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A Technicolor
Trip Through Time
Text: Nicky Furniss
Images © iStockphoto.com
Flying over the Namib Desert, you can still see the remnants of diamond mining
camps, with their lonely houses and abandoned ox wagons sitting eerily silent
and forgotten in the desert. Kolmanskop, the country’s most famous ghost town,
however, while long ago abandoned and now slowly being swallowed up by the
desert, feels just as alive today as it did over a century ago when those in search of
precious stones descended on it in droves.
Situated in the South of the country, 10 km from
the sleepy town of Luderitz, Kolmanskop sits perched
among the shifting sand of the desert in an area still known
– somewhat enticingly – as the Sperrgebiet or “forbidden
territory”. In its heyday, the town was a modern, bustling
settlement, and now, more than 50 years after the last
inhabitants left, is one of Namibia’s most famous tourist
attractions, which sees scores of visitors once again walking
its streets. In the no man’s land west of the town towards
Aus and Keetmanshoop, other things flourish in the desert.
Iconic quiver trees cling to the rocky soil and spread their
sturdy trunks upwards to the sky, while scores of beautiful
wild horses – thought to have originated from domestic
horses abandoned by German soldiers after the Second
World War – roam the plains, subsisting solely on lichen and
shrubs. In a place where things bloom and thrive in the
desert, Kolmanskop once did, and still does today.
The town owes its name, fittingly, to a sand storm which
forced transport driver, Johnny Coleman (or Kolman in
Afrikaans), to abandon his ox wagon on a small incline
nearby. A more suitable name, however, would have been
Zacharias Stad, as it was thanks to the sharp eyes of Zacharias
Lewala, an former Kimberley railway worker, who noticed
the telltale glitter in the sand he was shovelling near the
railway line at Grasplatz. The silly man shared his find with
his supervisor, August Stauch, a German railway inspector.
Stauch took a more pragmatic approach and tried to keep the
discovery to himself, but news spreads fast in small places,
especially when the whiff of money – and diamond dust – is
in the air.
Fortune seekers flocked to the area, drawn by what
turned out to be a rich alluvial deposit of diamonds,
washed across the sand by the retreat of what was once
an inland sea. Unlike the more famous diamond town of
Kimberley, the prospectors here weren’t forced to endure
the back-breaking labour of mining through earth and
rock to find their prizes. Instead they had the relatively
easy task of simply sifting through the sand – often in
the form of long lines of men, leopard crawling through
the desert with handkerchiefs over their mouths to stop
any opportunists from swallowing a precious stone as
they went. Like Kimberley, however, the newly found
fortune of the area led to many modern developments. So
while the “Big Hole” was the first place in the Southern
Hemisphere to boast electric street lights, Kolmanskop was
the first to have an x-ray station. While ostensibly for use
in the hospital, it was also convenient to check whether any
stones had made their way past the handkerchiefs.
While this mod con was impressive, perhaps more
remarkable was how the settlers coaxed life out of such
a harsh and inhospitable place where even the most basic
necessity – like water – had to be shipped in barrels from
Cape Town and then carted by ox wagon from Luderitz.
And with over a 1,000 people calling the town home at its
zenith, that’s a lot of water! The constantly shifting sands
of the desert were another logistical nightmare, but where
there’s money, there’s labour, so they solved the problem
by hiring groups of men whose sole responsibility was to
sweep the sand out of the town every day – think of the
frustration of waking up every morning to find it all back
Namibia's Most
Famous Ghost Town
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2. 66 67Indwe Indwe
ad
again overnight! And for the relentless heat of the sun?
Well, a public swimming pool filled with seawater solved
that issue.
That said, the town, perched as it is in a sea of hot sun
bleached sand, was certainly not the gentile type of place
preferred by German ladies of the time, and so the miners
had a tough time convincing their significant others to leave
the fatherland for the desert, albeit a diamond encrusted
one. Eventually they were forced to get creative. One miner
ingeniously painted an elaborate mural of palm trees and
ocean lapped beaches to serve as the lifelike backdrop of a
photo he sent his sweetheart. The poor woman was in for a
horrible shock when she eventually arrived with not a palm
tree in sight! Others paid princely sums to the ship captains
responsible for transporting their loved ones to Africa, in
order to persuade them to time their arrival in Luderitz
under the cover of darkness, so that by the time the sun
rose the next morning and the true extent of the desolation
of the area was discovered, the ship had already departed and
there was no turning back.
But while the surroundings were not perhaps ideal, the
town itself had all the trappings of a modern German town.
Elegant houses sprouted up, and with them came all the
amenities to sustain this growing – and extremely wealthy –
population. A furniture factory churned out pieces to furnish
the palatial homes, while a German bakery and general dealer
provided the flavours of home (including cheese and wine
imported from France). A school and public playground
catered to the settlement’s more or less 40 children, and a
well equipped hospital and power station to the needs of the

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inhabitants. There was even an ice factory (ingeniously built next
door to the butchery in order to keep the meat refrigerated), and a
soda-water and lemonade plant. The town, though not extensive,
boasted the first tram in Africa – because one could not expect
the ladies to have to walk through the sand on their shopping
excursions, plus it was responsible for making the daily deliveries
of lemonade, milk and a block of ice (for the refrigerators) to
every household in town.
For entertainment there was a four-lane skittle alley, a sports
hall and theatre, a ballroom, and even a casino. No expense was
spared and a full orchestra played at tea dances, while Europe’s
best opera singers and other entertainers made appearances in the
theatre. Kolmanskop may have been in the middle of nowhere,
but at its peak, it was the centre of all the action.
And then the diamond price plummeted after World War
1 and the numbers of precious stones found at Kolmanskop
dropped right along with it. The cracks in the shiny veneer of the
town started to show, with the death knell being the discovery of
a much richer deposit of alluvial diamonds in Oranjemund. The
town began to break up as the prospectors left to chase the next
big rush, and with them, eventually, the townspeople drifted away
too, leaving their empty houses in their wake. In 1956, the hospital
closed its doors for the last time, and Kolmanskop officially
swapped its human inhabitants for ghostly ones.
In the intervening decades, the carefully swept sand has
reclaimed its rightful place, burrowing under doors and through
windows, and settling in drifts in the corners of the once palatial
mansions, or luxuriating in the claw and ball bathtubs. The desert
wind and searing sunlight has stripped some of the walls of their
beautifully patterned wallpaper, though enough remains to give
an indication of just how opulent these homes once were. The
school teacher’s house has been almost entirely swallowed by
a sand dune, while the hospital is eerily silent, except for the
sound of the wind through the corridors. The midday sun casts
harsh shadows through broken roofs and across worn staircases
–shadows which are softer and more luminous at first light when
the town becomes a photographer’s dream.
In 1980 De Beers established a museum and restored a
number of the original buildings, so that visitors can now
walk through the theatre, admire the skittle alley, and even
wander through one of the houses which has been completely
refurnished in keeping with the style of the time. Tour guides
bring the town to life with fascinating stories of its workings and
its people, as do the evocative ruins of its once vibrant buildings.
Sadly, the tram is no longer functioning, so there’s no respite
from wading through sand in order to explore the town, but it
is well worth the effort, as every nook and cranny yields a new
snapshot or unexpected discovery.
Sittingonaduneoverlookingthelittletown,thedesertspreads
out in all directions, bleak and barren, while the bleached skeleton
of Kolmanskop sits quiet and unmoving. But if you listen very
carefully, you can hear the tapping of feet in the ballroom, the
clinking of glasses in the casino, and the sound of the tram rattling
by. Hurry! You wouldn’t want to miss the lemonade delivery!
Due to its location in a restricted area, visitors need to buy
permits at the gate, before joining one of two tours (09h30 and
11h00) offered each day from Mondays to Saturdays or at 10h00
on public holidays and Sundays. For more information on visiting
Namibia, contact Namibia Tourism on namibia@saol.com (South
Africa) or info@namibiatourism.com.na (Namibia) or visit
www.namibiatourism.com.na.