Cahama

Cahama lies on the dry plateau of southwestern Angola, a short way north of the Cunene River, where open woodland and thorny scrub give way to the semi-desert of the Namib fringe. Rain is scarce and uneven, and the land is better suited to cattle than to crops.

This was the country of Bantu-speaking herders, among them Herero-related groups who had moved into the south-west of Africa from the east by about the fifteenth century. Their wealth was cattle, and homesteads shifted with the grazing and the water holes. Settlement stayed scattered, and the Cunene, flowing out of the Angolan highlands toward the Atlantic, was the one dependable water line in a wide dry land.