How Silence Holds Space

This is the third of four essays exploring silence. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

---

In Namibia Tom and I take a shuttle from the airport to the truck rental office in Windhoek. The road itself is normal—paved, two-lanes, straight, and flat through terrain that looks like the desert southwest—but we’re immediately aware we’re in a new place because the road is more populated with baboons than cars. The driver never changes speed and hardly seems to notice the animals, even when large males dash in front of us and bare their teeth from the roadside.

Our hotel, a standard tourist accommodation, is surrounded by a tall wrought iron fence with a guard house and a gate that locks at sunset. I feel safe enough to sleep deeply and appalled to be seen as so wealthy and privileged that I need to be protected.

On the drive north into the more remote parts of the desert, we stop at a grocery store. The parking lot is guarded by uniformed men to make sure vehicles aren’t broken into or patrons robbed of their purchases. Inside, grumpy women snatch bags of produce from our cart, weigh them, and slap stickers on them before returning them with an eye roll and a frown. We learn quickly that we’re not allowed to weigh anything ourselves. After the gated hotel, it’s almost a relief to be treated as a stupid tourist by the locals.

Bouncing down wide dirt roads, we keep an eye out for giraffes that casually stroll across the road in front of us. Instead of the herds of elk that graze in the roadside meadows at home in Colorado, we see the occasional dazzle of zebras, and once, in the distance, something I first think is a yurt, or a cabin. Then it moves, and my brain catches up: a large gray shape in the African savannah is an elephant, not a building.

Now, Tom and I are camped in northern Namibia between an inhospitable slab of red rock rising from the desert and a dry riverbed lined with acacia trees and bushes I can’t identify, although I’m trying to learn. This morning our Himba guide, Robin, took us on a short walk and pointed out ostrich scat and giraffe tracks, large tree branches broken off by elephants, and the holes of ant lions, one of which he dug up to show us. On the way back to our campsite, he picked berries from a bush with tiny oval leaves and encouraged us to try them.

“They’re good,” he said. And they were—red, sweet, and tender enough to almost dissolve in our mouths.

We spent the afternoon sitting in camp chairs, coping with 100°+ temperatures and flies that walked on our arms and legs, into our eyes and noses, and along the seams of our mouths. Their buzzing was the only sound until the sun went down, the temperature began to drop, and they disappeared. Now it’s silent, a lack of sound like open arms, offering space to contemplate this place that has awed and inspired me, and made me uncomfortable.

Immediately, I notice how much of an outsider I feel. I want to get to know this desert, its animals and soundlessness and the social mores of the people and communities who live here, but there is so much I don’t understand. Is it OK that we’re in this country, renting a top-of-the-line 4WD vehicle to explore the desert? Are we part of the problem—two more white people, interlopers with more money than sense? Or is our presence (and our money) a boost that helps this country and its people get where they want to be? Our shuttle driver did seem genuinely delighted to have us, especially after the global shutdown during the pandemic, a time he spoke about with heart-wrenching sadness.

What about the Black people I see in service jobs at grocery stores, hotels, and gas stations—waiting on white people? Am I interpreting what I see from the perspective of an American, someone aware of my country’s history of slavery and ongoing racism? Maybe I need to look at events differently. White people are a minority in this country, so statistically perhaps it’s appropriate and good that Black people hold most of the jobs, jobs that allow them to earn money that in turn open up more possibilities for them. On the other hand, white people hold the majority of the wealth, so maybe there is still an imbalance of power here.

And what is my role as a visitor? Although I’m considered middle class in the U.S., in Namibia I’m inconceivably wealthy. Does that mean I should tip lavishly, buy all the trinkets thrust at me in gas stations and parking lots and donate to every cause I’m asked to donate to? Is that helping, or is it driving up prices unnecessarily?

I have no answers to any of these questions, so I turn my attention to the silence that fills the desert, a silence that’s more complete somehow, as if it’s used to being the dominant sound, and unbroken. There are no commercial airports nearby, so no airplanes fly overhead. Few cars brave the washboard “roads” to reach the remote locations along sandy tracks so bumpy you feel like your vehicle will vibrate into pieces and leave you sitting in a pile of metal in the middle of the (blessedly still) desert.

In the Himba village of Purros, which is out of sight a couple of miles away beyond sand dunes and hollows, a few hundred people live simply in a collection of widely scattered buildings about the size of American gardening sheds. There’s no electricity in the village and no motorized vehicles of any kind which means no televisions or even radios blare, no engines rev, no tires hum across the sand, no horns honk. The silence is as big and real as the darkness.

I slide down in my chair and close my eyes, feeling the soundlessness envelop me. Briefly, I consider again all my questions about how to be here. I imagine laying them out like notecards in the sand, but as soon as I envision each one, it vanishes, important to me as a human but inconsequential in the massive silence of the desert. I let my confusion go and feel it slide away like a seed on the wind to disappear into the spacious stillness of the Namibian desert.