Tsumeb is a small mining town about 250 km from the Angolan border. The city center looks very American, one shopping street with non-descript South-African supermarkets, a grid of suburban streets behind the main street, a small German church, a park with lawns and flowerbeds.

However, Namibia feels strange and schizophrenic after the Angolan exuberance. The original German settlers and Afrikaners (”old whites”) don’t trust the newly arrived immigrants from Europe (”new whites”), the blacks don’t trust the “old whites”, the different tribes (Owambo, Kavango and Herero) don’t trust each other, it seems socially way more complicated than it looks on the surface. This shows as well in the language people are speaking: English and Afrikaans are the official languages used in education, but in Tsumeb alone, 4 or 5 different tribal languages are used. So everybody masters 3 or 4 or even 5 languages, often without being able to speak more than one language properly.