A collection of short essays based on my first years of research and life amongst the Ovahimba communities of Namibia and Angola.

Tales From the Ongumbati explore the human adventure of an ethnographer settling with a family of African tribesmen and women, the encounter with the Ovahimba, an extraordinary people, who observe ancestral traditions and possess a vast and complex thought system. As intimate accounts based on real life characters, writing the Tales was a means of coming to grips with the foreignness of the world in which I lived. They explore the development of my relationship as fieldworker with the Headman of Etanga and his extended family and relations.