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Two girls who might have been a few years older than me, covered their mouths with hands so pale that they looked untouched by the sun. Everyone looked as if the sun was his or her enemy. I was the only Himba on the shuttle.
My prospects of marriage had been 100 percent and now they would be zero. No man wanted a woman who’d run away.
Those women talked about me, the men probably did too. But none of them knew what I had, where I was going, who I was. Let them gossip and judge.
To them, I was probably like one of the people who lived in caves deep in the hinter desert who were so blackened by the sun that they looked like walking shadows.
I wanted to tell him that there was a code, that the pattern spoke my family’s bloodline, culture, and history. That my father had designed the code and my mother and aunties had shown me how to braid it into my hair.
“Why do you spread it on your skins?” “Because my people are sons and daughters of the soil,” I said. “And . . . and it’s beautiful.”
His anger was rightful, but all that he said was from what he didn’t truly know.
“That is something else. You understand, because you truly are what you say you are—a harmonizer.”
Only a blue line remained at the point of demarcation where it had reattached—a scar that would always remind it of what human beings of Oomza Uni had done to it for the sake of research and academics.
