Rundu

Poison Stream, Quarrel and Whatever: what Rundu's names say

In 1911 two colonial army captains, Graf and Witte, passed along the south bank of the Okavango and noted at one spot: dunes about 15 metres high on a rocky base, tall timber with shade, a bank dropping steeply to the water and a wind that always came off the river. The town stands on that rise, and the rise gave it a name. Rundu comes from ndundu, the word for a hill or high ground in the Kavango languages.

On 16 September 1936 Harold Eedes, the assistant native commissioner, opened an office on the rise, having moved from Nkurenkuru. The historian Kletus Likuwa, who interviewed the people later moved off the bank, found that when residents spoke of going to Rundu in 1936 they meant going to that office. A string of homesteads ran along the bank either side, from Sauyemwa in the west to Rupouoro.

Nakare and the queen he sacked

Local people called Eedes “Nakare”. He stayed ten years, and part of his job was to find men. Recruiters appointed from his office worked the Kavango villages and crossed into Angola, signing up labour for farms and mines. Men back from the South African gold mines, “Djwaini”, were known as Magayisa, tycoons. The women of Nkondo, a village out on the floodplain, brewed kashipembe and cooked fish and porridge to sell to them.

The Kwangali, upstream, sent fewer men than the commissioners wanted, and both Eedes and an earlier commissioner put that partly down to their ruler being a woman. Kanuni had been hompa since the 1920s. She had once gone for her brother Sivute with a knobkerrie and won, and her own explanation was plain: her young men were afraid to go south. In 1940, after reports reached him that the Kwangali would rather have a man, Eedes removed her and put Sivute in her place. She outlasted both of them: Eedes died in 1958, Sivute was deposed, and Kanuni took the throne back and kept it until she died in February 1972.

Poison Stream, Quarrel and Whatever

Sarusungu comes from rushungu, a poison that villagers threw into a side stream so that the fish would be floating by morning. Eedes’s black policemen had their homesteads there and walked to the office. Nkarapamwe, the township built from 1964 and occupied in 1968, means “sitting together in one place”, from a proverb about neighbours not exposing each other. The houses had no ceilings. By 1970, the year the commissioner evicted families from their houses, residents were calling the place Katutura after the Windhoek township, “a place where we will not settle”.

Then the river bank itself was cleared. Sarusungu went in 1971, and its people named their new site Kaisosi, which means looking for a reason to start a quarrel. The settlement of Mangarangandja followed in 1972. Its people were put in a camp that the authorities fenced, with an army checkpoint on the way into town, and they called it Kehemu: “whatever”. Officials said the land was wanted for farming. Likuwa’s reading is that the security forces wanted a clear view of a river SWAPO fighters were crossing.

When he photographed the emptied ground in 2005 it held a eucalyptus plantation with a village graveyard inside it, a zoo, and on the floodplain the remains of a miniature golf course built by the South African army.

Eight metres on the gauge

Nkondo was the one village the river emptied before the officials could. A flood in the 1950s finished it, and a former resident told Likuwa the fish swam into the huts. The commissioner then ordered the families up to higher ground. Some settled at Sarusungu, in time to be moved again.

The hydrology department’s gauge is at Sarasungu Lodge, and its numbers explain a lot about a stay here. A little over five metres in mid-March 2007 was called normal. Past seven the hydrologists call it critical. The record they quote is 8.91 m, in April 1969. In mid-March 2009 the gauge stood at 8.3 m, about 66 families in the region were moved to higher ground and two riverside lodges were flooded. The peak that year was 8.65 m. In 2010 one lodge stayed shut for about six weeks, and when it reopened its guests still had to be brought in by boat.

The opposite can spoil a stop too. One couple who stayed in December 2022 reported that the river was too low for any boat trips at all.

Skimmers at dusk, and not much game

Do not expect big game from a boat at Rundu. Travellers who stop at the lodges here mostly stay one night on the way to the Caprivi, and what their reports have in common is the other bank: villagers on the Angolan side, a few yards off, getting on with their evening. Hippos turn up in several reports, and one guest counted kingfishers of three kinds or more. One couple said flatly that they did not see a lot of wildlife on the cruise. The buffalo and elephant country starts at Mahango in Bwabwata, beyond Divundu and a good 200 km east.

Birds are another matter. In July 2012 tourism operators along the river made the first extensive water-bird count of the Namibian Okavango, written up by Mark Paxton of Shamvura Camp, and the surprise was 46 African skimmers in four of the six stretches, one of them close to Rundu, where nobody expected them to put up with the people. Skimmers breed from the end of July to November in scrapes barely 30 cm above the water and are most active at dusk, so look on an evening boat trip past sandbanks in those months. They will not let you walk up, but a boat can get close. Possible, not likely. The same count turned up white-backed night herons, normally a rarely seen bird, in five of the six stretches.

One couple’s warning from a lodge on the bank: phones latch on to the Angolan network and show Angolan time, an hour behind, and by their account plenty of guests turned up for meals an hour late.