Oshakati

A town built in the path of a flood from Angola

In a good year the first thing people notice is the fish. Rain that fell on the highlands of southern Angola works its way south through about a hundred shallow channels, crosses the border and spreads over the flat north of Namibia. The water carries fish in such numbers that people take them by hand or in simple traps and eat them fresh or dried. The flood is called an efundja, and Oshakati was built right in its path.

One big flood every six years

The channels are iishana (one is an oshana). Some are less than ten metres across and some more than a kilometre, and their beds are clay or salty soil, so the water stands long after the rain has stopped. The Okatana, the channel that divides Oshakati East from Oshakati West, is one of them.

The Atlas of Namibia has flow data for 68 of the 81 years between 1941 and 2021. In 23 of those years, a third of them, almost nothing arrived. In 11 the flood was a major one, which works out at one every six years or so, with a medium or large flow nearly every second year. The 2008 flood that hit the town was followed by a worse one in 2009. By early March 2008 the count of dead across the north stood at 42, most of them children and old people who drowned crossing iishana in the dark.

Tap water from another country

Dry years are why there is a canal. Groundwater under most of the north is too salty to drink. What comes out of a tap in Oshakati is Kunene River water, taken out at Calueque inside Angola and carried east by pipeline and open canal to a purification works in town. The system dates from the 1970s, and the army base South Africa set up here in 1974 needed the water as much as the town did.

On 27 June 1988 Cuban MiG-23s bombed Calueque in waves, and one wave took out the pipeline to Ovamboland. The dam had been left about 70 percent built when work stopped in 1976, and the job of repairing and finishing it only began in 2012.

After independence German money paid for another 53 km or so of channel and a new works at Oshakati. The bank that funded it went back in 2004 and was blunt: sand washed into the canal every rainy season, and a break in 2001 had cut the supply for several weeks. It called the canal the backbone of the water supply for about 600,000 people, roughly a third of the country at the time, with another 200,000 or so at holidays when the migrant workers come home.

Erundu, the village under the town

Before there was a town the place was called Erundu, and a secondary school still carries that name. The people living there were forced out in the 1950s to Ehenye, a village on the edge of town. In 1992 the town council came for that land too. Houses now stand on part of it, and the argument over what a family’s mahangu field is worth was still in the papers in 2025.

Nobody quite agrees when Oshakati began. The date most often given is July 1966, when the Administrator of South West Africa, Wentzel du Plessis, opened the hospital. The historian Klaus Dierks lists the official founding under 1961, and the council itself says “the early 1960s”. Until independence the white east and the black west were kept apart by open ground, fences and barbed wire.

The homeland’s Legislative Council sat for the first time in Oshakati on 17 October 1968, with Oshona Shiimi of Ongandjera in the chair. Yet the 1973 proclamation that made Ovamboland self-governing named Ongwediva, next door, as the seat of government, not Oshakati.

Twenty-six prisoners and a bishop

The 1988 bank bombing is the one people remember, but it was not the first bomb in town. Two American diplomats, Dennis Keogh and Kenneth Crabtree, were killed by one in Oshakati on 15 April 1984. On 6 February 1987 a bomb in front of the Barclays Bank killed a man named Levi Ipinge. Among the dead a year later was a daughter of Kleophas Dumeni, the Lutheran bishop.

It was Dumeni the United Nations turned to in April 1989, when the ceasefire nearly collapsed. South African forces told the UN at Oshakati that they would hand over captured SWAPO fighters, 31 of them as it turned out. Martti Ahtisaari, the UN’s man in Namibia and later president of Finland, arrived on 26 April to find nowhere in town to put them. The bishop took in the 26 who were fit enough at Ongwediva, and the next day they went north by road to the border. Seven weeks later UN staff counted between 70 and 80 Koevoet Casspirs drawn up around the camp for returning exiles at Ongwediva.

Flamingos, if you can get to them

Oshakati has no game. What it has, in flood years, is birds. Around 260 species have been recorded across the iishana during an efundja, some 90 of them waterbirds, with flamingos, pelicans and saddle-billed storks among them. The 2008 flood arrived in early February and the 2009 one in early March, so late summer is when to look.

They stay longest at Lake Oponono, south of town in Uuvudhiya, the biggest of the lakes where the channels run together. It fills about two years in three, can hold up to 19 kinds of fish and in a good year keeps its water until the next rains. Flamingos shift there as the smaller pans dry out. One district road, the D3607, serves the whole area and past it there are only tracks that go under in the rains, which is exactly when you would want to be there. In some years the same water carries on down the Ekuma into Etosha Pan.