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Source: IRIN
Date: January 18, 2008
EPUPA FALLS, 18 January 2008 (IRIN) - Asking the local Himba people where on the Cunene River in northern Namibia they would choose to site a hydroelectric dam "is like asking me which of my three children do you want me to kill", a Himba elder told IRIN.
In the event, the announcement by President Hifikepunye Pohamba late last year that construction on "the Baynes hydropower project [on the Cunene River] as soon as possible", was made without consulting the Himba, stirring simmering tensions over land ownership and ethnic chauvinism that first rose to the surface in the 1990s, when the ruling South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) government attempted, but failed, to construct a dam at Epupa Falls.
About 25,000 Himba live in the arid regions of southern Angola and northwestern Namibia, straddling the Cunene River, which is central to the Himba's existence and their continued survival as a homogenous people. The river rises at Nova Lisboa in Angola's central highlands near the city of Huambo and flows 700km south before turning west to demarcate part of the Angolan/Namibian border for its last 340km or so before spilling into the Atlantic.
In the successful resistance mounted by the Himba to thwart construction of the dam at Epupa Falls, the Himba's main protagonist, Chief Hikuminue Kapika, travelled to the donor countries of Germany, Sweden, Norway and England to drum up support for their cause. The result was a steep learning curve on the impact of such construction projects on a pastoralist economy reliant on the delicate management of one of the continent's last remaining wildernesses.
A feasibility study accompanying the proposal to build the dam at Epupa Falls cited the Baynes Mountains as an alternative site for the hydroelectric plant, which would substantially reduce the impact on the Himba's cultural heritage. However, Tako Hunga, a Himba elder, told IRIN that "We never agreed [to a dam on the Cunene] and we will never agree; we will never allow the government to do this."
At a temporary bush camp about 100km south of Epupa Falls, where hundreds of Himba were gathering for a funeral in temperatures slightly shy of 40 degrees Celsius, Mutjinduika Mutambo, another Himba elder, explained the significance of the river to an IRIN reporter: "As we are sitting here under the shade of a mopane tree, the Cunene is for us a big tree to which we can go when it is hot, for ourselves and for our animals - that is the beauty of it."
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