Luderitz: A Charming German Village and A Ghost Town

It is important to note that Luderitz is an African port that looks like it belongs somewhere on the Rhine River in Germany. A German tobacco merchant named Franz Adolf Edward Luderitz purchased the port, a five-mile radius of land around the port and then an additional 1,000 square miles from an Orlam chief in the late 1800s. He also bought land near Walvis Bay, Swakopmund and other areas, hoping to find minerals, which he did not. Near bankruptcy, he sold all his political and commercial rights to the German Colonization Society, which waged an expensive war with the Nama tribes before relinquishing its claims to the German government. Germany lost the colony to South Africa during World War I but the German style of architecture remained. Franz Luderitz died a poor man in Germany at the age of 69.

Eight of us--Ginger, Joe, Andrea, Mark, Richard, Joan, Ken and Sara--through Andrea's negotiation skills hired two cabs to take us to and wait for us at the ghost town of Kolmanshop, which is being reclaimed by the sands of the Namib Desert. While shoveling sand for the building of a railroad in 1908, a worker found an unusual stone that he took to his boss. A shop keeper identified it as an exceptionally high quality diamond. After the discovery of diamonds, the workers completed the railroad in seven months, an amazing feat. By 1914, five million carats of diamonds had been found and boom-town camps were built in places like Kolmanshop. The town started to shut down in 1928 when diamonds were discovered in the north or south (we heard both). By 1938, all the equipment and workers had moved from there with the last residents leaving in 1956. During the boom, about 400 adults, 45 children and 800 railroad workers lived in Kolmanshop, which boasted churches, gingerbread trimmed houses, a hospital, a concert hall, mess hall, ice house and meat house.

The present-day room in the main building where diamonds were sold was the smoking room, the curio shop was the champagne room and the ground floor housed a bar and skittle alley for a German style of bowling. In an open area outside was where the workers shifted for diamonds. Our tour guide Eugene, a recent graduate from a local school who was born and raised in Luderitz, was giving his first tour. By the time he had finished with our group, he had definitely earned the designation of an experienced tour guide.

At the shop, which seemed to have been a company store, the residents could purchase just about anything. The shopkeeper lived in a typical German designed house with two bedrooms on the right side, a kitchen with a wringer for clothes and a parlor in the middle, a coat rack in the hallway with a stand for canes and umbrellas, and a mudroom on the side. Every day, a train in the town delivered items to the residents including 20 liters of fresh water per person and a block of ice per family. Eugene explained that the No Piddle sign meant no urination. The hospital had been furnished with the first X-ray machine in South Africa, which also was used to detect diamonds that people might try to hide on their bodies, going as far as cutting flaps in the skin on their scalps.

After our tour ended, the cab drivers were waiting to drive us back to the town. We walked to Felsenkirsche, the Church of the Rock, built by the German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation in 1911 with donations from all over Germany. The most stunning features of the church were the incredible stained glass windows, the ones over the altar being a gift from the German emperor.

We then climbed the hill to the Goerke Haus, which a man from Germany had built for his wife in 11 months in 1910. She lived in the house for two years, was not impressed with the lack of a social scene in Luderitz, and moved back to Berlin in 1912. The house remained vacant until 1918 when the Consolidated Diamond Company bought it for $10,000. We tried to put an option on it to buy it if it ever came on the market for the same price. The company uses it as a guest house for VIP visitors. Then we stopped in several gift shops and walked back to the ship, commenting that we had not seen many people who lived in the village and where were they. When we had sailed away, we learned that a woman on the ship had been robbed by a man who took her camera but ran off before he could steal her purse. We certainly have seen the good, the bad and the very, very ugly.