Opuwo

The office town that sat inside a game reserve

In 1956 the Sunday Times in Johannesburg ran a story under the headline “Slaughter of game in Africa’s Largest Reserve Alleged”. The reserve was Game Reserve No. 2, and the awkward part was that, by the article’s count, 6,000 people and their cattle lived in the northern part where most of the game was. They were governed from the commissioner’s office at Ohopoho, now Opuwo. For some twenty years this town was the head office of a native reserve that was also, on paper, a game reserve.

Lions were the commissioner’s problem

The Kaokoveld had been inside Game Reserve No. 2 since the Germans drew it in 1907. In 1947 South Africa proclaimed the Kaokoland Reserve on top of it without taking the game status away, and ran the lot from Ohopoho. A Cape wildlife man, Dennis Woods, came back from a museum expedition saying prospectors were shooting what they liked and that the Kaokoveld was the best part of the only game reserve worth having in South West Africa. The answer he got was that it was a native reserve first, and that officials had a duty to protect the people in it from lions.

The idea of making a park of it was not new. In 1928 Cocky Hahn travelled to the Kunene near Ruacana and named an old Himba hunter, the headman Ikandwa, as an unofficial warden. He told his superiors the river country could outdo Kruger. The Odendaal Commission, which reported in 1963, wanted the game status gone, and by the early 1970s Kaokoland was a homeland with no conservation law of any kind. Headmen had been issued strychnine and rifles against predators. The administration handed out thousands more rifles once the war reached the north-west, and the poaching that followed was not only local. Officials and soldiers were in it too.

One man who knew the country before all that was Garth Owen-Smith, who worked in the Kaokoveld as an agricultural supervisor in the 1960s and was made to leave in 1970. He came back in 1982, built a network of game guards with the headmen, and lost his funding three years later when the authorities called him a Swapo supporter. His book An Arid Eden is the one to read before driving north.

Three hundred boreholes, and a pass cut by hand

What changed the country around Opuwo most was water. A Sergeant Basson sank the first borehole here, and was known locally as Katjiriamakaja, the tobacco eater. In 1954 the office that recruited contract workers in Opuwo shut for lack of takers, and the administration decided the future was cattle. Forty-three boreholes went down in the 1950s, every one of them around the town or south-east of it, where officials could reach. The 1960s added 136 and the 1970s another 128.

One of the commissioners in those years was Ben van Zyl. In the 1960s he had twenty men cut a track down the escarpment toward the Marienfluss by hand, in four months, and Van Zyl’s Pass still carries his name. His son Japie, born at Outjo in 1957, ended up running solar system exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When the Ingenuity helicopter made its first flights on Mars in 2021, a spot at the site was named Van Zyl Overlook after him.

Elephants that walk up mountains

Opuwo is not a game stop. The two travellers who logged sightings for a tour operator at the hilltop lodge in 2019 recorded no animals, and one added that they had not gone out on a drive. The animals are in the broken country to the south, the highlands that run down toward the western end of Etosha, with peaks up to 1,800 metres.

Elephants live there among Herero villages, and they climb. Researchers who walked with community game guards in 2021 and 2022 found dung on ridge tops and on a 4x4 track they put at one in three or steeper. The guards say the herds go up for star-chestnut and corkwood on the rocky slopes, and that they can tell a hill elephant’s spoor because the soles are smoother. From June to December the herds keep to the hills by day and come to village water points on some nights. In the rains they come in far less often. So for someone driving the hill roads toward Sesfontein in the dry months, the odds of an elephant in daylight are poor. The researchers’ figure for the whole north-west is only about 300.

They were here long before the boreholes. On Georg Hartmann’s expedition of 1895 and 1896 the Swedish navy captain Eberhard Rosenblad sat up on a moonlit night at the water near Kaoko Otavi, south-west of today’s town, and shot two bulls as the herd finished drinking. Both had broken tusks. He called it unsporting and wrote that the party agreed never to hunt that way again. Major Manning’s patrol of 1917 was already warning headmen against killing elephants, and Manning called it lion country. What takes stock in the highlands now, going by the guards’ record books in one conservancy, is mostly spotted hyena, cheetah and leopard.

One more animal left by road. The black-faced impala in Etosha today come from animals caught in northern Kaokoland, most of them near the Kunene. In 1971 a capture team worked Enyandi, on the river upstream of Epupa, with a helicopter and drop nets, then trucked the impala over bad roads to the western end of the park in crates fitted with fans.

A staging post with a film star

Visitors who write about Opuwo treat it as a stop on the way to somewhere else. A couple heading for Epupa in 2016 called it a staging post and not very attractive, then praised the view from the hill above it as the surprise. A New Zealand pair in 2019 also wrote about the view. One Danish couple who came through in the dry August of 2019 wrote of dust everywhere and dead trees along the road up.

Hardly any of them mention that one of the best-known babies in cinema is from here. Ponijao, a Himba girl, is one of the four infants the French director Thomas Balmès followed through their first year in his 2010 documentary Babies, alongside children in Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco. Early in the film her mother rubs red ochre over her belly before the birth.