


A waitress came with a different jug and washed our hands. I like this tradition.



Even though Wi11bed0ne and Micheal are Herero, they explained the table etiquette to us. You must eat with your hands, and only your right hand. This was difficult for me because I am left-handed, and I prefer to use chopsticks above everything else. Also, when you are pouring someone’s drink, you must serve it with both hands, but not before you sip it first to prove that it’s not poisoned. I like this tradition better.

We basically ordered everything off the menu: mahangu porridge, matangara tripe, wild spinach, more mopane worms, and oschivambo chicken. Not all of this was easy to eat with your hands (like, the pap porridge). Wi11bed0ne claimed the chicken neck as soon as the dish arrived.

The one thing we didn’t order was the smilie, that is, goat’s head, so named because when you cook the goat and the face muscles’ tense up, the goat looks like it’s smiling. It’s supposed to be delicious. I wanted to order it, but the guys claimed to be a bit too hungover that morning to take up the challenge. Ah well, next time.

clubbing in a car wash

I woke up Saturday morning with a strange craving for crass commercialism. I wanted to be immersed in cheap consumerist culture; I wanted to be surrounded by marketing ads craftily created by corporations aiming at my demographic with laser point accuracy, I wanted to have new and exciting products pushed in my face that I definitely do not need but still want. I wanted to go to the mall.

While still in bed I got a text from Taylor inviting me to go to the Biomarket, which is a farmer’s market / craft market held down the street every Saturday morning. Okay, maybe that wasn’t quite the same thing as going shopping at the mall, but it was still shopping.

I find the Biomarket to be small and I generally don’t buy my food there on a regular basis, even if the food there is organic, fresh, and locally made. I find that the produce and other foods here in Namibia don’t last as long as I’d like, mainly because I suspect they don’t pump as much preservatives into their farm foods as North Americans do, so instead of doing one big grocery shop at the beginning of the week, I have to get my food several times a week, often buying whatever vegetables I intend to eat for dinner that night. It’s not as convenient, but I think that’s how a lot of Europeans and the rest of the world live, anyway, rather than heading over to the CostCo and buying truckloads of frozen processed foods.

Even if you’re not planning to buy anything at the Biomarket, it’s a fun place to hang out on a Saturday morning, because it seems like that’s where the whole of Windhoek professionals hang out. On my way there I ran into Karen, who had picked up a loaf of bread during her morning run, and once in the Market, I also saw Allison, some of the Hashers, a woman from my French class, and someone from my office. It just goes to show that a) Windhoek is pretty damn small and b) never believe it’s okay to go out in sweatpants and last night’s eyeliner to buy your eggs, because you will be seen.

What I really like about the Biomarket is the Market Café though, where you can enjoy coffee, tea, juice for less than a buck Canadian, and delicious ham-and-cheese broetchen (or cake, if that’s the sort of Saturday breakfast food you’re into) for less than two Canadian dollars. Yes. That is worth changing out of sweatpants and putting fresh eyeliner for.

After brunch, Taylor suggested we head over to Maerua Mall, which makes me wonder if she’s been reading my mind lately. Maerua Mall is one of the biggest malls in Windhoek and probably the closest thing to the capitalist fantasies I’ve been having and missing of North America. The problem is that the stores in this city all close about the same time I get off work, and they all inexplicably close at 1PM on Saturdays and stay closed on Sundays so if I want to get my consumerist lifestyle in properly, I have to not be hungover on Saturday mornings.

After I got my fix of mall shopping (I didn’t end up actually buying anything except wine, because the liquor store would be closed for the rest of the weekend), I got a phone call from L, inviting me out to a party at a bar in Katutura that night. Yesssss. I went home, freshened up, grabbed dinner with Mark and Taylor at the Wine Bar, met up with A. and then headed for Katutura to meet up with my Namibian friends.

I have grown really fond of L and S. One of the first times we talked, the topic of hair extensions came up.

“If my hair isn’t long enough for the wedding, I might get hair extensions,” I mentioned casually.

This news excited them. “Gloria, you must get your extensions in Africa! We know the best places in Namibia to get them. We will take you shopping tomorrow morning!”

They are incredibly friendly, despite having known me only for a short period, and they do really sweet things like arrange for their friends to drive me safely, and then call me after to make sure I arrived at home all right. The girls also invite me out to events like this, where, as the only Asian girl in an all black crowd, I stick out like a sore thumb and they have to keep me company to make sure I’m having a good time, which is really something they don’t have to do, but they do anyway.

The party that night was at Druzo’s, one of the classier looking clubs in the Katutura townships that was part bar, part car wash. The party was in the car wash. There was a deejay spinning African house, another guy beating intensely on a pair of congas, and about a dozen girls dancing along. It felt a bit strange to be dancing under the bright fluorescent lights of the car wash – I feel like North Americans prefer to dance in the safe anonymity of the dark – but the people at the party sure knew how to dance, so they had nothing to be shy about.

The music was fantastic and I found myself dancing despite my shyness. I really like house music in Africa, which was a surprise because I hate house music in Europe. They seem to be different breeds altogether. At the clubs in Europe, I feel like pharmaceutical drugs are required to enjoy house music and the extensive robotic hand motions that Europeans employ to dance to it. House music in Africa though, seems to have less of a techno beat and more of a, well, African rhythm and the dance moves are more sensual than schizophrenic.

I found the crowd here to be a lot friendlier than the night before, which had a lot of purse snatching and asian-girl-gawking. Here, despite being deep in the heart of the Katutura township without a non-black person around for miles, nobody treated me like a circus freak for being "China", and that was pretty nice for once.

One of Saima’s girl friends showed up, who introduced herself as Tutu, but was introduced by everyone else as the Best Dancer Around, with house music running in her veins. Immediately she hit the car wash dance floor, and magically her five foot nothing body cleared the space around her as everyone stopped to watch and admire her fluid moves. She was soon joined by an equally short man in military uniform with a perfectly round potbelly that he used to maneuver his dance moves. I watched Military Man move around the club, and if he saw a pretty girl, he would go up to her and push his potbelly into her. If he was really into the music Military Man would unbutton the bottom of his shirt and slap his bare belly. It was quite the sight. Andrew speculated that maybe he was just a normal nine-to-five employee, maybe spending his day working at a bank, who on Saturday nights just likes to dress up in soldier’s clothes and dance in it.

There was a braai off to the side where they were cooking delicious smelling chicken skewers, boerwoers, and game meat. I also swear I saw cupcakes, but Andrew tells me that I was imagining things.

Andrew and I had meant it to be an early night, since we’d all been out dancing till almost 3AM the night before, but somehow we stayed late again, dancing with Saimo, Pa, Tutu and Pinehas, until Tutu finally drove us home that night. I went to bed with the conga beats still echiong in my head, and wondered if maybe by the time I go back to Canada I’ll have learned how to dance. Maybe one day I'll learn to move like Military Man.

my katutura glee club

I’ve been volunteering at Bernhard Nordkamp Centre, an after-school program for disadvantaged kids in Katutura. I went with these grand dreams of teaching the kids to play music, maybe creating the next Langley Schools Music Project in the style of Jack Black's School of Rock, or leading a Katutura Glee Club of lovable ragtag kids to glory and fame. Mainly, though, the whole experience has been a big lesson for me.

My first day volunteering was Pool Day at the Western Suburbs swimming pool in Katutura, where all 140 kids from the program showed up, full of excitement. And I swear, when I showed up, almost all 140 kids swarmed me. It didn’t matter that they’d never met me before, or that they had no idea who I am. About four kids took my hands shouting “Teacher! Teacher! Come swim with me!”, another kid jumped on to my back demanding a piggy-back ride, and two more climbed up the front, hanging off my neck because they couldn’t swim. On one hand, their immediate affection for me melted my heart. On the other hand, I wished that I hadn’t worn an old bikini that day, because the kids liked to grab on to my bikini top as they fought for my attention. I don't think Katutura needed the sudden flash of yellow lightning.

My next volunteering stint was at the Centre itself, where I was supposed to tutor some kids in what I thought was English. Instead, they weren’t really “kids” – they were fifteen-year-old boys needing tutoring in math. And not in the sense that they were behind in math and needed to catch up. They were there because they just seemed to like math and wanted a chance to do extra math. It kind of blew my mind. Back in Canada, kids pretty much have to be forced by their parents into extra tutoring. Yet here these boys were, glad for a chance to do math for fun.

It goes for the rest of the kids in the after-school program too. None of them are there because their parents are forcing them to be there, like might be the case in North America or Asia. In fact, many of their parents don’t know or care where their kids are. The kids show up to the program to do extra math, English, and science because they want to be there. According to the Director, Marybeth, some of them are just glad to be in an environment where they’re not being yelled at or hit. It just feels so unbelievable to me to see how these kids just soak up the extra learning, and it makes me realize how much we take a lot of this stuff for granted in Canada.

Anyway, I digress. So there were three serious well-behaved young men who were hoping to get some extra math help from me. Sadly, even though I am Asian, I am actually pretty bad at math. The number of times I’ve spent too much money because of my inability to mentally divide Namibian currency by seven to convert it to Canadian dollars...anyway, after reviewing the perimeter of a rhombus (what's a rhombus?) a few times with the boys, I just chatted with them about the Namibian school system for the rest of the tutoring session. And then told Marybeth that I should probably not be teaching high school math when i have trouble calculating the tip on my bar tab.

The next time I came to the Centre, it was Saturday and I was with a few other friends. We had organized fun activities for the kids: Julia would read to them, Allison would do crafts, Karen would teach them about aerodynamics through paper airplanes, and I would teach them how to sing Journey songs in four-part harmony in time to win at Nationals.

Obviously it didn’t work out that neatly. There were a lot of kids, really excited kids, and it was hard to hold their attention. They really dug Karen’s paper airplane project, mainly because they could throw the airplanes at each other. But my teaching them to sing was not a well thought-out plan. Forget the fact that I don’t actually know how to sing. Some of the kids don’t read, so I can’t just pass out music sheets. They also didn’t grow up with the same songs that I did, so we can’t just do singalongs. Also, the kids were fascinated by the guitars and were far more interested in taking them from me and banging out their own songs on it. My Katutura Glee Club will just have to wait for another day.

Oh, let me speak about the guitars for a moment. In my quest to be useful to kids, I’ve taken on the task of repairing all their guitars. There were three donated to the centre; the kids have broken all of them. No worries. we have Gloria and the art of guerrilla guitar maintenance. This too has been a learning experience for me. I am learning that changing the strings on a cheap guitar will change the tension it’s used to and the neck will warp. I’m learning that cheap classical guitars don’t have truss rods with screws that you could turn to fix a warped neck. I’m learning that filing down a fret is a bad plan for dealing with a warped neck. I’m learning that tuning pegs can’t be properly replaced by pencils (but whoever decided to try that was very creative). I’m learning that scotch taping the guitar will not improve its sound. I’m learning to build a guitar humidifier out of a sponge, which is kind of useful in a desert. I’m also learning how to play all my songs with a capo on the second fret, because nothing before the second fret works.

No matter. There’s something about sitting in my dark bedroom, struggling to pull a pencil out of a broken tuning peg while giant insects the size of my fist fly around my head, that makes me feel like I’m truly in Africa.

Today was my latest volunteer session at the Centre. This time, I was supposed to be actually teaching English. Unfortunately, I had about ten kids all between grades one to six, and it was unclear what I should be teaching them, since I had no textbook to work from, even if they were all in the same level. Suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head.

“Do you guys want to learn poetry?” I asked them.

“Yes!” they all said.

And so I taught them poetry. I taught them how to look for rhyming words. I taught them about couplets, free verse, and haikus. I taught them about internal rhymes. I taught them about homonyms and homophones. I taught them that their favourite rappers were basically poets, reciting poetry to a beat. I taught them that their favourite songs were poems, set to music. I taught them the rules for poetry, and that it was okay to break them.

I had them try to write poems of their own, and some of them came up with really cute ones, although the number of times they rhymed “dad” with “bad” was a bit alarming. At their prompting, I pulled out a guitar and played them one of my own songs, to show them how rhyming schemes work in song lyrics. I had these visions in my head of creating a Katutura Dead Poets Society, with these kids reciting beautiful poetry, seizing the day, and addressing me passionately as "O China My China"...

One of the older boys shyly told me that he had written a song. I encouraged him to sing it to everyone. He stood up in front of the classroom and sang it. I didn’t catch all the words, but heard enough to recognize that it was a form of free verse, and complimented him on his creativity. He asked me if I could play his song on the guitar. I agreed, took his lyrics sheet, and then realized that it was full of the N-word. There was no way I could bring myself to do that; I handed his lyrics back to him and told him that songs sound the best when sung by their original composers.

Maybe next week will be the sonnet.

katutura versus the hilton

Namibia is supposed to have one of the biggest disparities between the rich and the poor, and my weekend certainly reflected that. Thursday night, I hit up a birthday party being thrown at the rooftop bar at the Hilton. I may or may not have barely known the birthday girl; but i managed to look rich and confident enough to stroll past the guards.

I might have pushed my luck a bit too far with the swimming pool – I got politely kicked out after swimming for about five minutes, after a very nice bouncer explained to me that the pool was reserved for house guests only. Ah well. I was still free to linger at the bar and enjoy the beautiful rooftop view of the skyline.





I was a little less stoked about the drink prices. My one vodka soda cost me eighty-five Namibian dollars. Keep this price in mind for when I talk about my next night.






The birthday party itself was pretty fun, full of a bunch of random interesting young people, international aid workers and American government folks. We’d also brought along Tshuka, a young law student from our French class, who invited us all out to hang out the next night in his neck of the woods, Katutura. I’d been curious about Katutura for a while now, and now that a local was inviting us along, I finally had a chance.

Friday was Eliza’s last night out in Windhoek, so before going out to Katutura, we decided to treat her to a special picnic. We packed what we believed were her favourite food – chocolate cake, cheese sticks, Savanna cider , plus some sandwiches and salad – and headed over to what we believed would be the perfect picnic spot: one of the highest points in the mountains in the city of Windhoek, where we could watch the sun go down.


picnic feast!

To get to this spot, we got off at Bahnhoff street and had to hike up what seemed like an endless set of stairs. Endless. Set. Of. Stairs. They reminded me very much of the Stairs of Gloria in Barcelona. I don’t feel comfortable with my name being associated with so much pain.


stairs of pain

And then by the time we got to the top of the stairs, there was a barbed wire fence.

By that point we were too tired to do anything – go back, go down, go over – so we sat down at the top of the stairs and just had our picnic there.









After our delicious feast, we were far too full to go back down the stairs again, and perhaps feeling adventurous after our Savanna cider, so we decided to take on the barbed wire fence. I jumped right over without any problem, either because I am part monkey or because I am a tough Canadian girl. Eliza struggled a bit more, probably because she is not a monkey or a tough Canadian girl. We all eventually made it over to the other side without injury. On the other side of the fence was a public road. I still don’t understand why that fence was there.



Our next plan for the night was to go visit Tshuka in Katutura to go hang out in the shebeens. For a bit of history, during apartheid, Katutura was the township where the blacks were relocated to after being forcibly removed from their homes in the 1960s. Appropriately, Katutura means “the place we don’t want to go.” It has a sad history and a tragic name, but has grown into a huge community full of life. It is still predominantly inhabited by black folks (and is therefore very different from Klein Windhoek where I live), and from what I gather, the thing to do on a Friday night is to hang out at your local shebeen (unlicensed drinking establishment) with your buds.

After getting quite lost in the maze of Katutura (our cab driver was a coloured man whose clients were mostly affluent white people and therefore knew very little about getting around Katutura), we finally met up with Tshuka who had us stop by his house first. We met up with his numerous brothers and sisters and even more numerous friends, all incredibly polite and friendly and ready for a good night out. We also met his dog which was not so friendly, but that perhaps is what makes a good guard dog. Tshuka’s house was quite nice, cosy and spacious, which put to bed any preconceived notion that all parts of Katutura are very poor neighbourhoods consisting of tin shacks. There certainly are a lot of those too, but Tshuka and his family had a great place. He loves living here in Katutura. “I’ve lived in Klein Windhoek,” he explained, “and it’s so dead at night. In Katutura, there’s always something going on, and I know all my neighbours all the way to the next five blocks. It’s great here.”

Tshuka is a pretty impressive character himself. He’s only 22, but less than a year shy of becoming a lawyer. Not only is he incredibly smart and friendly, he’s got his own community radio show and he runs a Namibian law magazine. This Christmas he’s moving to Paris. I only wish I was as accomplished at his age.

We also met up with his friend Veejay, a sweet young Herero man, and headed out to the first shebeen. It felt an awful lot like drinking in someone’s dad’s garage, right down to the aluminum walls.

What I really digged were the 750 ml beers, which thirteen Namibian dollars each. Yes, I am serious: those giant beers were less than CAD$2. Remember, my drink at the Hilton the previous night had cost me eighty-five Namibian dollars. This could get dangerous…







Gloria and the big big beer

We moved on to another shebeen after a while which was a little more happening. Music was pumping, and people were dancing, including a mom and her baby and a middle-aged lady who had rollers in her hair. Hey, if you have to wait for your hair to set, why not spend the time shaking your booty at the local bar? This shebeen also had a pool table, so Tshuka took the opportunity to beat everyone in the bar, including me.



From the discussions that I’ve had with other people about Katutura, there is a big perception among many white people of Katutura being a rough, poor, dangerous place where you are certain to get robbed. And while certain aspects of it may be true, I’ve come to realize it’s such a one-sided idea of the township. Maybe all of the houses aren’t surrounded by high majestic gates, barbed wire and guard dogs (although some are, like Tshuka’s), but there also seems to be more of a visible sense of community. I don’t know any of my neighbours in Klein Windhoek, because they are always behind those tall electric fences. In the Katutura shebeens, there was a unmistakable friendly spirit – despite the fact that three white people and one “China” were walking into an entirely black bar, all the folks greeted us warmly and were eager to chat with us. As we left that night, women begged us from their houses to take us with them (probably expecting us to go on adventures rather than heading for bed in sleepy Klein Windhoek). I’m not trying to romanticize or idealize Katutura. It’s no Hilton, and it certainly struggles with problems of poverty, alcoholism, violence and not to mention a sad history. But a lot of times that’s all you hear, and if you avoid the place completely for that reason, then you are missing out on a whole different world.



Well, there was a gang of young guys that swarmed our cab as we were leaving, but luckily they seemed in more of a joking mood than a threatening one.

“Watch out, cabbie, those white people are going to rob you,” they called out after the cab.

“Hey, I’m not white!” I protested as we drove away.

“Okay, not that coloured one,” they corrected themselves. I actually felt pleased for once to be called coloured – it’s a refreshing change from China.




conclusion: $2 beers and playing pool > $12 drinks and getting kicked out of pools