Mucubal woman with traditional hat
A Himba woman of high status
Mohacahona woman with their Kapapo.
texture, and attaching table clothes and fabrics to the sides of our vehicles for backgrounds. Otherwise we were out photographing in the villages to capture their daily lives. The Mucubal Tribe are beautifully dressed in multiple layers of strikingly vibrant colorful African fabrics that are becoming scarcely visible in modern day life. The women make square hats from the fabrics by using sticks to support the shape. Mothers use goat skins to make a “papoose” to carry their babies on their back. They are still living a traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle relying on livestock, due to excellent water access in their area. They were the first stop on a two week trip in the southern part of Angola. We started in Luanda, the capitol and had a night there before getting a regional flight to Lubango, a large city in the south, which is close to the main tribal areas. From there, we set our on our “road trip” getting to very remote areas - often driving on desert tracks when the roads vanished, through sand, over boulders and traversing dry river beds. Miraculously getting stuck happened only once, getting lost a couple times and thankfully no breakdowns at all. These areas have no cell service and there were places where we passed one vehicle and a couple people on motor bikes the whole day. The Himba tribe has very striking women, covered in a mixture of ochre and fat, called Otijize. They spend as many as three hours a day maintaining their beautiful appearance. The different neck pieces and hair styles
determines the importance and status of the individual person. The jewelry of married woman is a main necklace that has a shell or cone shell, which symbolizes marriage and is strung with iron and ostrich egg beads. Their ankles are covered with iron bracelets. On their head they wear an ornate headpiece called the Erembe, which resembles cattle horns. Their wrists are banded with coils of iron and plastic etched bands. Their hair is braided with mixture of animal hair, cow dung and ochre. Unmarried men wear a simple braid toward the back of their heads. Village life is simple with the young girls tending to herding and milking the goats and the women cooking a goat milk and flour or maize porridge to feed their families. The Mohacahona are another tribe that lives a nomadic life. The tribe we went to see one morning was in a very established village with a large cattle kraal and goat enclosures. They had sturdy huts and were busy storing large amounts of maize in them. The next afternoon we decided to go back and photograph them in the afternoon light and the village was deserted! We couldn’t figure out how a village of 80 or so people could just disappear like that. But in this area, people wander from village to village and eventually venture back at some point. The women also have very intricate hairstyles. The women’s haircut is made with a mix of cow dungs, fat, coal, and herbs for the fragrance. Their traditional headdress is called Kapapo, and decorated with colorful barrettes, beads, leather, aluminum strips from cans and jewelry.
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