Gobabis

Thirty-four zebras in one night at Elephant Fountain

In the middle of September 1851 two travellers rode into the place now called Gobabis and found they had to watch their feet. Francis Galton, later famous for statistics and notorious for eugenics, and the young Swede Charles John Andersson had left Jonker Afrikaner’s settlement at what is now Windhoek on 30 August and spent a fortnight getting here. The spring came out of the side of a dark, thorny hill above the bed of the Black Nossob. All the ground around it had been dug into game pits, so well hidden that Andersson says even people who knew the place risked dropping into one.

Ivory in the mud

The pits worked. Galton recorded thirty-four zebras caught in them in a single night. He also gives the plainest reason for the English name, Elephant Fountain. When the pool was first cleared of its reeds, elephant bones and tusks were found lying in the mud, and a trader took away more than one wagon load of ivory. Galton thought it was two.

Hill Damara families grew tobacco in gardens beside the spring, on land that belonged to the Orlam chief Amraal Lambert. Both men mention what had already emptied the Wesleyan mission station here. Andersson calls it a destructive fever that killed many residents. Galton is more exact: it broke out in April, raged for two or three months, and had depopulated the place more than once.

Thirty rhinos at the next water

Amraal, by then well into his seventies, wanted to come along for the hunting, and by the time the party was on its way east it was several hundred strong. On 3 October they reached Tunobis, a spring close to where the Botswana border now runs, with no other water for two or three days in any direction. In a few days the party shot more than thirty rhinos. Andersson killed eight in five hours one night, and Galton a white rhino cow.

The San at Tunobis told the two men the country ahead was impassable that year, and they turned back. Andersson got to Lake Ngami in 1853.

Most of the hunting stories from the Fountain itself belong to the return, nearly a month later. Ostriches walked in to drink at about noon every day and barely bothered to retreat. Andersson shot eight of them. Lions were bold enough that several of Amraal’s hunters had been carried off or badly mauled while lying in wait at night, and the old chief worried about the Swede sitting out alone. One pitch-dark night, hidden in thorn scrub next to a big pit on the river bank, Andersson heard a purr behind him, then a rush and a cry as something sprang at an antelope close by. Three gunshots followed. Amraal had sent Eyebrecht, the guide Galton had hired at Windhoek, to fetch him back, and the man had met the lion on the path. In the morning its tracks were found a gun barrel’s length from where Andersson had been sitting.

Amraal died of smallpox at Gobabis in February 1864.

Off the train, and into the cells

Being the last town before the border has brought Gobabis some odd arrivals. In June 1931 the British banished the Bakwena ruler Sebele II to the far side of the Kalahari without a trial. He went by rail, and by one historian’s account a crowd turned out to celebrate him when his train pulled in at Gobabis, before he was driven on to Ghanzi.

In August 1963 the traffic ran the other way. Four Namibian activists, the Rehoboth doctor Kenneth Abrahams and Andreas Shipanga among them, had walked across the border and were on the road to Lobatse when three South African policemen in plain clothes and an unmarked truck seized them inside Bechuanaland, a gun to Abrahams’s head. They were locked up in Gobabis and charged with leaving the country illegally. It took British pressure and a habeas corpus case before South Africa’s prime minister, Verwoerd, announced at the end of that month that Abrahams would be sent back.

Looking for cheetahs with a dog called Enya

The big animals that are left here are the ones that hide. Farmers north of town share their land with cheetahs, and not happily. In November 2012 the Cheetah Conservation Fund was called to fetch five that had been trapped on a farm near Gobabis. One died. Among the four survivors, all females, was one they named Toeless, after old paw injuries that cost her a broken toe. The following month the four were moved into the fund’s soft-release reserve.

In March 2020, after years of drought had pushed up losses and tempers, the fund opened a field station in Gobabis under the carnivore researcher Hanlie Winterbach. Its cheetah study block north of town covers more than 4,000 square kilometres and about a hundred farms. A scat detection dog called Enya walked 395 km of farm tracks there sniffing out droppings, and cameras watch the play trees where territorial males leave their marks. Halfway through, the team had 68 cheetah samples and 105 from brown hyaena, leopard, caracal, jackal, bat-eared fox and genet.

So the cats are there, and you will almost certainly not see one from the B6. Wild dogs are rarer still. The fund puts Namibia’s adults at about 400, and the station also works with the communal farmers around Otjinene and Okakarara. What the town does offer is birds. Egyptian geese and ducks sit on the Black Nossob where it passes through, and an ornithologists’ expedition in November and December 1968 listed 143 species across the sandveld between here and Stampriet.

The thing to watch for on the drive is the fence. The highway to Botswana opened in 1998, and on the Namibian side it runs between stock fences with the verges cut short. Two cyclists who rode it in December 2024 noticed the fences stop at the border past Buitepos, and goats, donkeys and cattle take over the tar. A poster on the 4x4 Community forum gives the same warning about livestock near the villages, and says that is what makes the Botswana side dangerous after dark.