A hyena got in among the camp’s goats last night. The baboons saw everything, but, as we pass the murder scene, they’re sloping off into the crepuscular gloom, hands in pockets, some whistling, others mumbling that they never saw nothin’.

Just one remains, perfectly silhouetted on the clifftop by an enormous platinum moon. Surrounded by a shimmering halo, he watches as I scramble to drag my camera from my bag, stretches as I fumble to attach a lens, then, as I bring the viewfinder to bear, slopes off to join his mates.

Baboons are the Burberry-wearing chavs of sub-Saharan Africa, an obstreperous mob of disreputable, scrounging troublemakers. If baboons move into your neighbourhood, move out - unless, of course, you live in Kent, in which case you won’t notice.

But enough of the baboons. I haven’t flown for 11 hours and driven for three days across the blistering wastes of the Namib to commune with baboons. I’ve come to Serra Cafema, the most remote bush camp in southern Africa, to meet the Tueizaras, a Himba family living two hours east of here, somewhere near the parched Otjinjange River.

Namibia's strange desert blooms

Spring flowers and 2,000-year-old trees - the extraordinary beauty of Namibia's landscapes

• On Namibia's Skeleton Coast

On Namibia's Skeleton Coast

On a mission to cross Africa on foot, Fran Sandham chose Namibia's Skeleton Coast, graveyard of explorers

• Take a train through Tunis

BACKGROUND

• Namibia in bloom after the rains

• Kalahari with kids

• Can you go independent in Namibia?

• Namibia issues elephant warning

Related Internet Links

• Research nearly 500 articles about travelling in Africa

Related Links

• On Namibia's Skeleton Coast

Descended from Herero tribes, the Himba have herded cattle and goats in the Kaokoland region of northern Namibia since the 16th century.

They’ve survived tribal conflicts, attempted genocide by German colonial forces in 1904 and a brutal war with South Africa. In the 1980s, a devastating drought killed 90 per cent of their cattle, forcing thousands off the land and into the relief-agency shanties in the gritty town of Opuwo.

Now perhaps 25,000 remain to fight an adversary that may finally wash them from their desert lands for ever, and, ironically, that enemy is water. Plans to dam the Kunene River, the source of all life in the region, have been around since German colonial rule - and, despite Himba resistance, the latest scheme has been given the go-ahead.

The Epupa Falls hydroelectric project will inundate 135 square miles of the valley, submerging ancient Himba grave sites and drowning 6,000 palm trees on which the nomads depend for cattle feed in time of drought. A road will be built to the dam. Workers, their families and those seeking employment will flood in, and, as Namibia switches on 200 megawatts of hydroelectric power, the Himba way of life will be switched off.

They call this the land God made in anger, and, considering its tortured immensity, he must have been furious. Draw a line from the Mersey to the Wash, and take every acre as far as the Scottish border, and it’s still smaller than this vast, simmering place, where the population, according to the Namibian government’s department of survey and mapping, is “less than 0.01 persons per square kilometre”.

An area of this scorched earth the size of Greater London equates to 15 men and a dog, so, when Jockel says that if anyone is out there, it will be the Tueizaras, I believe him.

The moon has dipped behind the ridge and the stars burn like backlit bullet holes in a black velvet curtain. It’s cold, and Jockel’s pimped-up Land Cruiser isn’t built for comfort, but it’s better than walking. That’s what old Oli does whenever she feels like seeing the grandchildren.

Oli - the eightysomething mother of Mengiyo Tueizara - told us where to find the family. She moved here to be close to her daughter, who is currently living just an eight-hour walk away through the desert. That’s just around the corner in these parts, and, because she doesn’t really like the heat, Oli prefers to walk at night. Barefoot, smoking a roll-up and carrying a gourd of water.

“Water is like money out here,” says James, a Himba who gave up herding to work as a guide and has eagerly joined us as a translator. “Show the Himba too much water and they become crazy.” He tells a story of an old woman who built a hut on the banks of the Kunene, near the Serra Cafema camp: “Every day, she came to the river to fetch water for her maize plants. She always came to the same spot, as many times daily as the plants required. We all warned her, but she wouldn’t listen. Then, one day, a couple of boys were on the Angola side and they saw her coming down to fetch water. There was a splash - nothing more - and when they looked again, she was gone. The croc had probably been watching her for days.”

The sky is lightening in the east, gilding the jagged dragon’s teeth of Angola’s Cafema mountains, and in the gloaming we start to see the beasts of the desert - spike-horned oryxes, dark thickets of giraffes, skittish kudus and athletic springboks - staring as we pass. With predators limited to the odd leopard, the brown hyena and the black-backed jackal, most ruminants find Kaokoland to be a benign, if rather minimalist, spot to raise their young.

The Tueizaras would agree. We find them camped in a broad river bed, emerging sleepily from a pair of skin-covered huts. It’s still cool enough to see plumes of breath rising from the cattle, and just dark enough to see the ember glow from last night’s fire.

They greet us with slow smiles, long, graceful limbs raised in languid waves as they make room for us beside the fire. Jockel has brought supplies - apples, sugar and tobacco - and as these are handed over, introductions are made. Tueizara is the father and head of the family, or so he thinks, but it’s his wife, Mengiyo, who wears the trousers.

Except she doesn’t, favouring instead Kunene a goatskin skirt called an oruheke. Her River wrists and ankles are encased in bangles, and her hair falls in a torrent of braids. She wears a conch shell around her neck, and the battered metal insignia of a Swapo soldier in the middle of her intricate leather headdress. Her waist is girdled by a heavy, copper-studded belt called an epando.

That belt is like a wedding ring, and though her 17-year-old daughter, Yeki, wears the oruheke, she’s a long way off the epando if Tueizara has his way. Then there are the 11-year-old twin girls, Karima and Jurgen - the latter named after Jockel’s brother - and baby Isaack.

As mother and daughter begin the Himba beauty regime by smearing their bodies and hair with otjize - a paste of red ochre mixed with butterfat - Tueizara takes James and me to fetch water. The source is about a mile away - practically ensuite - and comes from a deep hole in the river bed. James leaps in unbidden and eagerly starts filling water carriers, chatting incessantly in Herero.

It seems his eagerness to accompany us as interpreter has more to do with passion for Yeki than duty to Jockel, but he’s not making any progress with her father, despite having scrounged a dowry of 50 cows and three times as many goats from his clan. He’s eager to arrange a meeting between the two sets of parents - his live only six days south of here, making Yeki virtually the girl next door - and Tueizara listens impassively as the boy professes his love from the bottom of the pit.

Back at camp, there’s no particular rush to get to work, but eventually, as the sun’s first rays beam down the valley, Yeki ambles off towards the cattle. Her sisters fold the blankets, storing them in the branches of a quiver tree. The shimmering silence is broken only by the buzzing of flies, the gentle bleating of goats and the songs of the twins as they perform their chores.

Mengiyo puffs on her pipe as Yeki milks the cows. “Every day is exactly the same,” she whispers. Tueizara wanders among his goats, pursued by James, and Isaack, caked in layers of snot and grime, crawls happily through the dirt. Breakfast, when it comes, is a salty porridge of maize meal and sour buttermilk with a soldier of goat-meat biltong for dipping. Yummy.

It’s taken nearly two hours to fetch water, milk a couple of cows and rustle up breakfast, with numerous breaks to discuss the weather - it’s turned out rather hot again - watch soaring eagles, play with the dogs, sing songs and smoke some roll-ups.

Some time later, when they can be bothered, the girls will take the cattle to graze in one direction and Tueizara will take the goats in the other, but there’s no hurry. It’s as though the Himba have all the time in the world.

They haven’t. Namibia’s president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, has announced that construction work on the Epupa dam will begin “as soon as possible”, and Tueizara is worried. He says that interrupting the flow of the Kunene will bring misfortune to the Himba.

The trees will die and the cattle will starve. He’s heard that for every individual hired by NamPower - the state energy company - 100 more jobseekers will come. He says they’ll build camps on his land, take all the firewood and steal his livestock.

What will he do? He shrugs his bony shoulders and looks into the distance. He does not know.

Need to know

Chris Haslam travelled as a guest of Exodus (0845 863 9600, www.exodus.co.uk ), which has a 15-day trip exploring the Himba territories of Kaokoland, and the other main areas of Namibian wilderness, from £2,613pp, including return flights from Gatwick to Windhoek with Air Namibia, all meals and travel by 4WD. Or try Expert Africa (020 8232 9777, www.expertafrica.com ), which has a 10-day air safari for £3,877pp, including flights from London, all internal flights and meals

Times recommends

• Bogus websites are conning hundreds out of their holidays
• The complete last minute holiday guide
• Croatia: the flashing blades of Korkcula