#tribes documentary

Desert of the Skeletons. Bushmen People | Tribes

Documentary "Desert of the Skeletons. Bushmen People"

Lüderitz is today a sleepy, somewhat surrealist German colony. Just like a typical, small Bavarian town, but transposed to one of the most remote corners of Southern Africa, where the wind blows furiously all year round. The town is surrounded by almost endless diamond deposits, but these are transported directly to South Africa, and have very little influence on the local economy. But long before the arrival of the White Man, a nomadic people, once to be found throughout the continent of Africa, had sought final refuge in the Namib and Kalahari deserts. They were probably the last survivors of the hunter people that had been persecuted and displaced by the Bantu tribes who arrived from the north. Those who did not manage to escape into the desert were exterminated or enslaved, first by the Bantues and the Hottentots themselves, and later by the European conquerors, who rather contemptuously named them 'Bushmen'. Nowadays, the majority of the 100,000 Bushmen that live in the Kalahari desert are to be found in remote ghettos, in subhuman conditions. Some of them work for the White Men, or for neighbouring tribes, as hunters, farm-workers, or herdsmen, in conditions of near slavery, in exchange for food, clothes and tobacco.

Desert of the Skeletons. Diamond Mines | Tribes

Documentary "Desert of the Skeletons. Diamond Mines"

The Skeleton Coast marks the limit of a desert which covers a narrow strip, no wider than 200 kilometres, running from southern Angola to the Orange river, the border with South Africa. 

Like a coastal belt, the dunes and rocks of the Namib desert cover 250,000 square kilometres along more than 2,000 kilometres of the Atlantic coast of Namibia.

From the air, this mass of orange-coloured sand seems endless. These are the tallest dunes in the world, and below them lies the world's largest diamond deposit. It is a fantastic sight, which could only have been created by nature.

But every year, there is a veritable explosion of life along the Skeleton Coast. In October, the sea-lions come to these coasts to give birth. At this time of year, Cape Cross is home to the largest colony of sea-lions over one hundred thousand of them.  Outside the breeding season, males of the species are rarely seen they start to arrive at the end of October, in order to mark out their territory.  

The first European to set foot on this coast was the Portuguese, Diego Cao, in 1486. A year later, another Portuguese navigator, Bartolomé Días, with his three ships, sailed into the bay, seeking protection from a storm. After many attempts, he finally managed to land, and named the bay 'Angra Pequena' (small cove)*. But it was not until 1883 that the first stable settlement was established, when the German navigator and merchant, Adolf Lüderitz, reached an agreement with the head of one of the Nama tribes. Lüderitz bought the bay for a relative small amount of money and sixty rifles, in order to set up a whale processing plant here.  A few months later, Kanzler Bismark declared Namibia a protectorate of the German Empire. 

In 1904, war broke out between the Nama and the Germans, and Lüderitz became the first prisoner of war.