in the centre of which was what seemed to be a base for either a pedestal or monument. We unearthed a broken column, a part of which was in a fair state of preservation, the four flat sides being fluted. We searched diligently for inscriptions, but could find none, and hence could collect no definite evidence as to the age and nature of the structure.
That was the first-ever mention of the Lost City of the Kalahari.
Chapter Two
A Journey with Gun, Camera and Notebook
Early the next morning, I was woken by a crunching sound just outside the tent. Being careful not to make a noise, I peeped tentatively outside, and found myself nose-to-muzzle with a cow munching on the grey seedpods scattered under the trees where I had pitched my tent. The big brown beast, with an impressive set of horns, wasn’t too surprised at the sight of me: it simply lifted its square head to meet my gaze, as if to say, “Do you mind? I’m having breakfast,” before it went back to its meal. After getting dressed I stepped out into the cool morning air to be greeted by a herd of about twenty, which had surrounded the tent. Most were intent on hoovering up every pod on the ground but a few managed to crane their necks long enough to pluck some from between thorns on the hanging branches.
Like its distant cousin the cow, the giraffe has always favoured this tree for its crunchy seedpods. It is said that they liked them so much that their necks grew as they strove to reach the juiciest pods higher up in the tree. Of course, this is a gross over-simplification of the evolutionary process. But the association between giraffes and their preferred source of sustenance has been immortalised in the name of the tree: the camelthorn. In Afrikaans a giraffe is called a kameelperd, a camel-horse. Now, long after European travellers shot the giraffe to extinction in these parts, the camelthorn is a poignant reminder that these animals once thrived on the desert plains. That morning, however, I was mostly grateful that the cows shared their culinary preference. Being less well adapted to desert life, their presence meant I was close to permanent water – and humanity. So, after enjoying a cup of coffee, using up the last of my water, and breaking camp – which involved a little pushing and shoving of bovine flesh – I followed the cattle path heading northeast.
Gradually, the path improved, morphing from an indeterminate track peppered with cattle spoor, to a set of parallel tyre tracks, to a graded gravel road with road signs. Finally, a few hours after leaving the cattle herd, I arrived at the village of Lehututu, named after the call of a conspicuous bird in the Kalahari, the African grey hornbill. The ubiquitous birds perch at the tops of camelthorns, raise their heads and heavy curved bills skyward and whistle shrilly hew, hew, teoo, teooo, teoooo.
Lehututu was a welcome base for replenishing my water supply and reorienting myself. It also boosted my resolve to continue my search for Farini’s Lost City because, by his own account, he had been there. At the time he passed through, it was just a small baTswana village of round huts; the walls constructed of mud, sand, grass and cow dung that created a strong cement-like compound commonly known as dagha. All the huts had thatch roofs supported by a pole in the middle. Even today, many abodes in Lehututu are constructed like this, although I noticed that rectangular structures of brick and mortar are beginning to take over the architectural landscape of the village. More important to me than Farini’s visit to the place was that Lehututu was the closest settlement to where he claims to have seen the ruins.
The first time I came across the name Farini was in 2005, inside the covers of a Christmas gift. I had received a copy of Alan Paton’s hitherto unpublished account of an unusual adventure he undertook in 1956. The celebrated author of Cry, the Beloved Country had been persuaded by a fortune-seeking adventurer named Sailor Ibbetson to go on a harebrained expedition into the Kalahari Desert to search for Farini’s Lost City. Ibbetson was obsessed with what had already mushroomed into a legend and somehow persuaded Paton to accompany him and a group of amateur explorers in a dilapidated five-ton truck on “the craziest expedition ever to enter the unknown”. Before then, Paton had never heard the name Farini, but like any good writer he allowed himself to be drawn in by Ibbetson’s scheme. In his resulting book, Lost City of the Kalahari, Paton describes Farini as an American cattle rancher who came to the Kalahari fired up by tales of “grass-covered plains, its teeming game and its diamonds” and came away the discoverer of a Lost City. I was hooked.
I learnt from Paton that Farini had written a book extravagantly entitled Through the Kalahari Desert: A Narrative of a Journey with Gun, Camera, and Notebook to Lake N’gami and Back. With some difficulty, I obtained a copy from the British Library, which had printed it from the original housed in the British Museum. It was a fairly voluminous work, complete with sketches, tables, inventories and a map, plus lengthy details on the fauna and flora of the region. Despite the detail, I agree with Paton’s impression of it as a galloping and entertaining read. The narrative bounds along at a pace that makes it difficult to put down, even by today’s standards.
A wonderful feature of the book is the series of sketches, apparently based on photographs taken by Farini’s foster son, Lulu. Then in his late twenties, Lulu was a talented photographer who had taken along an early version of a portable camera, complete with dry plates, which he had to preserve for months on end in hot, dusty conditions. This was some feat. Even in the modern era, with the luxury of a climatically sealed truck cabin, it is almost a hopeless battle to prevent the dust and heat from destroying my camera equipment. I have broken three camera housings and scratched half a dozen expensive lenses, thanks to the fine red dust of the Kalahari. Lulu somehow prevailed. He must have been one of the first, if not the first, to photograph Kalahari scenes and landscape. His photos are preserved for posterity at the National Archives in the United Kingdom.
According to Farini’s narrative, the journey in a light buckwagon took eight months to complete. He was accompanied by his foster son, a German itinerant salesman named Fritz Landwehr whom they picked up along the way, a handful of servants, local guides, mules that were soon switched for much hardier oxen, some horses and a pack of hunting dogs. The Farinis did a train journey from Cape Town to Kimberley, where they collected a wagon and supplies. They then travelled to the Vaal River, crossing it at Schmidtsdrif before heading west past Griqua Town to the Orange River at Wilgenhoutsdrif. There the party struck out north, trekking to the isolated trading post of Khuis on the Molopo and then on to Lehututu, which Farini misspelled Lehutitung, in what today is the Matˆsheng district of the Kgalagadi region of the southern Kalahari. In 1885, precisely as Farini travelled through, the predominantly uncharted area between the Orange River and the 22˚ South parallel was in the process of being proclaimed for the British Crown, soon to be the Bechuanaland Protectorate. It was a move aimed primarily at halting the expansion of both German imperial and Africanised Dutch (Boer) republican designs.
After Lehututu, Farini and his party travelled up the western border of the would-be Protectorate and the German territory of South-West Africa (now Namibia), passing the remote European hamlet of Ghanzi. The explorer apparently got as far as Lake Ngami (he wrote N’gami) where he shot an elephant. Lake Ngami had already been ‘discovered’ by explorer David Livingstone, who came in from a different direction in 1849, but Farini then went further northwest to an area he recorded on his map as Bell Valley before looping back, taking a south to southwesterly route roughly along the eastern boundary of German South-West Africa. They passed Tunobis, then a settlement of Herero, a tribe Farini describes as “powerfully built… with the splendid physique of the Zulus”. After Tunobis they trekked south all the way to what was then the quasi-independent Baster nation of Mier. Baster is Afrikaans for bastard, referring to a large group of mixed-race immigrants, originally from the Cape Town region, who had escaped the racial oppression of their European masters. The majority were the offspring of Dutch farmers and their Malaysian, Indonesian or Khoe-Khoe slaves. They proudly referred to themselves as Basters, distinguishing themselves from the indigenous people and the slaves of ‘pure’ blood.
Mier country was and is characterised by a vast expanse of waterless desert dune country interspersed with white salt-encrusted pans and
