There are only two in 1,000 miles. They are called Walvis Bay and Lüderitz and are the only ports in Namibia, a young country, independent from South Africa in 1990 and which during the period 1884-1919 bore the name of German South West Africa. The founder of that colony was the merchant Adolf Lüderitz, whose name was withdrawn from the Berlin street map a few months ago to erase that episode a little more.
In Namibia, the name of the town was also officially changed to !Nami=nüs (sic), in the Khoekhoe language, although it is so difficult to pronounce that the merchant's surname has won the day and the city continues to appear on maps as Lüderitz, as well as the white and blue signs with that Gothic-Germanic writing continue to mark the streets. The visitor is surprised to see that this city in southwest Africa, 9,000 kilometers from the German capital, maintains a good number of art nouveau buildings. Its Central European-style houses and public centers contrast with a desert that surrounds it on all sides, except for the coast: an ocean through which Bartomeu Días, sailor and explorer, arrived. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot in the place in the 15th century, although it was not until the 19th century that the area began to be economically exploited with the hunting of whales, seals and the exploitation of guano. Killing animals and using gull droppings as fertilizer made Germany in the far south richer.
The city, which today has less than 15,000 inhabitants, has grown around the port and the bay. Walking through the center, on Bismarck street, a three-story building crowned by a 1914 surrounded by laurels attracts attention. It is the railway station, an infrastructure that has a history of suffering and death behind it. When it is known, the unique road that crosses the town from end to end, with a branch that extends to a dock, is not so nice.
The railway was considered a strategic infrastructure for the economic growth of the colony, although above all for its control over the locals, by being able to move troops more easily. In the neighboring British Cape Colony, its governor, Cecil Rhodes, a supremacist by the book, was clear about the value of the train: “In the colonies, railways are cheaper than cannon and have a longer range,” he said. In the German part, the first track was laid between the capital and the nearest coastal part, to the north. The branch from Lüderitz to Aus, about 130 kilometers long, was built between 1906 and 1907 using the labor of inmates in the Shark Island concentration camp, where the rebels who did not accept German rule were taken.
Working in very precarious conditions, without any medical assistance and malnourished, the statistics of this railway project ended up being terrifying. According to figures in the records of the German Colonial Administration, 2,014 prisoners from the camps were used between January 1906 and June 1907. Of these, 1,359 died while working on the line, giving a mortality rate of one 67% of the workers or that every 100 meters of track claimed a death.
The services of this railway branch experienced times of splendor when new stations were opened. They were built in mining areas where diamonds were extracted in degrading conditions similar to the works for the construction of the roads, to which was added a strict vigilance so that the miners did not keep anything they extracted underground for the owners of the the holdings. The closed Kolmanskop mines are today an attraction for the few visitors who come to the area. The sand has gradually eaten away at the facilities, giving the town a ghostly air, where it is still clearly noticeable that the differences between Europeans and locals were abysmal.
The 140 kilometers of railway were closed in 1997 due to the poor state of the infrastructure and its renovation was completed five years ago, although now there are no regular passenger services. The head of service, his family and several employees of TransNamib, the state railway company of Namibia, live in the hundred-year-old station. Now they see, very punctually, long freight trains loaded with magnesium go by to load at the dock. There are no more travelers or diamonds, just a long colonial shadow that is still present in a decadent city that has little to do with the thriving north of Namibia.
