Bwabwata National Park

One hippo, one sable: the park the army left behind

In 1978 somebody surveyed the game of what was then the Caprivi Game Park. The whole result fits in a sentence: one breeding herd of 35 elephants, a single sable, a small herd of red lechwe and one hippo. The ministry prints those figures in its own fact sheet next to its later counts: at least 340 resident elephants with thousands more passing through, 277 sable and about 350 hippos.

The gap between those two sets of numbers is the story of this park. It had been a reserve on paper since 1963 and a game park since 1968, but nobody managed any wildlife in it. It was a closed security zone, first under the South African police and then the army.

Buffalo, Omega and a lion called Teddy

On the Okavango side was Buffalo, home of 32 Battalion, which Colonel Jan Breytenbach put together in 1975 out of Angolan soldiers. The headquarters sat 200 km west in Rundu, but the men trained and lived at Buffalo, with a village called Pica Pau for their families. Halfway along the strip was Omega, base of 31 Battalion, raised in 1974 by Colonel Delville Linford from Khwe and !Xun men, many of whom had already served with the Portuguese in Angola.

On the Kwando side the special forces had Fort Doppies, and Fort Doppies had a lion. Teddy was the Recces’ mascot, and a photograph from about 1980 shows him playing in the Kwando with an operator named Obie Oberholster. A man whose father held the Caprivi concession until 1978 wrote on an overlanding forum that Teddy “was ours” until about 18 or 20 months old. That is one man’s account. The military history writer who published the photograph was asked by a reader what became of the lion and did not know.

When the army pulled out ahead of independence in 1990, several thousand San soldiers and their families went with it and were resettled at Schmidtsdrift in South Africa’s Northern Cape. The ones who stayed are the people you pass on the B8 today: about 4,000 Khwe in ten villages, as The Namibian put it in 2006. Their chief, Kippi George, died in December 2000 and they went more than five years without one, until Ben Ngobara was elected at Omega 1 in May 2006.

The bases are still there, more or less. In the Buffalo core area the ruins of the old station stand in the bush, and impala and kudu wander through them. The lodge at Nambwa was built on army ground and keeps the small relics its builders turned up on show in its library. In October 2026 guides at Divundu told The Namibian that the ministry had closed tracks along the Okavango, some of them in use for more than 25 years. The ministry says only illegal tracks were shut.

A highway you can cross without noticing the park

One overlander wrote that you can drive the B8 and never realise you are in a national park. The road signs warning of elephants, and one of wild dogs, are the main clue. In 2013 a pack denned 500 metres from the tar and lost six pups to traffic. Lise Hanssen, who has studied the big carnivores here since 1999, put the spotted hyenas at one full clan and parts of three others: 15 to 25 animals in the entire park, all tied to the two rivers.

The road has darker dates. On 3 January 2000, during the last years of the Angolan war, gunmen ambushed a French family’s car on it and killed their three children. At least five such ambushes were recorded between 1999 and 2002. And on 29 November 2013 a Mozambican airliner on its way from Maputo to Luanda came down in the park with 33 people on board. A helicopter search was called off in heavy rain, there were no proper roads to the place, and the burnt-out wreck was only found the next day. Investigators later concluded the captain had flown it into the ground deliberately.

Lions by ear, wild dogs by luck

Be realistic about cats. One magazine writer at Mahango in 2015 reported a roar close enough to send her companions running for the car, and no lion to go with it. A photographer who worked with Hanssen across the wider Zambezi region that year wrote that even she had never seen its lions except on her research cameras. His own five camera traps ran for three months and caught lions twice.

Numbers have been topped up by hand. In June 2017 two young males caught on farmland in Omaheke were sent some 1,400 km by road for release in the Buffalo core area. It does not always take: two lionesses and four cubs moved into the park in May 2025 after killing cattle were back within days, having crossed the B8 near the Kwando gate. One magazine writer did find a lioness and two males in Buffalo, then sat three hours bogged in mud 50 metres from them in the rain.

The Kwando side gives better odds. Among travellers who stayed at Nambwa and reported back to one British operator, about a third saw lion and fewer than a quarter saw wild dog, though one party in May 2024 counted 13 dogs. Nearly everybody saw elephant and hippo. One camper at Nambwa described a cow and her small calf feeding over the campsite while branches and leaves rained down around the awning.

Counted on foot

Game here is counted by walking. On one day in September 2011, teams of ministry rangers and community game guards across the region covered about 800 km between them, on routes of 3 to 25 km, writing down every animal and every track less than a day old. In the park the guards belong to the Kyaramacan association, set up by the park’s residents in 2004.

There is a harder side to the guarding. Between September and December 2016 the park lost 24 elephants to poachers. In February 2018 two German visitors drove on when armed men who did not look official to them tried to stop their hired car. The men were an anti-poaching unit, shots were fired, and police later found a bullet in the canopy. Nobody was hurt.