Ondangwa

A salted horse, a cask of brandy and the first train north

On Friday 5 May 2006 a train pulled in near Ondangwa and more than 4,000 people came out to look at it. Callie Louw was driving, with Sollie van der Merwe beside him. No train had ever run into the Owambo north before.

The 246 km of track from Tsumeb had been started in June 2002. More than 19,000 local people were paid to work on it and, by the official count, 44,000 more turned up as volunteers. President Pohamba opened it at Ondangwa on 15 July 2006. A weekly passenger train called the Omugulugwombashe Star, named after the place where the independence war’s first battle was fought in 1966, then left Windhoek on Friday evening and arrived on Saturday morning, 16 hours later. TransNamib crowed that the doubters who had called it a white elephant were wrong. Not for long. The train broke down and the service went. The rails carried on to the Angolan border at Oshikango in 2012, but in August 2026 The Namibian reported that no train had used that last stretch since July 2024. Do not plan a trip around a train to Ondangwa.

The brother who would not sell

Ondangwa’s station was named after Nehale lyaMpingana, and so was the Etosha gate south-east of here. He came from this kingdom. When the Ondonga king died in 1884 the succession went to Kambonde, and his brother Nehale refused to accept it. Nehale took the eastern half and ruled it from Onayena. Kambonde kept the west, the side Ondangwa is on.

The next year Kambonde sold a huge block of country far to the south, including Grootfontein and the copper at Tsumeb, to a Cape trader and hunter called William Worthington Jordan. The price is recorded as £300, 25 guns, a salted horse and a cask of brandy, though one account has the goods making up the £300. Boer trekkers settled on it and declared the Republic of Upingtonia. In 1886 Nehale’s men shot Jordan dead and the republic fell apart.

When Kambonde leaned towards German protection in 1898, Nehale would have none of it, and on 28 January 1904 he sent about 500 men against the German fort at Namutoni, now inside Etosha. The seven defenders rode out in the night and the fort was wrecked the next morning.

A tape inside Treasure Island

Under the contract labour system a man from here could not leave the north without a contract. The recruiting body graded him on health and strength and gave him a tag to wear on his neck or arm, and Ondangwa was a staging post on the way to the mines at Tsumeb. In December 1958 Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, then working in Cape Town, recorded a protest against the system and got the tape out to the United Nations hidden in a copy of Treasure Island. The authorities traced it, sent him home and held him for months at the chief’s palace at Okaloko. After that, The Namibian’s obituary says, he opened a shop at Oluno, the part of Ondangwa that now has the prison, and spent much of his time organising. The airport was given his name on 22 August 2019, which would have been his 95th birthday.

The contract system cracked in the summer of 1971 to 1972, when a strike that began in Windhoek sent 18,000 workers home to the north within about a month and the government briefly blocked the roads north of Ondangwa. In August 1975 the Ondonga chief Fillemon Elifas was shot dead at Onamagongwa. His brother Immanuel Kauluma Elifas took over and reigned for 44 years. When he was buried at Olukonda in April 2019, after about three weeks of mourning, a reporter watched Herero horsemen from Opuwo escort the coffin.

In April 2023 the president of Finland, on a state visit, handed back two fragments of Ondonga’s sacred power stones, which missionaries had carried off more than a century earlier. They are said to be pieces of a meteorite that fell in the 1880s.

Fish that arrive by flood

There is no big game at Ondangwa. On the overlanding forums, the animals drivers warn about on the north’s tar roads are cattle and goats. The town sits among the iishana, hundreds of shallow channels that run south from the Angolan highlands towards Etosha Pan and lie dry for most of the year. In a good season the flood, the efundja, comes down them and brings fish.

In July 2017 a reporter found more than a hundred men and women camped at the Okalili pans, most of them 50 or 60 km from their homes in Ondangwa, Oshakati and beyond, working nets and fishing baskets for two weeks at a stretch and selling the catch in the two towns’ markets. The funnel-shaped traps the women use are woven from the fronds of the makalani palm, the tree that stands over the mahangu fields all through this country.

For birds, the place is Lake Oponono, south-west of town and the biggest water in the whole channel system. Its headman says the name means the one that swallowed all the water, and it earns it: the lake fills roughly two years in three and in a good year holds fresh water right through to the next rains. That is when flamingos and white pelicans come in, as other wetlands dry out, and some of Namibia’s few blue cranes move up from Etosha. A reporter there one December morning saw knob-billed ducks, Cape teal, grey herons and egrets as well. Villagers shoot the water birds for meat, which conservationists have complained about for years, and in the drought of 2012 to 2013 the shoreline pulled back more than 500 metres while thousands of cattle drank it down.

If you are here late in the rains, ask about omagongo. Marula juice is left to ferment for a few days, and the eight Owambo traditional authorities take turns to host a festival around it, usually in March or April, though in 2017 it ran as late as the end of May.