In their ancestral lands in the far north of the Kunene River region of Namibia—a country bordered by Angola above, Botswana to the east, South Africa below, and first the Namib Desert and then the Atlantic Ocean along its western edge—live the Himba. They are the region’s last seminomadic people, pastoralists who grow calabash, millet, and maize but also depend on the milk and meat of the goats, sheep, and cattle they raise. The Himba live in compounds of two dozen or so people, in huts of mud and cow dung, around which they build fences of mopane wood to contain their livestock. But they
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