Meeting Himba Women in Namibia
Women’s day... thinking of these women who reminded me to lead from the heart. In 2004, I studied in Namibia and Botswana with a small group. We met some nomadic Himba women who grabbed the 3 women in our group and created a circle. They just started singing and dancing, inviting us to join and also share our songs and dances. There’s a lot I learned from these women that has stayed with me but one is to meet from heart and spirit, which often happens when joining in song and dance. In this case, we didn’t have the language connection to be able to meet intellectually like we tend to do in the modern world, but it made me more aware about how it feels when we meet from our hearts first.
What else did I learn from our brief encounter? We visited one of their communities and got to learn about their lives. And in any sort of cultural interaction, there’s a mutual curiosity and learning that naturally occurs. From my perspective at the time, a 21-year-old half-Filipino woman who grew up in the US, I imagined what it would be like growing up as they did, which made me look at the cultural programming that I grew up with. The way they did their hair, took care of their skin, and made all of their clothes. They were connected to the earth. Every day, they’d not bathe, but with a mixture of goat fat and the red ocre clay of the earth, they rubbed the mixture in their skin and hair. That showed me how disconnected we had become in “modern” life- at that point in time, I bathed daily, washing off any evidence of dirt or earth. I used industrial creams and products which I never looked at the ingredients. It made me question why we use these products when I saw the elderly Himba women over 70 with hardly any wrinkles. I also was confronted with the fact that I didn’t know how to make a single article of clothing- everything I owned was bought in a shopping mall. And beyond the surface-level things, I could feel how comfortable they were in their own skin, in their being, in being a woman, in walking the land. That confidence reflected back to me my own discomfort and self-conscious I carried and didn’t consciously realize. I often judged myself and worried about the judgment of others based on the clothes I chose to wore, how my body looked, and how much I had achieved.
But beyond the many differences, it also made me feel this deep sense of connection. Joining with them woke up some latent wisdom of being a woman on this earth, some treasure that we all carry and yet can’t exactly describe. The burden of carrying so much, yet the lightness and playfulness of it at the same time. And the leader of their small group was the one who was the most open-hearted, the one who laughed the most, and was bold enough to speak her mind and open her mouth and belt out a song. She was the one who wove the connection between us all, and has reminded me time and time again as I have encountered new groups of people- to go beyond the barriers of what seems like differences to find the connections of being human.
2004, Namibia, Himba Women. Photo credit: the guy who took photos of us using my film camera.
The original post on Instagram was removed for “nudity”, so here is the reposted post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMK1i-7HeyE/
Well, I guess I have to acknowledge it now- the censoring of body parts. There’s another reflection of the modern programming many of us have. There are many cultures in the world where breasts are not hidden under clothes. And the reaction to this just shows the cultural programming.
I initially had a strong reaction- how dare they?! It’s an affront to indigenous cultures and their being! And my own personal reaction of not liking to be told what I can and cannot do in any aspect also came to the surface. But then I had to look at what I just wrote- that beyond the differences, there’s some element of connection that we can find. And I just shifted how I saw it all. I think of the full range of cultures where women are covered head to toe and those who hardly wear clothes at all. I want to see the points of connection- that underneath our clothes, we are all naked anyways! And that underneath our skin and nudity is our internal organs- we all have a heart, lungs, and a brain. And even beyond the physical body, we are connected energetically and in spirit! Thank you, Himba women and Instagram rules, for reminding me to see our connection and not separation.
