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SWARKOPMUND, Namibia—Once a year, Swakopmund, a German-coined city in Namibia, holds an unusual festival called Swakopmund Music Week. Founded by the protestant church, the festival has been connecting people across ethnic and cultural boundaries for 46 years.
For a couple of days each year, the festival bridges a social abyss between blacks and whites, still in the process of coming together after apartheid. The festival took place a few weeks ago, from Dec. 9-18, 2011 and was more successful than ever.
Swakopmund is situated in southwest Africa, on the edge of the torrid Namib Desert, ironically where other opposites meet: Antarctic currents and strong winds are cooling down the Atlantic Ocean on this coast.
Germans founded the small coastal city in 1892 when Namibia was a German colony. The city reached the peak of its fame in 2005—when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lived here for half a year.
The Germans Organize Music Week
Although the festival is sustained by an association, making it all happen falls to Christiane Berker, who is in charge of Music Week. The tall grey-curled lady, donning a baseball cap and a Music Week t-shirt, radiates serenity whether caught amidst a tangle of laptop cables in her “office” (improvised from a vacant classroom), or whether engaged in a multilingual dialogue of English, German, and Cape Dutch with her volunteer staff.
Traditionally, the festival takes place shortly before Christmas because that’s the time of summer vacation in southern Africa. The rooms of the Namib Primary School look a bit careworn. A paper note on the door reminds the teachers to be role models for their students.
Berker stumbled into the organizing team straight from her job as staff member because of her useful talent for organizing. When not coordinating the music festival, the 52-year-old psychologist serves the HIV population.
At the festival she coordinates the requests of 250 people: participants and musicians, instructors, and lecturers, coming from Swakopmund, South Africa, Germany, and the United States.
Black and white, old and young, play music together under the theme of “the way is the goal.” For a small fee anyone can register. Participants just need to bring their own instruments and music stands.
At the end of the week, the orchestra, choir, and big band hold eagerly anticipated concerts; orchestral music is rarely heard in the sparsely populated desert nation of Namibia.
What a Tour of the City Reveals
DESERT SOUNDCHECK: A Namibian cello player during a sound check in the desert landscape. (Rosemarie Frühauf/The Epoch Times)
The reason the music festival takes place in Swakopmund of all places is explained by a tour to the city’s museum. When the Germans landed here, they brought with them—besides their technology and infrastructure—their culture, which gave them a foothold and identity.
To give the reader a sense of the importance of music for the German culture: historically, an indispensable part of each German household was a piano. And, among the museum paraphernalia of uniforms, small arms, stuffed zebras, and meerkats, a document shines forth, in which the German Sängerbund (singing society) congratulates in the ’70s Swakopmund choral society on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. The importance of music is entrenched.
In town, Christmas LED lights hung on the street lamps, together with evergreen branches, reindeer, seals, and dolphins. Motley shop signs reminded one of an American town. Everything was covered with concrete. If not, one would have ended up standing on dusty desert ground.
The city has about 30,000 inhabitants and everyone knows everyone else, at least in the nearby surroundings. That’s why “Uschi and Diane” can run a real estate agency using their first names.
The Namibian state, however, has adopted German orderliness. Officially there are no homeless in Swakopmund. Whoever registers with the government, obtains an address in the suburbs on a street with street lamps, running water, and toilets, even without an income. Six thousand blacks live there in makeshift huts in the desert.
Next … The Finale Concert
