Etosha National Park

Purple feet, a cursed tree and the lions of Okondeka

Charles John Andersson walked out onto the Etosha Pan at the end of May 1851 and, he wrote, within ten minutes his legs and the legs of his oxen had turned purple. The clay was soft, greenish-yellow and strewn with purple stone. Francis Galton, travelling with him, was more struck by the mirage. He could not guess the pan’s length through it, and thought it “must form a rather pretty lake” after rain. A day or so earlier the two had camped at a reed-choked spring that the Ovambo used as a cattle post, where Andersson woke in a cutting wind to find his quilt smouldering from a spark. That spring is Namutoni.

Seven men, 1,500 rounds and two memorials

The fort at Namutoni today is the second one. The first was a small block of unburnt brick and galvanised iron at a post left over from the 1897 rinderpest cordon and kept on to watch for guns and liquor going north. On 28 January 1904 it held seven Germans. About 500 Ondonga fighters of Nehale lya Mpingana attacked and kept at it most of the day. By late afternoon the seven were down to 150 rounds from 1,500, so they slipped away after dark. The fort was taken empty the next morning and wrecked. How many attackers died depends on who you read: 70 or 80, or about 200.

The Germans built the four-towered fort afterwards. The army left in 1910, the police in 1912, and it stood rotting until it was restored and opened to tourists in 1957. A plaque to the seven went into the wall. The park’s northern gate is named for Nehale. One battle, a memorial for each side.

Who was living at the waterholes

When Governor von Lindequist proclaimed Game Reserve No. 2 on 22 March 1907 it ran to the Skeleton Coast, roughly 80,000 square km by the later reckoning, about four times the park of today. The Hai||om had settlements at the springs south of the pan, and for decades officials did not mind. In 1936 the commissioner in charge, Major Hahn, reported that they were “part and parcel” of the reserve and were allowed to shoot certain game. In 1954 they were put out.

Ute Dieckmann spent years driving the park with Hai||om men born at those springs. The waterhole at Halali, opened in 1967, is not a natural spring. The old well, Tsînaib, is close by and off the map. About 17 km from Okaukuejo, near the main road, stood a lone buffalo thorn whose Hai||om nickname contains a swear word, because on that flat ground a tired walker could head for its shade for hours and never seem to get closer. At Homob, before the eviction, people waited under a tree near the waterhole in tourist season to be photographed, and were often paid in sweets and oranges.

Kadisen ||Khumub remembered the fence going up after the eviction and people arriving at the new gate to be told that whoever was outside stayed outside. One man, Axarob ||Oreseb, refused both the rest camps and the farms. He went on living in the bush with his dogs into the early 1970s, by which time his hunting counted as poaching.

Lions fed on Saturday evenings

The lowest lion estimate on record for Etosha is 150, in 1952. The highest is 500, in 1980, and the cause was a disaster. Fencing began in 1963 and closed the park completely in 1973. The northern fence cut wildebeest and zebra off from their old routes, and the herds left inside bunched around new boreholes. Gravel pits dug for the roads held water, the ground was grazed bare, and anthrax, always present, broke out badly. Wildebeest fell from more than 25,000 to under 5,000 within ten years. Lions, which shrug off anthrax, ate the carcasses and multiplied. When drought hit the springbok in the early 1980s the lions followed them down, to 200 by 1986. The 2018 estimate was 335.

Two lion places near Okaukuejo come with stories. At Leeubron, a borehole since closed, the warden of the early 1950s, P. Schoeman, shot zebra for a starving lioness and her five cubs. It turned into a feeding show that visitors could attend on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, until the park decided the visitors were the part it could not control. Okondeka, the spring on the pan’s western edge, is still among the places most often named for lion. One explanation of its name is an Oshindonga word for ambush, tied to 1950, when lions there killed three of four men who had stopped for water on foot. The fourth sat in a tree for three days until a policeman on patrol found him. Both stories come from a list of place names that park staff compiled in 1994. I have found no second record of either.

What people see, and what they don’t

Expert Africa asks its returning travellers what they saw. For Etosha, 73% saw lion, 65% black rhino, 22% cheetah and 16% leopard. So leopard is a long shot, and Halali is where to take it. The camp sits in thicker mopane, and the photographers behind Kruger-2-Kalahari say a resident leopard drinks at its waterhole most nights. Cheetah turn up on the open ground near Sueda and Salvadora. The Okaukuejo floodlights are the rhino spot everyone knows, but after a few months of good rain much of the game moves off to fresh grass elsewhere, as Expert Africa’s own staff have found on some visits. Namutoni’s camp waterhole is the weak one of the three. The same photographers took their lion pictures on that side of the park at Chudop.

Elephant is close to a sure thing: 87% in the same survey. Watch for a herd that suddenly freezes, all facing one way, while one animal lifts a foot. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell noticed that in Namibia in the 1990s, and her experiments in Etosha in 2002 and 2004, with equipment buried in the ground, showed elephants reacting to alarm calls that reached them through the soil alone.

People who write up a stay keep saying the same two things: the floodlit waterhole was the best part, and service at the state-run camps is hit and miss. Expert Africa’s staff found Okaukuejo’s seldom well stocked, and one South African family, there in a crowded August, wrote that the shops carried little beyond drinks and that friends who lost a tyre near Halali had a long wait for one from Tsumeb.