Matthew Crompton

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 Editorial | Matthew Crompton

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THE GHOST TOWN OF KOLMANSKOP, NAMIBIA

It’s not often that you can shoot amazing landscapes indoors, but the ghost town of Kolman-
skop, Namibia, is just that kind of place.
Matthew Crompton

The Namib Desert is relentless. On the drive into the little seaside port town of Lüderitz, sand- Award-winning writer, photographer
wiched between the South Atlantic Ocean and the high dunes, sand blows and drifts over the and general gadabout Matthew
highway like a scene from Mad Max, threatening to swallow it whole. Heavy equipment stands a Crompton has variously called
way off, waiting to push the voracious dunes from the road. Give the Namib a chance, and it will Seoul, Sydney and San Francisco
quickly reclaim anything that human hands have built. home, though he thinks that for
an experience of the natural world,
southern Africa is pretty hard to beat.
He enjoys metaphysics and outdoor
suffering (sometimes both at once),
The diamond mining ghost town of Kolmanskop, a collection of guage term, ‘Namib’ loosely translates as ‘immense’ or ‘vast and
and is currently in the coffee regions of
skeletal buildings a short way off that same highway, is a testament empty’, which might qualify as the geographic understatement of Colombia writing a book about a four-
to just that fact. Abandoned with structures and possessions largely the century. month bike packing journey through
intact by its inhabitants in a rush to a richer set of diamond fields to Tibet, China and Central Asia.
the south, for more than 60 years the Namib has been reclaiming Stretching for more than 2000km in a 200km-wide band spanning matthewcrompton.com
the town, the desert now as much a part of the buildings as it is a the country’s entire coastline, nothing defines Namibia more than
setting for them. this, the oldest and perhaps most spectacular desert in the world,
its 400,000 square kilometres of area almost completely uninhabit-
That the Namib Desert gave this southern African country its name ed.
is no mere coincidence. Taken from an indigenous Khoekhoe-lan-

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It’s important, though, to qualify that desert desolation
as almost complete, because, for all its arid forbidding
dune seas and gravel plains, the Namib also contains
something that would draw human beings to live and
toil eagerly in even the most forbidding environments on
Earth: diamonds.
The story of Kolmanskop, so told, began with Afrikaans
Voortrekker Jani Kolman who, the ox-cart with which he
was travelling bogged in the sand, abandoned it there,
giving the town its name, ‘Kolman’s Hill’. Yet it wasn’t un-
til 1908 when a railway worker named Zacharaias Lewala
found an unusually shiny stone while digging there and
showed it to his supervisor, August Stauch, a man long
on the lookout for the diamonds rumoured to be in the
area, that the town as we now know it truly began.
Apart at that time of colonial German South West Africa
in the short-lived German Empire, with the discovery
of Lewala’s find there the German colonial government
quickly declared a 26,000 square kilometre ‘Prohibit-
ed Area’, the Sperrgebeit, cordoning off for diamond
prospecting a vast corner of the country’s area that had
previous been known only for sand and the rich deposits
Editorial | Matthew Crompton
of penguin guano staining its offshore islands.
Driving through the gates of the town of Kolmanskop
however on a sunny bluebird desert morning in January
2019, absolutely none of this is apparent. The guard
desultorily checks my permit (the Prohibited Area of the
Sperrgebeit still holds to this day, though Kolmanskop is
the cheap and easy exception to the rule – you can buy
a tourist permit in Lüderitz for less than £5), and I roll
ahead and park in the shadow of the entrance building,
keen not to return to a rental car in which the dash-
board has literally boiled. There, blinking in the bright
early-morning sunlight the town resembles nothing
so much as a stage set, the shells of sun-bleached
German-colonial-style constructions standing empty
amongst the sweeps of wind-ridged golden sand.
My intrepid traveller friend Sue Smith who, now in her
60s, has overlanded through Africa multiple times in
her long travelling career, had sternly warned me back
in Sydney when I told her I was planning this trip to
southern Africa not to miss Namibia and especially not
Kolmanskop. We shared a passion for photography and,
she assured me in no uncertain terms, that if you liked
photography Kolmanskop was a place for it quite unlike
any other on Earth. ‘You will need a spare battery,’ she
told me. And she was right.
Many visitors head immediately to the meeting points
for the included hour-plus guided tour of the city –
offered both in German (there are scads of German
tourists here) and, less popularly, in English – but I had
a different plan. With the gates just opened and the ma-
jority of the visitors ganged up for the tour, the sprawl of
the town itself stood empty and ripe for exploration, and
so, Fuji X-T2 with attached 10-24mm F4 in hand, I struck
out excitedly into the ruins of the town.
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My favourite thing about Kolmanskop, aside from the

fact that it is absolutely the most surreal place that I
have ever been to, is that it is not only a literal but also
metaphorical sandbox. There is minimal signage and,
with the exception of some buildings already in a state
of collapse so advanced that it poses an immediate
danger to enter, no prohibitions on where you can go. I
wander up to what was once the town Overseer’s house
and, stepping across the threshold into the stripped and
abandoned interior, begin my explorations.

The true richness of shooting in Kolmanskop lies

particularly within a handful of dimensions; its surreal
and often spooky atmosphere chief among them. It is
difficult to explain to a person who has not visited the
place how strangely affecting and emotional, how evoc-
ative, the sight of these rooms can be, abandoned by
humankind and filled up with drifted sand, the colourful
paint and cheery wallpaper incongruous amongst that
desolation and fixtures like bathtubs and toilets being
slowly swallowed by the actual substance of the earth
itself. Doorways stand open, the doors partially off their
hinges, giving onto rooms that are now more desert
than structure, as shattered windows offer vantage to
the austere and sunbaked landscape without.
beams and rectangles of illumination and darkness stripped floorboards, bare rusting corrugated metal and
It’s exactly that sense of spaces leading onward into into the rooms as if solely to give a point of focus for sprays of shattered glass like imitations of the diamonds
spaces, as in a continual sense of unfolding discovery photographic composition. I write one slot in my camera that, in the short years between 1908 and World War I,
that, for me, is one of the other strongest visual ele- to JPEG and one to RAW, dialling down my exposure once made this one of the richest mining settlements
ments of the place. With a sufficiently wide lens (and a compensation to preserve the highlights in the high-con- on Earth.
16mm equivalent is probably the very least you’ll want trast settings and bringing up the shadows in Lightroom
here), the opportunities for bold and creative framing are later if necessary. A little more about that time, though: Kolmanskop,
everywhere – especially through doors and windows, this now haunting and abandoned zone of collapse and
but also through cracks and ceilings and floors – offering Beyond light and framing, the textures of Kolmanskop decay, testament to the power of the earth and time to
glimpses of settings-within-settings as rich as anywhere too are endlessly varied and endlessly striking, both overcome completely anything that human hands have
you’ve ever shot. Amongst these endless apertures light in the myriad variations of the drifted, windblown and built, once thrived in a way that, from the vantage of
and shadow pours in, the desert sun glowing through shifting sands, and in the crumbling textures of the the present moment, seems impossible to imagine. At
the slats of crumbling ceilings and casting lines and buildings themselves – collapsing walls and ceilings, the height of its productivity in the 1920s, Kolmanskop

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was home to 300 German adults and 40 of their children,
the town boasting its own school, hospital, bakery, post
office, casino, bowling alley and butchery – this last of
course also producing sausages for colonists missing the
taste of home. There was an ice factory and a railway cir-
cuit for the town as well, bringing each household a large
block of ice each morning as well as transporting the
ladies of Kolmanskop down from their houses to do their
daily shopping. Regular parties and dances were held
in a large ballroom that also doubled as a gymnasium
with regular exercise classes; naturally, of course, there
was also a swimming pool. Fresh water was shipped in
by rail from 120km away and stored in huge tanks that
allowed the occupants to improbably cultivate lush lawns
and gardens in the midst of one of the driest deserts on
Earth.
The first-ever X-ray machine in southern hemisphere
was also installed in Kolmanskop, and though it likely
received some medical use here, its primary function
reveals the dark side of this one-time diamond mining
boomtown. The actual diamond extraction itself was
performed not chiefly by German colonists but by some
800 native Owambo workers, living in dormitories on
two-year contracts the terms of which forbid them to
ever leave the settlement within that two-year period.
Editorial | Matthew Crompton
They were often made to work at night, when diamonds
glittered in the moonlight and were easier to find, and to
wear special masks covering their faces as they worked
to prevent them swallowing any stones. They crawled
on all fours across the desert sands in organised lines,
plucking up any finds into jam jars. When their two-year
contracts were up, and before the workers left, they
were given a powerful laxative and their stools strained
in a search for any smuggled diamonds. And that X-ray
machine? It was used to scan the workers top to bottom,
ensuring in the search that no diamonds had been con-
cealed in healed-over wounds within their skin.
Yet even the immense mineral wealth here that com-
pelled the colonisers to mistreat their workers thus could
not last forever and indeed did not last for very long at
all. Though in 1912 the area produced nearly 12% of the
world’s total haul of diamonds (one million carats), after
World War I the prices of diamonds fell and, with re-
serves in the area becoming increasingly depleted by the
decades of ongoing mining, the residents of Kolmanskop
began to depart.
In 1928 the richest diamond deposits in recorded history
were found in an area near the Orange River 270km to
the south, and with that find the same eager prospec-
tors who once streamed into Kolmanskop to make their
fortunes fled en masse to stake a claim on those new
and more bountiful deposits just discovered. Their haste,
however, bequeathed the ghost town of today much of
its visual richness, the structures and possessions of the
increasingly depopulated town left largely intact as they
bolted for greener pastures. By 1956 the declining town
of Kolmanskop had breathed its last as the final inhabit-
ants left the once-thriving burg for good and the Namib
began, free of their labours, to reclaim once more the
ground that rightfully belonged to it.
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Today in Kolmanskop, the hot sun rising toward its meridian in
the endless powder-blue sky, I walk with my camera across a
human settlement that is reverting each day more and more
completely into desert, strolling past structures now buried to
their rooflines, the tracks of small rodents and even hyenas,
which scavenge here amongst the desolation, visible in the
undulating smooth-ridged sandscapes. Inside a lonely outbuilding
on the north-east edge of the town I note the posted warning of
‘Unstable Ceilings’ and climb a large slope of drifted sand that
covers a doorway almost to its lintels, entering the nearly sealed-
off room beyond.
Editorial | Matthew Crompton
One day, I think, and perhaps not so long from now, this will all
be gone, buried, reclaimed; a sad but strangely beautiful medita-
tion on the nature of time. And as I stand there in the half-buried
room I can almost feel the force of time flowing like an invisible
river all around me. A current as old as the Earth and older, flow-
ing ever onward, washing away and away and away once again
all that we have ever built, until the photos are all that remain.
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