ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a herding culture in northern Namibia. OvaHimba inhabit the arid, mountainous southwestern comer of Namibia and the adjoining areas of South-Angola. Among the various peoples in northern Namibia, a wide arsenal of names exists to indicate the size and form of horns and the colour or colour pattern of sheep, goats and cattle. The cattle post is associated with dessication, with the dry season, even with 'hunger' or, from the Himba point of view, the 'absence of milk.' Cattle are bodies of power, but they are neither an embodiment of a false consciousness, nor an embodied projection of desire. In the inner enclosure erected by the head of the household, the animals are milked twice daily by the women in the village. Usually, cattle are milked by the women from the homestead, in the compound's inner cattle enclosure erected by the man.
