“It was a brutal murder, that much is certain.” He’s sounding like Hercule Poirot with an Afrikaans accent, but Fanie du Preez does indeed have a point. Scattered around the orange sand lies a human skeleton; a thighbone here, a cheekbone there, hand and foot bones all over, a rib cage emerges from the sun-baked clay. Next to it, the skull: ivory-coloured, dark holes where the eyes once were, an absent nose and a nearly intact set of teeth. Du Preez points out a gaping hole above the left ear and picks up a big flintstone, round and black as a cannonball. “This might well be the murder weapon.”
This is what may have happened, roughly a millennium ago. A young Hottentot got into a tribal dispute with a fellow Hottentot, possibly over the cost of a fresh harvest of nara fruit or simply over a girl, the situation got out of hand and one native threw the rock at the other, who was killed instantly and either buried here by his family or just left in the desert to disappear under the shifting sands of the wandering dunes. Now, centuries later, this and two other skeletons have been exposed by the elements, giving Du Preez the rare opportunity to let his guests peek into the lives of the desert-dwellers of that time.
From beachy Walvis Bay, 61-year-old amateur archaeologist Fanie du Preez guides tourists through his backyard, the Namib Desert, a massive orange sandbox that stretches along the coast for four hundred kilometres. Transportation is by quad, a vigorous moped on four wheels, perfectly suited to plough through the loose sand – and certainly not as grumpy as camels can be. This is not just another adrenaline tour, though – there is no dune bashing at death-defying speeds. This is the world’s oldest desert, which attracts the attention of scientists and the National Geographic Society, due to its huge amount of centuries old, well-preserved human traces. The Namib is one great big archaeological museum under the blazing Namibian sun.
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