Popa Falls Game Park

A river wizard, an 1884 march and the dam that never came

On 31 August 1884 two men came out of seventeen days of dry sand ridges, reached a big baobab on a rise and saw the Okavango running about a mile below them. Aurel Schulz was a doctor, August Hammar a civil engineer, and they had walked from the Chobe. Schulz wrote that they believed they were the first white men to look at the river. Before their camp was up, a trader of part Portuguese descent called Gonsalvus hurried in with pistachio nuts and a little corn, wanting all their news.

Their book, The New Africa (1897), is full of the contempt of its time for the people it meets, and it is still the closest early picture of this stretch of river.

The chief who taxed the river

The man they had come to see lived on an island a mile long in midstream, with the river breaking over rocks on both sides of it. Schulz calls him Debabe, or Indala, and puts him at about thirty and six feet tall. The name and the place both point to Andara, some 19 km upstream of Popa. The Mbukushu king of those years is remembered as Ndara, and he lived on an island there. Catholic fathers tried to start a mission at Andara in January 1908. All three men died, two of them of blackwater fever at the station, and the mission was only made to stick in 1913.

Indala’s power was the river. He and his forefathers claimed they could make it dry up or turn poisonous whenever they liked, so the people downstream, as far as Lake Ngami, sent him corn, ivory, feathers and young women every year. The Hambukushu are still called the rainmakers of the Okavango. Schulz says he argued with the lake king against paying, and heard years later that the tribute had been held back, that the river “behaved phenomenally well” that season, and that Indala was sent a message to deflate him.

What he could not sneer at was the boating. Mbukushu men worked dugouts less than a foot wide up the slack water along the bank, then swung out and shot the rapids standing bolt upright.

When the expedition left, its first day’s march was thirteen and a half miles down the right bank, which would have taken it past Popa. All Schulz recorded was a few small cataracts, “mere unevennesses in the water”, with hippos lying in the still pools below them. People who turn off at Divundu expecting a waterfall tend to agree.

Twenty megawatts, five sites and a lot of sand

Schulz did see one thing in the low banks and the steady fall: “a mighty water power”. In 1969 a Water Affairs study named the lip of the falls as the best place for a power station. NamPower brought the idea back in December 2002 as a 20 megawatt plant, a weir right across the Okavango with the turbines built into it, at one of five sites between the falls and Andara. The lip itself was ruled out because of the rapids and the tourist trade, and by June 2004 the favoured spot was 7.3 km upstream.

Five public meetings were held in ten days in February 2003, in Windhoek, Divundu, Rundu and twice in Maun. One of the Maun meetings drew more than a hundred people, and the worry there was sand. The Okavango carries its sediment down into the delta, a weir would hold it back, and Botswana said so. Upstream, the backed-up water would have drowned islands and riverbank fields.

NamPower’s chief technical adviser, Reiner Jagau, said the company would not go on if the damage could not be reduced. The assessment went out for comment in June 2004, with a copy left at Popa Falls itself. By 2012 it was off NamPower’s list of planned stations, and in 2014 Botswana’s chief water engineer told the Daily News that the study had found it not feasible and that it had been abandoned. There is no weir.

Mesh walls, and a boy taken by a crocodile

The rest camp is older than the park. Annabelle Venter, writing in Travel News Namibia in 2014, says hunters were using it in the 1970s. She first stayed in the 1980s, when the road between Rundu and Katima Mulilo was still gravel. She remembers windowless bungalows with open mesh for walls, no electricity, mice and bats. The 2013 rebuild did away with all of it.

Her best story is about an old hunter who turned up asking after a boy from the 1970s. Two brothers were walking by the river when a crocodile took the younger one by the leg. The hunter went into the water after it, shot it and pulled the child out, and decades on he wanted to know what had become of him. The manager later confirmed the man was alive and living nearby. The story rests on her telling alone.

Hippos by ear

What Venter heard through the mesh in the 1980s was hippos and owls. A family who stayed 2 km downstream in August 2022 told a British tour operator the noise of the hippos overnight was amazing. More than thirty years apart, same report.

Seeing them is nearly as sure. Of the travellers at that lodge who have sent in sightings since 2018, almost nine in ten ticked hippo. Venter’s cruise ran two hours, down to Divava village and back to the rapids for sunset, with a boatman, Claus Kapinga, who had worked 25 years at the lodge next door.

The same travellers’ lists show sable for four in five and elephant for three in five. None of that is at the falls. It comes from drives into Bwabwata.

The oddest resident is one you will not see. Of the five animals the ministry names for the park, two are fish. One is the broadhead catfish, which science only described in 1965. It grows to just under 30 cm, hunts other fish and lives in rocky rapids on big rivers. The 1969 plan would have put a power station on the lip of its rapids.