Ruacana

The six miles nobody owned above Ruacana Falls

In 1920 a geology professor from Grahamstown published a plan to block the Kunene a little way above Ruacana and send it south. Ernest Schwarz of Rhodes University College had convinced himself that the river once spilled every year into the oshanas of Ovamboland and on into Etosha, and that it stopped only when it broke through the rock at what he called the Rua Cana Cataract and “hurried away to the sea”. Put a weir across it, he argued, and the old channels would fill, Etosha would become a lake again, and moist air off the water would bring rain to the whole country.

His book, The Kalahari; or, Thirstland Redemption, is free to read on the Internet Archive. He weighed up a cheap weir of driven piles packed with branches and rubble against a proper masonry wall, and put the wall in a rocky gorge six or seven miles above the smaller cataracts, where dirt lines on the rock showed floods had once stood forty feet over the dry season level. Ruacana itself he ruled out. It sits too far below the level of the plain. He also waved away anyone downstream who might lose their water: there were no people living between the falls and the sea, he wrote, and only mad ones would ever move there. The Himba who herd cattle along that stretch would have something to say about that.

Nobody built the weir. Fifty years later engineers did dam the Kunene above the falls, at Calueque, and a canal from it carries river water into Ovamboland. It stops a long way short of Etosha.

A strip run by two residents

Schwarz also explains, in passing, why the border here took so long to fix. The Germans and Portuguese had agreed on a line running due east from “the cataracts” of the Kunene. Portugal said that meant Ruacana, the big one. The Germans heard from their missionaries about smaller rapids higher up, at a place he spells Cambele, and claimed everything up to a line drawn from those. The difference was a belt about six miles (10 km) deep, running the whole length of the border.

When Schwarz travelled through, the question was still open. The belt was treated as neutral ground and administered jointly by a Portuguese resident and an English one. His host in Ovamboland, the Resident Commissioner Major C. N. Manning, had written what Schwarz called the only description of the Kaokoveld in existence, because the German map of the river below the falls was wrong enough to show that no one had been along it. The 1926 convention in the timeline further up this page ended it, and left the falls in Angola.

What the dam treaty actually says

The agreement that made the power station possible was signed in Lisbon on 21 January 1969, and the full text sits in an FAO collection of river treaties. Portugal let the pumping scheme at Calueque go ahead at once “on account of the humanitarian nature” of sending drinking water to people and cattle across the border. South Africa got the use of the regulated river from the weir basin to below the falls “in perpetuity”, and the ground it needed on the Angolan bank free of charge. In return it paid Portugal a royalty per kilowatt-hour on a set share of what Ruacana generated. Staff were to cross the border freely, with no immigration formalities, inside agreed limits.

That easy coming and going lasted about six years. On 9 August 1975, after armed groups had frightened the foreign workers at the site, a South African patrol crossed to occupy Calueque, and the army stayed for thirteen years. It was the first permanent posting of its regular units inside Angola. By June 1988 Ruacana was the headquarters of the task force facing the Cuban advance, under a colonel known as Mucho Delport. On 29 June, two days after the air raid, a company of 701 Battalion blew up the ramparts at the dam wall and became the last unit back over the bridge. The dam then sat broken until it was repaired between 2012 and 2015.

Bone dry, until the year it isn’t

One regular on the 4x4 Community forum is blunt about it: the falls are bone dry 99 per cent of the time, because the water goes through the turbines instead. In August 2019 he noted NamPower reporting 34 cubic metres a second, and reckoned that was too little to run all four turbines, never mind send anything over the lip. The treaty had assumed 80. Willie Olivier, writing in Travel News Namibia the same year, says the detour is hardly worth it when the river is low.

Then there are years like 2025, when the falls ran. New Era reported thousands of people there over Easter, roasting meat under the trees and dancing, and a reported 4,000 or so at the Hippo campsite. One woman who had come up from Otjiwarongo with her family told the paper the dry falls had kept them away in recent years.

Hippos, maybe, and five birds people travel for

The community campsite on the bank just below the power station is called Hippo Pools, and the name may be running ahead of the animals. A Travel News Namibia writer described that stretch as one hippos frequent, and the camp as a place to wake to the sound of them. That is one account and more than a decade old, so treat a hippo as a bonus. Crocodiles are the safer bet, and the reason nobody swims.

The birds are more dependable. The far north-west along this river is the only part of Namibia with Cinderella waxbill, a small grey finch found otherwise only in south-western Angola, and it is the southern limit of the rufous-tailed palm thrush, a bird of riverside palms whose loud whistling song comes mostly at dawn or dusk, sometimes as a duet. Grey kestrel and bare-cheeked babbler are on the same list. Birders tend to base themselves at a lodge about 48 km down the gravel towards Epupa, which runs birding cruises in the morning, and the keenest carry on into the Zebra Mountains for the Angola cave chat, first recorded in Namibia only in May 2010.