The man on the dusty roadside sits,
he is playing on the edge of nothingness,
legs folded like fallen acacia trunks,
his fingers dance on the Ombindu.
The goatskin still smells of last season’s rains.
His notes rising like ghosts, thin and unrelenting,
carrying the weight of a thousand dunes.
Around him—Katutura breathes, a lungful of borrowed time and diesel.
The air is dense with the yeast of unrisen bread vendors shouting, taxis screeching.
A boy down the street sells his sister’s braids for a sip of tombo.
His back leans against a wall
painted with faded murals—
scenes of liberation marches,
raised fists blurred by the years.
The scar on his temple glistens,
a thin white river snaking
from a time he won’t speak of—
a bullet, perhaps, or the butt of a rifle.
His face is a map of war—
each scar a village raided,
each wrinkle a name buried
beneath a thorn bush.
He is missing an arm,
his left side a hollow silhouette
against the dying sun.
I am a passerby, a shadow in motion,
and he is a sentinel of memory.
I see him first at sunrise,
when the dunes glow yellow
and the wind carries whispers
from the Skeleton Coast.
He’s not busking for pocket money.
His notes are the lamentation songs
of Herero mothers,
the cries of Nama children
stifled in dry riverbeds.
It is September.
The heat hangs heavy, like guilt,
and children gather near him,
their bare feet stirring up red dust.
They laugh, toss coins into his hat,
but one child—her hair braided tight—
asks, “What do you think
made him lose his arm?”
As if she could comprehend exile.
I do not answer.
I think of the Kalahari’s silence,
how it holds the cries of the Herero and
the Nama who fled from German guns.
I think of my grandmother’s hands,
scarred from carrying freedom
in baskets lined with suffering.
I think of how the Namib remembers
what people try to forget.
The Germans taught us to count losses in hectares.
We count them in teeth.
The man’s notes grow louder now,
piercing the clamour of the street.
I want to ask him:
Does your Ombindu remember the war?
Does it recall the fire-lit nights
when you hid beneath mopane trees,
praying the soldiers would pass?
But he looks at me, his face calm,
as if he’s already answered.
He wants to tell me how, for twenty years, his rifle spoke where his voice could not.
His peace now as deep as his arm was true.
The sound he remembers of it—sharp, metallic, final—how that sound that still echoes in his dreams.
But he keeps silent.
I drop a coin and walk away,
the sound of his Ombindu
stretching behind me like the horizon.
His Ombindu hums for the Welwitschia,
the ancient roots clinging to cracked earth,
their green stubbornness
a defiance of time.
“I am like them,” he says.
“They tried to kill me,
but here I am.”
Back in my room, I am left with his song.
His music broke me—not with sorrow,
but with something heavier: the weight of survival,
the stars hear it too—they’re just slower to weep.
A music the war can’t silence.
Mother says hold your pain like a grenade—pull the pin with your mouth.
But I’ve tasted the metal.
It sings in a key only the dead can dance to.
Here, in Katutura,
time does not stop—it swells.
The Ombindu man plays on,
his scars humming with each note,
his music unbroken.
Note: The Ombindu is a traditional string instrument played by the Namibian Herero and Himba people. It is usually made out of wood and animal sinew and is plucked or strummed to play varying sounds. It is used in storytelling and other cultural activities.
Johannes Shikongo, an alumnus of the University of Namibia with an honours degree in biochemistry, deftly blends his writing prowess with a profound compassion for performance poetry. He is a writer, youth leader, medical student, and poet.