Okahandja

A hyena by moonlight and the treaty Göring's father signed

One night early in 1851 a young Englishman called Francis Galton floundered across the bed of the Swakop River here wearing his shoes and nothing else. His dogs had cornered one of the hyenas that kept walking through his camp. The riverbed was about 300 yards of loose sand, and he shot the animal from four or five feet away once the dogs had it ringed in a patch of moonlight.

Galton did not call the place Okahandja. On his map it is Schmelen’s Hope, after the missionary Heinrich Schmelen, who came through in 1827 and was probably the first European to see it. He fixed its position at 22°0’ south, 16°56’ east, about three kilometres from the middle of the modern town. His Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa (1853) is the liveliest account of this spot before there was a town on it.

The spring nobody mentioned

Hugo Hahn and Franz Kleinschmidt tried to start a mission here in 1844 and gave up for want of water. They moved west to Otjikango, the hot spring now called Gross Barmen. Galton thought they had swapped the better site for the worse one: Okahandja had grass, trees and garden ground but only rain pools and wells. Then, on his first day’s travel north, he slept beside a spring in the riverbed five miles away. The missionaries had been asking about water for years and nobody had told them it was there.

Friedrich Kolbe tried again on 22 March 1850. Five months later Jonker Afrikaner’s horsemen rode in at night, the raid remembered at Moordkoppie. Galton reached Barmen later that year and found Kolbe and his young wife there with almost nothing left. He was told Jonker had turned up at the mission house the next morning drunk and asked for breakfast. He also met two women who had crawled the twenty or so miles to Barmen after the raiders cut through their ankles, both on one woman and one on the other, to get at their iron anklets.

Counting the dead after a raid like this was close to impossible, he says, because the survivors scattered and the hyenas got to the bodies first. About 700 is the figure on the monument register and in most histories. Galton, who was there within months, offers no number at all.

Then he packed a red hunting coat and jackboots, rode an ox for three days and more to Jonker’s village (today’s Windhoek), lectured him through interpreters and made him write Kolbe an apology. Kolbe never came back to Okahandja.

The raider’s grave came first

Jonker moved to Okahandja himself in 1854, onto the ground where the mission church was later built, and died here on 18 August 1861. In April 1949 the South West Africa Monuments Council named four national monuments in one go: Fort Namutoni, the Hoba meteorite, the Petrified Forest and Jonker Afrikaner’s grave. The Herero chiefs’ graves waited until 14 March 1990, a week before independence.

Klaus Dierks, in his chronology of Namibian history, gives a reason for where the later leaders lie. When Frederick Maharero died in 1952, let home from exile only shortly before, the municipality made Hosea Kutako sign an undertaking that no more of Maharero’s descendants would go into the old plot. That, he says, is why Kutako and Clemens Kapuuo lie beside Jonker and not beside the Mahareros.

Göring’s father comes for a signature

On 17 October 1885 Hendrik Witbooi fought Maharero at Osona, on the Windhoek side of town, and lost. Two of his sons, Jeremia and Salomo, were killed. Four days later Maharero agreed a protection treaty with the German commissioner, Heinrich Göring. Yes, that Göring: his son Hermann was born eight years later. No land changed hands.

On 30 October 1888 Maharero cancelled the treaty to Göring’s face, with an English trader named Robert Lewis standing by as his new agent, and Göring withdrew to British Walvis Bay.

The Germans were back by 1890 and the shopkeepers followed. Wecke & Voigts opened in Okahandja on 3 September 1892, and the firm is still in the Voigts family five generations on, running Spar supermarkets from Windhoek. Dierks lists two of its founders among the traders being paid for Herero debts in land by 1899, which goes some way to explaining what came next.

Two trains in January 1904

The railway from Swakopmund reached Okahandja on 7 December 1901. Late on 10 January 1904 a trader arrived saying 300 armed Herero were on their way, and the settlers panicked. The district chief, Lieutenant Zürn, put the garrison on alert the next day. Shooting began on the 12th, with most of the settlers inside the fort. The resident missionary, Diehl, reported that the only fire his house took came from the German side.

A relief party sent up the line from Windhoek under Lieutenants Boysen and Voigts was beaten back, and Boysen and six of his men died. An armoured train from the coast under Lieutenant von Zülow got to Waldau on the 13th, mended the torn-up track ahead of itself and steamed in on the 15th. When von Zülow tried to push on to Windhoek on the 19th he was stopped at Osona, where Witbooi had been stopped eighteen years earlier. Captain Franke’s column, up from the south, relieved the town on 27 January.

What Galton shot for the pot

Galton came back from Jonker’s on 8 February 1851 and stayed three weeks. His party shot at geese and ducks, and his companion Charles Andersson brought down a bustard for the cook. Caterpillars covered the ground, then locusts came, then a flock of migrating storks arrived and went to war on the locusts. Galton does not name the species. Abdim’s stork, which breeds north of the equator and spends the rest of the year in eastern and southern Africa eating mostly those two things, fits the description, but he gives too little to be sure.

The Swakop he crossed that night has been dammed since 1970 at Von Bach, just outside town.