Daan Viljoen Game Park

The reserve that was emptied to make a game park

The dam the lodge chalets look out over was built by hand. After the drought of the early 1930s the Damara families who lived on this ground walled off the Augeigas River themselves in 1932 and 1933, men, women and children, and finished before the big rains of 1934. In the account their descendants gave in 1991 it is the Alfeus Haraseb Dam, not the Augeigas.

Aukeigas, the name the park replaced

Before it was Daan Viljoen this was Aukeigas, in Khoekhoegowab ǃAoǁaexas, home of the ǀKhomanin, the Damara of the Khomas mountains. Karl ǁAribeb, who wrote a paper on the ǀKhomanin claim for the 2018 land conference, says the German administration gave them the farms Fürstenwalde and Augeigas in 1914. Under South African rule it became one of the Damara reserves.

Then the administration wanted the people out of the hills. The first group was moved off in 1947. One of them, Salatiel Seibeb, ended up as a headman of the Okombahe reserve, more than 200 km away to the north-west. Others were sent to Okakarara and Otjimbingwe. The last trek came in 1956, a drought year in which many cattle died, and it went to Sorris-Sorris, a farm tacked on to the top of the Okombahe reserve to take them. The Odendaal Commission’s 1964 report gave the reason: the land was wanted for a game park.

How many people? ǁAribeb puts the 1956 removal at 254 families, about 1,500 people, with 1,780 head of large stock and 15,820 of small. The ethnologist Oswin Köhler, in his 1959 survey of the district, gives a March 1957 census at Sorris-Sorris of 54 households and 298 people. Both numbers can be true if most families had already been scattered elsewhere, but I have not seen anyone reconcile them.

Named for the man in office at the time

Daniel “Daan” Viljoen was Administrator of South West Africa from December 1953 to December 1963, which covers the 1956 trek. The rest camp opened in 1962 while he was still in the job. The legal declaration came later, in Proclamation 19 of 1968, under his successor Wennie du Plessis. That is why you see 1962 on some websites and 1968 on the ministry’s.

The people of Aukeigas did not let it go. On 1 May 1991 they set up the ǃAoǁaexas Community to speak at Namibia’s first land conference that winter, and in 1992 some of them left Sorris-Sorris and squatted on the edge of their old land. In 2019 the ǀKhomanin chief, Juliane Gawaǃnas, asked the commission on ancestral land to have the park renamed after Haraseb, the headman behind the dam. The name is still Daan Viljoen.

The old graves in the park belong to this story. The community’s own account names a church and cemetery here, ǂArexas, where the last funerals were held in the 1950s. Whether the graves walkers pass are that cemetery or another one, nobody has written down that I could find. Walk past slowly either way.

Zebra that winter on a few square kilometres

One zebra study quotes an odd figure for the Hartmann’s mountain zebra here. Inside the fence their winter home ranges were only 6 to 10 square kilometres, against 10 to 20 in the far west of Etosha, and much smaller again in summer. A hiker who wrote up the 9 km trail for a Namibian travel magazine in 2020 only picked zebra out from the beacon, in a valley far below, where gemsbok turned up a few minutes later. The wildebeest were easier: heading for the waterhole past the office, early, on a cold morning. Kudu, hartebeest, springbok and giraffe never showed.

Expert Africa asks its travellers to log what they saw, and only two have done so here, in November 2018 and September 2025. Both logged giraffe and wildebeest. One of them also had zebra and oryx. Neither saw eland or leopard. Two people is no sample, but it matches what the Giraffe Conservation Foundation says its school groups see on their walks: giraffe, wildebeest, oryx, jackal, baboon, ostrich. Brown hyena turn up now and then, which is worth knowing next to the “no predators” line.

Blue wildebeest from here were among the animals sent north to stock the Waterberg.

Two and a half thousand children a year

Since 2016 the Giraffe Conservation Foundation has run its Khomas schools programme from the park, and it was still going in 2025. By its own 2020 count about 2,500 Grade 3 and 4 children a year, three in four of them from government schools that are often short of resources, spend a school day on a three kilometre walk learning tracks, droppings and trees. For many it is the first time they have seen these animals in the wild. Team leader Naemi Antonius called the work exhausting on hot summer days. On a weekday morning in term you may well meet a class.

The dam is often not a lake

Photographs sell a lake. Travellers kept finding a puddle: very little water in June 2013, the dams empty in December 2015, a small pool in February 2017, and a single duck on what was left when the magazine hiker passed. One guest in 2017 thought the whole view from the rooms suffered for it.

Other things come up more than once in visitors’ accounts. Baboons work the chalet terraces. The walk from the far chalets to the restaurant is long, one couple did it at night across open ground with animals wandering about and did not enjoy it, and a June visitor noted it was dark by seven and that you need a torch. The 9 km trail, by one walker’s account, is more about scenery than game. That walker did it in 35 degree heat in December and says to go at the start of the day.

The camp shut around 2008 and reopened in 2011. A walker in January 2016 still passed the abandoned old buildings on the longer trail.