ELECTRIC TREES AND
HALLUCINATORY ANIMALS
Miti ya Umeme na Wanyama Hallucin
Arbres électriques et animaux hallucinatoires
PHOTOS: NUSRAT DURRANI
MUSIC: BRENT ARNOLD
You could be driving all day drugged by Namibia’s magic and intoxication.
Here, every sunrise is an orange masterpiece, every bend in the dirt road leads to a science fiction vision of pink rock, golden grass and and electric blue sky installed with a gazillion stars that burn like sparklers all day and all night. But the sweetest shock of this country is its gentle tribes and wild treasure of animals. Lobotomized by the cold emptiness of Western cities, Asian chaos and Middle Eastern sorrow, and haunted by the world’s general brutality to nature you drive through the savannah with enchantment on either side and not a car or human being in sight.
You feel sweetly unhinged; lost in the uninterrupted silence of mountains and the poetry of tires on gravel and birdsong when you come across a kaleidoscope of giraffes gliding across the skyline, impalas flying in slow motion across the road twenty meters ahead or a zeal of zebras lazily eyeing you through the ascetic bushes. As you walk through the amber desert photographing strange twisted trees you stumble into a herd of elephants drinking from the river bed, the muscular shoulders of crimson hills and luminescent grass framing them in a fantasy that you who have lived and died in subways and elevators and airplanes and bullshit conversations, could never ever have imagined.
So you soak it in, this surreal Godly beauty unfolding before your eyes, because it might be just a dream, a dream that is receding as we ravage the wilderness, kill it systematically and with no forgiveness. And one day all that will remain are the memories of this dream.