Gobabis
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Gobabis, Namibia, is a town situated 200 km (124 miles) down the B6 motorway from Windhoek to Botswana. The town is 110 km (68 miles) from the Buitepos Border post with Botswana, and serves as an important link to South Africa on the paved Trans-Kalahari Highway. Gobabis is in the heart of the cattle farming area, and is considered to be the capital of the east and also known as the "Little Texas" of Namibia. In fact Gobabis is so proud of its cattle farming that a statue of a large bull with the inscription "Welcome to Cattle Country" greets visitors to the town. Gobabis borders the Kalahari Desert, and is traditionally in the land of the Herero people.
Like many other towns in Namibia, Gobabis developed around a mission station (Gobabis means "place of discussion" in the Nama language), in this case established in 1856 by Friederich Eggert of the Rhenish Missionary Society. In the latter half of the 1800s and the early 1900s several conflicts flared up between the Mbanderu and the Khauas Khoikhoi, as well as between the settlers and the indigenous people. Gobabis is in an area where the Herero and the Nama people fought wars against one another. The Gobabis district was proclaimed by the German authorities in February 1894 and in June the following year Gobabis was occupied by a German garrison. While the military fort, built in 1896-7, has long since disappeared, one of the few buildings dating back to that era is the field hospital, or Lazarette, which has been declared a national monument.
Gobabis continues to grow as a city due to goods crossing from the mines of landlocked Botswana to the Namibian port of Walvis Bay, and furthermore from consumer goods being imported into Namibia from Johannesburg in South Africa.
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