Usakos

The engineer's crates and the albums the women kept

At the end of 1905 a Swiss railway engineer called Victor Solioz and his wife Marie went home from Usakos to the Bernese Jura. The following year eleven packages reached the history museum in Bern. Among the contents were the headdress a Herero woman wears, a tortoise shell used for keeping ointment, finger rings, perfume containers and a knife of the kind carried by a man of rank in the far north: nearly three hundred things that had belonged to the people building his railway.

Solioz was chief engineer of the line to the copper at Tsumeb. It was he who picked this spot, about 150 km in from the coast, as the base for the work, because it had water. The workshops went up here, so did the workers’ quarters and the company offices, and the couple were living in Usakos in 1904, the year the war against the Herero began. Nobody has been able to show how they came by so much in two years. The museum’s own annual report for 1906 remarked that it had been high time to collect, since the war had all but destroyed the culture the objects came from.

What the workers’ descendants made of it

For decades at a stretch the collection sat in store under the engineer’s name. Then, in July 2023, the Bern curators and the Museums Association of Namibia held a three-day meeting in the Town Hall, and about 35 residents turned up. They doubted the museum’s working theory, that these were things abandoned by families fleeing the fighting, because the objects come from all over the country: Herero, Damara, Nama, Ovambo, Himba and San. That mix looked to them like the workforce, and historians who met in Bern that October agreed. As many as 2,000 people at a time built the line. Ovambo men came down from the north as migrant labour, Herero prisoners were sent up from the camps on the coast, and Damara women found work around the yards. One man at the Usakos meeting, Robert Gawanab, said his great-grandmother used to talk about working in the house of “the Swiss”.

At that October meeting the collection was renamed for the railway workers. In June 2026 Bern signed ownership of 286 pieces over to the town. Twenty-eight are already home. The rest are in an exhibition in Bern called “Destination: Usakos” until July 2027 and are due back by the end of that year, to a museum in the old Town Hall that has so far opened only now and then.

Four women and the old location

The museum holds a second thing worth the stop. In 2012 a small team that included the Basel historians Giorgio Miescher and Lorena Rizzo came to interview residents about the town’s past and met Cecilie //Geises, Wilhelmine Katjimune, Gisela Pieters and Olga //Garoes. Partway through the talking the women fetched their photographs.

Between about 1920 and 1960 Usakos was one of the busiest railway centres in the country, and the old location, where black residents lived, drew travelling African photographers. The albums hold bands, football teams, church congregations, school classes and a great many posed portraits. In the early 1960s the residents were forced out to new townships on the far side of the Onguati riverbed, the railway boom ended in the same years, and the old houses are ruins now. The women kept the pictures. An exhibition built from the albums opened in the municipality building on 27 June 2015 and copies have hung in Paris, Basel, Cape Town and Maputo. The originals stay in the women’s homes.

Champagne out, rum in the bottles

Two Reuters correspondents, W.S. Rayner and W.W. O’Shaughnessy, followed the South African army through here in 1915 and published their account in 1916. Until the troops got past Ebony siding, some 110 km up the line from Swakopmund, every drop of drinking water came by train from the coast. After that it came from Usakos. On 26 April 1915 a German force attacked the camp at Trekkopjes and was driven off with the help of armoured cars. Prisoners’ water bottles turned out to hold rum, and local people told the reporters the officers had set out from Usakos on champagne.

One of them later left Usakos at night perched on a locomotive tender, bound for Ebony and the coast. He called the little engine a coffee-pot. It stopped every few miles on the moonlit desert to get its breath while the crew drew the fire and boiled up again. Nine years on, in the locust plague of 1924, engines on the same narrow gauge were fitted with steam jets to blow the insects off the rails.

Blue stones and a bird you will probably only hear

A few kilometres out of town is an open pit that gem dealers know better than travellers do. By one account it began when a tin prospector’s dynamite opened a pocket holding about a tonne of tourmaline crystals. The pegmatite is more than 600 m long and pays out rarely. Pockets found between 2005 and 2007 gave neon blue stones so close to Brazilian Paraíba that a Swiss laboratory tested them for copper (there was none), then almost nothing came out until March 2016.

For animals you go north to Ameib, on the edge of the Erongo. The farm says giraffe turn up almost anywhere on it and that game comes to the dam late in the afternoon. The prize for birders is Hartlaub’s spurfowl, the smallest spurfowl in Africa, which lives among the granite boulders and nowhere outside Namibia and Angola. Pairs call in duet, mostly just after sunrise, and otherwise keep hidden. Ameib itself promises it only with luck on the walk to Phillips Cave, and birders at lodges elsewhere in the Erongo tell the same story. One, in 2013, heard it at dawn, lost it in the undergrowth, and saw a pair the next morning strolling past a lodge deck at breakfast. A guided group in November 2023 drew a blank four times over two days before finding a pair on their last morning. So be at the boulders before the sun is, and count hearing it as a fair result. The 2023 group also watched a female leopard drag a rock hyrax up the boulders beside their lodge early one evening.