Jim Naughten: Conflict and Costume in Namibia...
Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2013 9:48 am
Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/02/26/jim ... z2V8oyFaCiResting expectantly on the roughly cushioned seat of his motorbike, Jim Naughten was entranced by his first glimpse at the lunar landscape of Namibia.
“I felt as though I had been transported to a different planet,” he writes in the introduction to his forthcoming book, Conflict and Costume. The landscape was scorching and inhospitable, and for the recent college graduate, as foreign a world as he could have found.
On this land — marked by the remnants of the world’s oldest known cave paintings and still trodden by today’s remaining nomadic tribes — Naughten found a world of crises and celebrations — the twisted braids of culture and colony that have given birth to modern Namibia.
“Namibia was a country of contrasts and paradoxes,” Naughten writes. “I was hooked.”