Two months ago, in July 2025, I walked through Kolmanskop, Namibia’s famous diamond ghost town. The desert wind howled through broken windows, dunes piled in living rooms, and paint peeled from walls where once the world’s wealthiest families dined and danced.
Kolmanskop was once called the richest town on earth. Now, it is a ruin. And ever since returning home, the image won’t leave me: a town abandoned by fortune, swallowed by sand, left as a warning to anyone who believes power and wealth can insulate them forever.
But what keeps me awake is not Kolmanskop’s ghosts of the past.
It’s the ghosts of the future.
The Sands of Kolmanskop and the Blood of Gaza
In 2025, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues to unfold, Kolmanskop feels less like a relic of history and more like a prophecy. The lesson is etched in its empty streets: hubris collapses, greed runs dry, and empires fall.
Yet the world refuses to learn. Instead of dismantling a genocidal regime, the West props it up. Instead of sanctioning war criminals, it rewards them with weapons and deals. Instead of stopping the slaughter of a people, it invents excuses for their extermination.
The recent murder of Charlie Kirk—a rightwing ally of Israel – in an act tied to Israel’s shadowy hand—shows how far the Zionist state is willing to go, and how far the so-called “rules-based order” will bend to protect it. The empire of sand is defended at all costs, even as those costs mount in rivers of blood.
The sands of Kolmanskop whisper: you will not endure.
But the oligarchs do not listen.
Ecocide as the Cost of Empire
War is not just the destruction of people; it is the destruction of the earth. Every bomb dropped on Gaza poisons soil, water, and air. Every incursion is an act of ecocide: olive groves razed, farmland burned, aquifers contaminated.
The earth itself becomes collateral damage in the service of power. Gaza is not just a graveyard of human beings—it is a graveyard of ecosystems. And the oligarchs—the Musks, Bezoses, and Trumps—are complicit. They bankroll the industries of war, greenwash their complicity with token projects, and sell the lie of “civilisation” while standing on a mountain of ash.
They tell us the West is defending a “rules-based order.”
But what rules?
The rule of profit? The rule of genocide? The rule of silence?
Kolmanskop was abandoned when the diamonds ran out.
Gaza will not be abandoned by its people, despite what Netanyahu, Trump, and the complicit West think.
Instead, the West itself will be turned to sand. If not literally, then metaphorically, as their empires crash, their illusions crumble, and their arrogance is buried beneath the weight of history.
The Oligarchs and Their Rotten Empire
Let us speak plainly:
-
Elon Musk, who poses as humanity’s savior while providing technology to military contractors.
-
Jeff Bezos, who builds rockets for spectacle while workers in his warehouses collapse from exhaustion.
-
Donald Trump, whose entire political legacy is built on feeding the beast of Zionism while stoking authoritarian fires.
-
Bill Gates, who claims to champion global health and philanthropy while funding industries and initiatives that prop up the very structures enabling oppression, environmental destruction, and inequity.
-
Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media empire spreads disinformation, amplifies propaganda, and facilitates the manipulation of public opinion to protect regimes committing war crimes.
These people are not visionaries. They are parasites.
They are the heirs of the same arrogance that once believed Kolmanskop’s diamonds would last forever. They profit while millions bleed, while the earth burns, while Gaza starves to death.
And when they are gone, what will remain?
Not their monuments. Not their rockets. Not their “works.”
Only ruins.
Only sand.
Only ghosts.
Kolmanskop’s Warning to the West
Walking through Kolmanskop, I thought of Shelley’s Ozymandias:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The irony is as sharp as broken glass in Kolmanskop’s deserted hospital – once the pride of Colonial Germany in the Southern Hemisphere.
The West, in its arrogance, still clings to this illusion of permanence. It defends Israel at all costs, imagining its empire immune to collapse. But hubris is always fatal.
The so-called “civilised world” will collapse under the weight of its crimes. Its monuments will crumble, its myths will be exposed, and the sands of history will bury it as surely as they buried Kolmanskop.
Conclusion: Ghosts of the Future
Two months after visiting Kolmanskop, I understand its lesson with greater clarity. It is not merely a tourist site. It is a mirror, held up to our world, showing us what we refuse to see.
The ghost town is not haunted by its past residents. It is haunted by us—our greed, our silence, our complicity. It is haunted by Gaza, by poisoned earth, by oligarchs drunk on power, by the myth of Western civilisation as a beacon of order.
Kolmanskop is the future unless we change.
And the final words of Shelley’s poem echo through its ruined streets, echo through Gaza’s rubble, echo through every lie told in the name of empire:
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Pics courtesy of Gary Eaves