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Resting 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.”