The Nama deity awakens.

The sky awakens. The Creator god, Kalrnga, descends from the heavens in a week long display of natural extravagance. Invoked in times of warfare and illness, Kalrnga senses a brewing conflict. A human-wildlife conflict in the region of Hardap, disharmony as part of the domain of their creation.

Kalrnga summons the animist spirits of the hardaps (hills, not the region), their creation. The animist spirits each represent the interest of a species in Hardap. It is a pity that some are absent, and forever will be. The remaining spirits convene in the Hardap Hill’s Gods’ Assembly.

The assembly has the power to motivate the animals of Hardap to ‘follow their instincts’, if they will. Since the last assembly, Hardap has been dominated, much like the rest of the world, by a new and immature species - the humans. They bring to Hardap docile and tamed half-breeds - domesticated animals artificially selected to be loyal. They work with the humans to encroach upon our land, and instead of sharing it with the ecosystem, they fence their graze and keep it to themselves.

More pressingly, the vast land the animals once had the right to is now lost. Fortunately, Hardap’s human leaders have had the wisdom to keep some land for the wild. However, separated from one another, these fractured habitats have comparatively lower biodiversity, and are more susceptible to abiotic shocks.

Animals generally respect the little land granted to them, as those poor souls who wander out of the conservancies, onto their rightful land, will be hunted and killed by the humans. However, some situations prove dire, and necessitate some incursions onto the relative abundance of human land.

This respect doesn’t go both ways, after all. Poachers have invaded and killed many of our kind both inside and out of the protected areas. Pale-skinned humans have come to shoot us, buying the support of the locals. Some argue that it’s better to have some of us die to protect the species, but will this be true given the declining trend elsewhere?




This is our domain. It has been for millenia and unless we can find a balance, we need to restore it. Nature used to be balanced, as all things should be.