Walvis Bay

The bay is the only sheltered deep-water anchorage on a coast of surf and fog, and it drew whalers, sealers and traders long before any town existed. The Topnaar, a Nama-speaking people, settled along the lower Kuiseb river from the early nineteenth century, harvesting the !nara melon. Portuguese navigators charted the bay in the 1480s, and its name — the bay of whales — comes from the Dutch through Afrikaans.

In 1878 Britain annexed the bay and a small strip of land around it, later attaching it to the Cape Colony. When Germany claimed the surrounding territory in 1884, the one good harbour stayed British, which is why Germany built Swakopmund up the coast as its own port. The enclave passed to South Africa and was administered with the rest of South West Africa for much of the twentieth century, but South Africa kept it when Namibia became independent in 1990, holding the port and its offshore islands until they were transferred to Namibia on 1 March 1994.

Since then the city has grown as Namibia's trade gateway. Fishing and fish-processing expanded on the cold, productive Benguela current; the salt works and guano platforms continued; and the port was enlarged, with a new container terminal completed in 2019 that raised its capacity and its role in corridors serving Botswana, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Talk of green hydrogen and offshore oil has made the coast a focus of national economic hopes.

Walvis Bay is a working city and knows it. The rhythms of the port, the fishing fleet and the shift buses shape social life more than tourism does, and the population is mixed: Oshiwambo speakers who came for work from the north, Afrikaans-speaking families with long roots in the enclave, Nama and Damara communities, Topnaar households from the Kuiseb, and a smaller German-speaking presence than in Swakopmund. English is the official language, but Afrikaans is the common street language of the older neighbourhoods.

Its separate history has left a distinct local identity. Until 1994 residents lived under a different administration from the rest of the territory, with border formalities on the road out of town, and that memory still shapes how people here describe themselves. Kuisebmond and Narraville, created under apartheid-era planning, remain the population centres and have their own churches, choirs, football clubs and shebeens.

Angling, boating and birdwatching are genuine local pastimes rather than visitor activities, and the lagoon is treated as public property to be defended: its Ramsar listing and the protection of the tidal flats are points of civic pride. Football is followed closely, and the city's clubs draw strong support from the harbour workforce.

About 100,000 people live in Walvis Bay, most of them in Kuisebmond, Narraville and the informal settlements that have spread on the desert side of the city as migration from the north continues. Housing, water and serviced land are the constant political issues, in a place where rain almost never falls and fresh water has to be brought from outside the desert.

Work centres on the harbour: container handling, ship repair, bunkering, transport companies moving cargo inland, and above all fishing. Trawlers land hake, horse mackerel, sardines and kingklip, and the processing plants that freeze, can and pack them are the largest private employers. Salt production, oyster farming, guano collection and the airport add to it, and construction linked to port and energy projects comes and goes.

The city wakes early, in fog that often burns off by late morning, and quietens in the evening, when the Esplanade fills with walkers and anglers. Weekends mean fishing trips, braais and the short run up the coast to Swakopmund. Unemployment is high despite the industry, and the gap between the settled neighbourhoods and the newer shack settlements is wide and widely discussed.

Fish defines the table. Hake is the everyday fish, fried or grilled and served with chips; kingklip, kabeljou, snoek and steenbras appear on restaurant menus; and calamari and rock lobster are seasonal luxuries. Snoek is often smoked or salted, and anglers' catches are braaied whole. Oysters are a local speciality, farmed in the bay's cold, plankton-rich water and eaten in the restaurants beside the harbour.

Away from the seafood restaurants, the food is Namibian and unfussy. Kapana — thin strips of beef grilled over open coals and dipped in a dry chilli and salt mix — is sold at stalls in Kuisebmond, with fat cakes (vetkoek), pap and beans. Braaied meat, boerewors sausage, biltong and potjie stews are standard at home, and game meat such as oryx and kudu turns up on menus aimed at visitors.

The German-Namibian influence from up the coast shows in the bakeries, with rye bread, Brötchen and cakes, and local lagers are the usual drink. The Topnaar of the Kuiseb valley still harvest the !nara melon, whose flesh is boiled into a cake and whose oily seeds are eaten roasted or pressed — the one truly local desert food of this stretch of coast.