ABSTRACT

Some one hundred and twenty years ago a group of German-speaking immigrants in the new city of Johannesburg decided to trek west across the Kalahari desert. Their motives were twofold: to get away from the impending war between the Boers and the British over control of the gold fi elds; and to seek their fortunes in a territory recently annexed by Bismarck as part of the scramble for Africa. The central Kalahari remains one of the more inhospitable areas of the world, and it was not long before the Europeans found themselves in diffi culties. They had African ox-wagon drivers, and their leader was an experienced explorer; but they ran out of water, and some were already dying, when they met one of the Kalahari’s nomadic tribes-people, possibly a G/wi.