Von Bach Game Park

When Okahandja drove out to watch a sluice gate open

At ten o’clock on the night of Monday 6 February 2006, NamWater opened one of the sluice gates at Von Bach. The dam had hit 100 per cent and the gates had not been opened for a flood since 1974. Hundreds of people drove out from Okahandja and Windhoek to look. Meatco and the local poultry farm put their workers on buses. The agriculture and biology classes of J.G. van der Wath Secondary arrived on a borrowed lorry. At half past ten on the Tuesday morning the gate was shut again, with the dam at 98 per cent, and that was that. The whole show lasted twelve and a half hours.

Von Bach is a water tank for the capital with a game fence round it, and the mood of the whole park follows the gauge.

A farmer from Outjo on the nameplate

Hans Wilhelm Sartorius von Bach was born in Detmold in Germany in 1904, went through the colonial school at Witzenhausen and landed in South West Africa in 1925 as a farm apprentice. He ended up farming near Outjo, sat in the territory’s Legislative Assembly from 1955 and on its executive through the 1960s, and went on to the South African Senate after 1970, the year the dam was finished. He died in Windhoek in 1975.

The dam he gave his name to was meant to be one piece of something bigger. Omatako Dam, about 100 km north of Okahandja, went up between 1978 and 1981 as a stage of a carrier that would bring Okavango water all the way to Windhoek. The last leg to the river was never built, so Omatako just catches floods and passes them down to Von Bach, and Swakoppoort, downstream on the same river, pumps back up to it as well.

One more thing about the river. Swakop comes from a Khoekhoe name that translates, politely, as a bowel movement. It describes the brown sludge the river pushes into the sea at Swakopmund on the rare occasions it gets there (2011, 2022 and 2025 most recently).

Read the dam level before you pack the rods

Full, the reservoir covers nearly five square kilometres, which is more than a tenth of the park. Empty is another matter. In March 2016 Von Bach was down to 22.7 per cent, and that September The Namibian reported that bass fishing here had stopped altogether. A year later it was back above half. In March 2020 it filled and a gate was opened again, with the water running down the Swakop to top up Swakoppoort, twelve months after the three Windhoek dams together had stood at 21 per cent.

It moves fast in both directions. In 2008 the level went from 51 to 83 per cent in about six weeks, and in March 2025 it gained ten points in a single week. NamWater puts out a dam bulletin every week and the Windhoek papers report it, so nobody needs to arrive at a mud flat by surprise. In every one of those years the big inflows came in February and March.

Spare a thought for the people upstream while you are at it. When the dam filled in 2006, the chairman of the farmers’ association at Ovitoto, in the catchment, pointed out that the same floods cut his 300 members off from town, and that none of the water came back to them by pipe. In 2023 their councillor was still asking for a pipeline from Von Bach.

Jump records and a ferry to the campsite

A drinking water dam is an unlikely place for continental sport, but five All Africa Water-ski Championships were held here between 1995 and 2006, and the eleventh edition was set for Easter 2010, with at least 55 competitors expected and wakeboarding on the programme for the first time. The local name to know is Garry Knight, an overall African champion who also held the All Africa jump record. One of his national junior slalom marks, set in 1997, stood until Dieter Kebbel beat it at Von Bach in 2015.

The campsite is reached across the water as easily as round it. When the Windhoek Spring Fiesta was held there in 2019, the crowd was ferried over from the lodge.

Where 22 South crosses 17 East

The game is the part to be honest about. I can find no published count for Von Bach, and the official species list is all anyone has to go on. What visitors describe is thinner and more believable. One New Era writer who goes often says giraffe and kudu come out of the bush when you are not expecting them, and counts that surprise as the best thing about the place. Away from the shore the park is rocky hill country with patrol tracks, not tourist roads.

The best account of that back country comes from an odd source. The point where latitude 22 South meets longitude 17 East lies inside the fence, and people who collect such points have logged two visits, in July 2003 and August 2006. The second pair, Brian and Renate Roberts, went with a ministry ranger, Viva Tjivikua, and his son. They needed low range to get within 80 metres, walked the rest through grass and thorn, and photographed zebra on the next hill. On the way out a troop of baboons was sitting on the rocks by the track. Their notes also list eland, springbok and ostrich in the park, which the ministry’s own list does not, so treat those as a 2006 report and no more.

That is one August day twenty years ago, so I would not promise anyone zebra. If you stay by the water, count on birds and treat anything bigger as a bonus.

A footnote for people who know their Namibian conservation history: Chris Eyre, who went on to fight poaching in the north-west in the 1980s, worked at this dam early in his career.