Going Native

As tradition follows for the BYU Namibia Field Study, all of the girls are invited over to a homestead of some women and allowed to dress up in traditional garb. For the Himba, this encompasses the red okre butter that they apply to their skin called “otjize” as well as goat skin skirts and skin head dresses. Then there are the woven belts, necklaces, and bracelets.

We purchased some of the otjize rocks in Opuwo and brought them to start grinding. Marahoraguapi helped me grind it into a fine red powder. This stuff stains EVERYTHING and we wanted to get to be as close to a real native woman so we wore our bras and shorts. I was the first to get covered in the red paste and those women put it on thick—especially on my face. Not gonna lie, I looked really scary with my bright green eyes and white teeth against a shocking deep red skin. Our translators came along with us and Nicki in particular said that she couldn’t even look at me for a while because I was so freaky looking! Eventually the look wore on everyone. The other girls put the otjize on themselves so they didn’t layer it on as thick, lucky them.

Wilka served as my personal photographer so I have lot’s of photos to document the occasion! I wore Sophia’s mother’s head dress (that made us look like little reindeer) along with her skin skirt.  Another woman put a belt and necklace on me and Karekatjo came around and dispersed some bracelets. I felt like a Himba! After a sufficient amount of pictures with our modest coverings on, we all went “full” native. Remember these Himba people don’t view breasts as something private or sexual so the women just go topless. While I wouldn’t have done it anywhere else, I went topless too. 

Okay, now pick up your jaw from off the floor. When will be another time in life where running around topless is not only considered socially acceptable but the women all looked at us and called us beautiful! Plus we now have a great story to tell: I ran around topless in an African village after native women dressed us up. Plus the red body butter kind of felt like a covering and toned down the shock of our white skin that has never seen the light of day!

The women laughed when they saw how white my stomach was compared to my very tan arms and then they were shocked to see that we all had belly buttons that went in as opposed to theirs that all stick out. I mean, they seemed like “egh” about our belly buttons but I was thinking a little “egh” about theirs. When a baby is born, they push all of the blood out of the umbilical cord and then cut it with a knife whereas we clip and snip them in America.

We danced their traditional dance of clapping and stomping in a circle. We even sat with the women and children while posing for a picture and played “spot the native”. I mean, we were all kind of the same color now but on the white skin, we turned out more red than the dark brown that they are.

So, after running around like crazy people (but actually not crazy to the Himba women) we walked back to camp. The men were a little shocked, a little scared, and a whole lot of humored by our freaky new looks. As I mentioned before, the otjize stains everything—including hair, skin, and nails. We had 6 jerry cans of water, 9 red-stained girls, 1 bar of soap, and a makeshift shower bag. We hung the water bag in a tree, split the bar of soap and passed it around while scrubbing off the top 3 layers of our skin. When the bar of soap got dropped on the ground, we now had pebbles lodged in the soap to exfoliate aka scrub off our skin. My hard-earned tan was rubbed off that night. Sad day.

Two hours later, we were still scrubbing the heck out of our skin and as the sun started to drop behind the horizon, it got super cold. I threw in the towel and accepted my temporary state of redness. Unfortunately, everything that I touched for the next 2 days got stained with red and we would continue to find otjize in some weird places. I forgot to get it out of my armpits and it wouldn’t come out of my nail beds! We looked a little bit like we had a skin disease for the next couple of days and as Drew, our Professor’s teenage son, would say, we had some permanent contouring going on on our faces.