a short history of walvis bay
Walvis Bay is Namibia’s only deep-water port. It is situated on the mouth of the ephemeral Kuiseb River. This underground river, in effect a long linear oasis that supports an infinite variety of plants, animals and people, halts the restless, constantly moving Namib sand sea that flows up from the south.
The town is isolated: to the south lies the Sperrgebied, the Forbidden Territory, where diamonds have been mined for over a century. To the north is the Skeleton Coast. Here, shipwrecks slowly disintegrate along the elementally beautiful stretch of sea, sky and sand.
People have lived in and around Walvis Bay for about five thousand years. Hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the Topnaar people who live in the Kuiseb fished and harvested the!nara plants, as the Topnaars still do to this day.
The Portuguese named it Bahia das Baleas, the Bay of Whales. Diego Cao erected a stone cross to the north, at Cape Cross, but he sailed on, leaving the bleak and waterless tracts of land unoccupied. During the eighteenth- century whaling boom, American whaling ships filled the bay, decimating the animals that gave this remote place its name.
In 1793, Walvis Bay was occupied in the name of Holland, but in 1795, the British occupied the Cape and claimed the port at the same time. But it was only in 1878 that Walvis Bay and the surrounding land, now a busy trading port, was formally annexed by the British. In 1884, the scramble for Africa reached a feverish pitch and the territory that is today Namibia was claimed by Germany. The British proclaimed Walvis Bay to be part of the Cape Colony, however, and it remained a tiny British enclave until 1915, when South African troops seized German South West Africa and imposed military rule. In 1920, after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, South Africa, then a British colony, was granted a mandate over German South West Africa by the League of Nations. Walvis Bay was integrated into the rest of the territory and it was known as the South West African Protectorate. South Africa’s segregationist laws, including the migrant labour system, were extended to the whole territory, including Walvis Bay.
Walvis Bay was of strategic importance to South Africa, and in 1962 a large army base was established – part of it in the town, most of it in the desert – as internal and international resistance to apartheid in South Africa and South West Africa grew. In 1977, it became clear that South Africa would have to give up control of the territory. The South Africans appointed an Administrator General for South West Africa/Namibia (as the territory came to be called). On the same day, however, they annexed Walvis Bay, justifying this on the British annexation on behalf of the Cape Colony a century earlier. As apartheid laws eased in the rest of the country, they were applied ever more strictly in Walvis Bay.
Namibia became independent in March of 1990, but from 1990 to 1994, the South African army consolidated its presence and continued to control the harbour, leaving the town in a strange economic and political limbo until South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, when Walvis Bay and its population of about forty thousand were reintegrated into Namibia.
Taken from Melinda Silverman’s
Margie Orford, an award-winning journalist and internationally acclaimed writer, is the author of
She was born in London and grew up in Namibia, the setting for
For more information go to her website: www.margieorford.com
Thanks to Willie Visser and Sharon Roberts, for patiently explaining ballistics to me and for teaching me to shoot straight; to Johan Kok, for detailed information on blood splatter patterns and forensics in out-ofthe-way places; to Leanne Dreyer, for introducing me to the microscopic wonderland of pollens and forensic palynology; to Colleen Mannheimer, who told me which plants grow where in the Namib Desert; to Bruno Nebe, for rescuing me at the last minute with information about the bats that live in the Kuiseb River; to Johann Dempers, for giving me so many rivetingly gory pathology lessons; and to Andrew Brown, for letting me borrow his wonderful
Any mistakes and all fabrications are mine.
Margie Orford
Crime novelist, award-winning journalist, film director and author, Margie Orford was born in London, and grew up in Namibia and South Africa. She lives in Cape Town.
