Omaruru

The Omaruru trader whose birds fill a Swedish museum

In the museum at Vänersborg, a small town on Lake Vänern in Sweden, there is a room that has hardly changed since it opened in November 1888. It holds close to a thousand mounted birds from south-west Africa, the collection of one man who traded out of Omaruru. Axel Eriksson, a butcher’s son from Vänersborg, gave the town his birds in 1883, and the gift did much to get the museum built.

Forty hunters on the north bank

Eriksson came out in 1866, aged 19, to work for the explorer Charles John Andersson, who died the following year. Around 1870 he set up at Omaruru, and from 1871 his partner was another Swede, Anders Ohlsson, a brewer by trade. A third, the seaman Thure Een, had landed at Walvis Bay in the same month as Eriksson. The Herero chief Christian Wilhelm Zeraua is said to have put the traders and the missionaries on the north bank of the river and kept the south bank for himself.

The firm kept a depot at Walvis Bay and dealt in ivory, ostrich feathers, guns and cattle. By 1878 it had about forty white hunters in the field. Klaus Dierks, in his biographies of Namibian personalities, was blunt about the result: this one Omaruru business did a great deal to wipe out the big game of central Namibia. The elephant and rhino painted in the Erongo caves were real animals here until hunters like Eriksson’s shot them out.

Ohlsson did not stay for the end. The partnership ran until 1886, but around 1881 he had already started a brewery at Newlands in Cape Town. Ohlsson’s Cape Breweries was one of the two rivals bought out in 1956 when South African Breweries took its present name, so one root of SAB runs back to a trading firm on a dry Namibian river. Eriksson went the other way, across the Kunene into Angola in 1882. He died in 1901 on a farm called Urupupa in the north, and his grave is at Rietfontein, about 30 km from Grootfontein.

Rhino that belong to the state, on farms without fences

The last black rhino in the Erongo Mountains was caught in 1972 and moved to a national park, for fear of poachers. Around the turn of the century farmers in the mountains between Omaruru, Karibib and Usakos began taking down the fences between their properties. By 2018 the Erongo Mountain Rhino Sanctuary covered about 180,000 hectares, with 24 member farmers and a dozen supporting neighbours. Its chairman that year, Kai-Uwe Denker, put the game at around 10,000 head, some of it built up from nothing. Black rhino came back under the government’s custodian scheme (the animals stay state property), and the black-faced impala released here are said to be the biggest free herd outside Etosha.

Do not come to Omaruru expecting to see a rhino. The sanctuary will not say how many it has or where, there are gyrocopter patrols and cameras on the gates, and the reason is plain. In 2013 a cow called Solo died in a wire snare set on a rhino path, and her horns were hacked off. In October 2025 a black cow and a white cow were found killed on a farm in the Omaruru district, and a decomposed black bull turned up on another, shot in the head some time in the months before.

What lives on the farms and lodges towards the mountains, and what visitors have a fair chance of seeing, is smaller: Damara dik-dik, kudu, gemsbok, mountain zebra and klipspringer. Birders come for the rock country. About 10 km west of Omaruru nearly 200 species have been recorded, with Hartlaub’s spurfowl, rockrunner, white-tailed shrike, Monteiro’s hornbill and Rüppell’s parrot the ones they travel for. Verreaux’s eagles nest in the mountains and are seen often.

Eight years of sand

The Omaruru runs about 330 km from the Etjo hills to the sea just north of Henties Bay, and for most of most years none of that is water. When it does come it is quick. On a Friday evening in February 2008 people at Etemba, downstream of town, saw the flood peak at 2.2 m. By the Sunday it was under a metre. In March 2017 a 19-year-old pupil, Ronald Tjipundi, was swept off a flooded bridge over a side stream between Ozondje and town, and divers were brought up from Walvis Bay to search for him. Then the sand took over. A reporter in 2025 was told the river had been dry for eight years before it came down properly at the start of that year and held water for a few months.

Dung smoke, frost fires and a series shot somewhere else

Smoky whisky usually gets its smoke from peat, and Namibia has none. Erongo Mountain Winery’s answer, for the whisky it sells as Ondjaba, is to smoke its grain, mahangu among it, over elephant dung from the nearby Omaruru Game Lodge. One of the staff calls it “the story of the poo”. At Kristall Kellerei, which Helmut Kluge started, the vines needed shade net against the heat and also, less obviously, fires lit in drums under them against frost. These days the gin is flavoured with devil’s claw.

The old mission house, now the museum, has doors about 1.75 m high and a cow-dung roof held together with reeds. Dierks credits Viehe’s weather station there, which he dates to 1885, as the first in the country.

Two things about Omaruru are not quite what they seem. The 26-part television series that carried the town’s name into West German living rooms in 1976 was made in South Africa by a Johannesburg film company. And the eleven von Trothas who came to White Flag Day in 2007 were relatives of the general, not his direct descendants. The six Herero royal houses invited them, and the paramount chief, Kuaima Riruako, told them to bring their own security.