April 6, 2025
Luderitz, Namibia
Luderitz was a complete surprise to me. It was as if someone had airdropped a Bavarian village into the Namibian desert. The town is filled with German-inspired architecture. It's clean and with not a smidge of graffiti (which to me, says civilization louder than just about anything.)
The harbor is not very big, but the town has evidently gotten tired of being passed by. Persistent fog makes cruise ships cancel when tender operations are too dicey. Luderitz cleared a berth for us in their small commercial port, so we tied up neatly.
We were going to visit Kolmanskop, a ghost town left over from a diamond boom, but diamonds were not the first thing Europeans and Americans were interested in here. In the 1800's, there were huge deposits of guano from the African penguin colonies on the coast, which provided a prime ingredient in making gun powder.
Diamonds were discovered just lying on the sand in the desert in 1910 and suddenly no one wanted to mine guano anymore. (Can we blame them?)
The town of Kolmanskop was born to house the miners and it sprang up quickly. After barracks for single miners, houses for those with families were built and the owners of the mine had opulent homes constructed for themselves there as well. The town had its own theatre, library, bowling alley, tea room, bar, and dance hall (where church was held every other Sunday!) The hospital in Kolmanskop boasted the first x-ray machine in the southern hemisphere.
However, that was not an altruistic gift from the mine owners. It was part of the security routine to make sure the workers weren't sneaking stones out in their shoes, watches, cassette tapes, or personal orifices. I can't imagine how many rads the miners suffered through during those screenings, whether they were guilty or not.
Initially, the diamonds were mined by having the workers lie on their bellies shoulder to shoulder and crawl together along the sand, picking up the blueish/white uncut stones. Most of them were one to two carats. Their quota was a can of diamonds a day, which they could easily do at first. Later, they could only manage a matchbox of stones in the same time. It was time to dig into the earth.
However, the deeper they dug, the fewer diamonds they found. That's because the deposit of gems was alluvial in origion. Ancient rivers deposited the diamonds on the desert when it was covered by river beds. The gems were all in the sandy surface.
So with the mine playing out, so did the town. People upsticked and left, with the last families leaving in 1956.
I would've hated to be the last ones out. How sad.
It's also a problem a lot of small towns face. If the economy is relying on only one company, it's always a recipe for disaster.
Tomorrow, we'll be sailing along the Skeleton Coast (so named for the whale skeletons and shipwrecks that dot the shore) to Walvis Bay.
More soon...
Ghost towns are interesting. As you say, one-company towns seem precarious.
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