History
From the time Europeans first came to the arid lands of southwestern Africa, they’ve dreamt of making them more lush and habitable by providing water. Within the first two decades of occupation, the German administration had assessed the colony’s hydrological potential. Theodor Rehbock produced the first comprehensive report in 1898 to enable the construction of dams – seen as a panacea.
Southern Namibia is Great Namaqualand, the land of the Nama. The Naute area lies at its centre and was occupied by Nama stock herders when European missionaries and traders first arrived here. A 1761 expedition from the Cape, guided by Hendrik Hop, provided the first map of the area and recorded abundant wildlife along the Löwen River, including rhino, giraffe and buffalo.
Guillaume Visagie, considered the first White settler in South West Africa, based himself at Zwartmorastfontein (later called Modderfontein) from around 1785. A mission station was established here in 1860 by the Rhenish Mission Society and later named Keetmanshoop. Under German rule, much of the colony was surveyed as settler farms, and by 1921 all land in the Naute area had been developed as freehold farmland.
Theodor Rehbock’s plans for a dam at Naute were halted by World War I, and were only taken up again in the late 1960s by the South African administration. Naute Dam was completed in 1972, built with extensive irrigation in mind – although the agricultural scheme was only developed after Namibia’s independence.
Naute Game Park was proclaimed a decade and a half after the dam’s completion and was, like so many of Namibia’s parks, a by-product of other developments – in this case the dam. The park is home to a much diminished fauna. Most of the large, valuable or problematic wildlife was eradicated well before 1900. The park was recently increased through the addition of 110 square kilometres of former farmland, expanding its potential.
The dam and thus park name comes from Cape Dutch, the southern African adaptation of Dutch that over time evolved into the Afrikaans language. The site of the proposed dam on the Löwen River, where it passes through a gap between rocky ridges, was originally known as ‘De Naauwte’, translated as ‘the narrow gap’. While a narrow gap is still spelled ‘naauwte’ in Dutch today, the Afrikaans spelling has changed to ‘noute’. Through time and misspellings, De Naauwte became today’s Naute.
.png?width=82&height=85&name=Navigate%20Namibia-03%20(1).png "Navigate Namibia")