5

Interlude

WHILE BOTHA WAS preoccupied with quashing the rebellion, von Heydebreck and Governor Seitz used the interlude to deal with the Portuguese forces massing on the northern border of German South-West Africa. On 19 October 1914, a garrison from the Portuguese border fort at Naulila had ambushed a German convoy, killing the German administrator for the northern region and two lieutenants.¹ Von Heydebreck immediately dispatched Major Franke with five squadrons and six artillery guns by rail up to the Tsumeb terminus. From there they marched over the expansive bushveld, past the white castellated walls of the German fort of Namutoni on the eastern rim of the Etosha saltpan and through the land of the Ovambo to Naulila.

At the same time, Seitz determined to remove Mucasso, the Portuguese fort on the Caprivi, once and for all. By 1914 the territorial dispute was still under review, but, given the outbreak of war, he thought it best to neutralise any potential threat. While Franke moved on Naulila, a small unit led by Sergeant Oswald Ostermann marched to the Caprivi. On 19 November, Ostermann’s men took the fort without a single shot being fired. In the process they captured sixteen Portuguese soldiers, two artillery pieces, some guns and plenty of livestock, and effectively erased the Portuguese presence in the sector.² That left the matter of deciding whether or not to secure the remainder of the Caprivi. As the long tract of land was strategically impossible to patrol, and the imperial resident on the strip’s farthest end had already surrendered, the decision was made to abandon it.

Meanwhile, for Franke and his men, progress was agonisingly slow. Besides his five squadrons of Schütztruppe, he was moving with some 2 000 oxen and various auxiliaries. By the time they arrived at Naulila on 18 December, he feared the Portuguese would be well ready for them. He need not have worried, for though he was slow in getting there, Franke was swift in demolishing the Portuguese.

The fort, surrounded with mud walls designed to deal with the odd Ovambo insurrection, was no match for Franke’s field artillery, which rapidly obliterated the structure and killed over 180 defenders. A large number of those deaths resulted from a direct shell hit on the fort’s central ammunition depot. The rest of the Portuguese divisions in the vicinity, who, unlike Franke and his troops, had no prior experience of African warfare or its landscape, fled north in panic, leaving most of their weapons behind and abandoning the southern section of the colony entirely.

The Portuguese rout at Naulila prompted the Ovambo tribes north of the Kunene River into full insurrection, and with the arms and ammunition left behind by their hated masters, they were able to keep the Portuguese troops occupied for the remainder of the war.³ For Major Franke, the timely Ovambo uprising provided an effective buffer between the German colony and the Portuguese forces. Satisfied that he had nullified the threat, Franke returned to Windhoek to discover that he was now commander-in-chief due to von Heydebreck’s untimely demise on 12 November.

The Portuguese’s protracted dealings with the rebellious Ovambo had lasting consequences for modern Angola. In a desperate effort to break the Ovambo spirit, the colonials exacted a dreadful revenge on the local civilian population, crucifying suspected insurgents and hanging children as young as ten with barbed wire strung around their necks. Eventually, the Ovambo were forced to capitulate, but they never forgot the atrocities exacted upon them. In the 1960s, they rose up again, this time with other Angolan insurgents, in a war for liberation. The violent and drawn-out campaign finally saw the Portuguese abandon the place for good in 1975.