Katima Mulilo

The magistrate, the axe and the toilet in the baobab

In 1952 a nineteen-year-old called Anderson Luendo stepped onto the veranda of the magistrate’s house in Katima Mulilo and went for the sleeping man with an axe. The magistrate was Major Lisle French Watts Trollope, who had by then run the Eastern Caprivi for thirteen years. He lived, but by the one published account he never properly got over it.

Trollope was appointed in 1939, when this corner was a free-for-all of poachers, hunters and ivory traders, and Pretoria was a very long way off. He was a bachelor, his sister Alice sometimes shared the house, and he kept up a stream of letters to museums and scientific societies about plants, animals and the “lost city of the Kalahari”. It was Trollope who had a Northern Rhodesian public works team plumb a flush toilet into the hollow baobab beside his house. That is the Toilet Tree. The office under it is older, but the cistern is his.

The Luendo story does him no credit. It comes from the history writers at Gondwana, the lodge group, and theirs is the only telling in print that I know of. Trollope had paid for the boy’s clothes and school fees. After Luendo was convicted of a burglary in Sesheke, Trollope held him in the Katima lock-up for three months and had him mind the magistrate’s own cattle with a policeman watching. When Luendo saw a chance to get away he picked up the axe instead. He got nine months. Trollope got an order to report to Pretoria, which he ignored, and when his replacement turned up he asked to see the man’s permit, found fault with it and sent him packing. He is said to have taken work in Bechuanaland afterwards, and he died a few years later while being treated in Bulawayo. His grave is on the edge of town. Trollope Street is now Doreen Sioka Street, and the baobab stands behind barbed wire next to the SWAPO office.

Wenela and the mine planes

The border post at the bridge is called Wenela. So was the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, WNLA said as a word, which found men for the Johannesburg gold mines. North of the Tropic of Capricorn nobody called it anything else. It had its own depots, barges and aeroplanes. Ken Fuller, a pilot who wrote the airlift’s history in 1998, lists Katima Mulilo among the strips that crews from Francistown were flying to by 1953, often more than 100 hours a month.

Fuller counts 1,857,231 passengers over 22 years. On 4 April 1974 a Skymaster that had been filled with contaminated fuel came down just after take-off from Francistown, and 78 of the 84 people on board died. Flying stopped for good in 1977.

Twenty rockets at a quarter past one

Old Katima houses had bomb shelters, and the reason has a date. At about 01:15 on 23 August 1978, twenty 122 mm rockets were fired at the town from Zambia. Eighteen fell in open veld. One hit a school in the township. One flattened a bungalow and killed ten South African soldiers. A New Era account puts the wounded at ten as well, and says SWAPO called it an answer to the raid on Cassinga three months earlier. The South Africans went into south-western Zambia the following March and found the camps around Sinjembele empty.

The carmine colony, on a good day and a bad one

The bee-eater colony downstream is the one thing near Katima that people cross the country for. Most of the birds do not nest in a river bank at all. Pompie Burger, who writes on birds for Travel News Namibia, describes the main colony as dug into the sandy flat beside the Zambezi at Zambezi Mubala (the old Kalizo), with a smaller group in the bank a few hundred metres downstream. He was there in the September mating season and watched more than 2,000 lift off at once with roughly another thousand sitting in the trees. The photographer Will Goodlet spent a couple of days at the same place and found only hundreds. Burger found the heat of the day dull, with the fighting and digging kept for dawn and dusk. Goodlet adds that the afternoon wind comes from the east, so birds landing into it have the sun behind them.

Goodlet could walk to the edge of the nesting ground without bothering the birds, though the breeding ground has also had barriers put up to keep cattle and people off it. The kites do bother them. Yellow-billed kites take bee-eaters over the colony, and Goodlet watched water monitors go down the burrows.

Dirk Heinrich and Mark Boorman have ringed birds here three times, in 2015, 2016 and a later September when they caught 530, bringing the total past 1,500. When Heinrich wrote it up not one ring had been reported from wherever the birds spend the winter. Every bird they handled at the start of that season had a brood patch, a strong hint that males sit on the eggs too, which nobody has yet proved. Heinrich has also described the Zambezi coming up six months after a breeding season and putting the whole site, barriers and all, under more than a metre of water.

Hippos on the lawn, nets in the channels

Katima is a town with wildlife in it, not next to it. In October 2025 a security guard at a hotel in town was found dead at about six in the morning with what looked like hippo tracks around him, and the police told people along the river to take care in the early morning and late at night. In late March 2026 a bull elephant, pushed onto high ground by floodwater, charged a woman walking to work at Chefuzwe on the edge of town. She got away with minor injuries and the elephant was put down.

Twelve guards from the Sikunga Conservancy patrol a stretch of the Zambezi downstream, and by August 2025 they had pulled out and destroyed 387 km of illegal net in two years, most of it set at night in the channels where fish breed. If the tigerfishing holds up, they will be part of the reason.