largely to Schwarz’s postulations there was, in South Africa at least, widespread interest in Farini’s ruins. It was no longer the colourful stuff of Haggard’s imagination. The press began submitting articles about the city’s possible location and origin. Against this backdrop, on New Year’s Eve of 1932 a schoolteacher named Jerry van Graan stumbled upon a real lost city, one that would set off Lost City mania in South Africa, and resurrect Farini from obscurity.
Almost as if one is reading from the pages of King Solomon’s Mines, Van Graan’s story begins with a mysterious legend told by his father, a pioneering farmer in the Limpopo River area. The tale involved a nineteenth-century hunter and explorer named François Bernard Lotrie. On his return from years of hunting in the unknown hinterland during the 1890s, Lotrie wore an intricate gold bangle of an unusual design. It was rumoured that he had found a cave in the side of a hill, which the local tribe believed was sacred. It was whispered that in the cave were dozens of decorated clay pots full of gold artefacts. Lotrie, of course, did not divulge its whereabouts. He took the information to his grave in 1917 but, fifteen years later, when Jerry van Graan was on a hunting trip near his father’s farm, he and his friends stopped to ask for water at the hut of a blind old tribesman named Mowena. When the water was presented in an elaborately decorated clay pot, Van Graan, remembering his father’s story about artefacts in clay pots, became curious. His interest was piqued even further when Mowena steadfastly refused to divulge the origins of the pot. Undeterred, Van Graan bribed Mowena’s son, who then led them to a hill the locals called Mapungubwe – ‘the place of wisdom’.
It was the find of the century, if one discounts Hiram Bingham’s rediscovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. The fantastic ruins of Mapungubwe have great walls of hand-fashioned rectangular blocks set in complex enclosures, similar to Farini’s ‘elliptical wall’ description. Van Graan and friends unearthed intricately worked gold artefacts, anklets and figurines, the most famous being that of a rhinoceros about thirteen centimetres in length. Most were found among the numerous burial sites surrounding the hill.
Being the desperate years of the Great Depression, Van Graan’s friends wanted to melt down the gold but he persuaded them not to. Instead, he contacted his former history professor at the University of Pretoria, who ensured that the discoverers were adequately compensated before getting the national government to purchase the area for the university. Paver, who at that time was the assistant editor of The Star, Johannesburg’s main daily, personally covered the story. It is likely that it was Mapungubwe that got Paver all fired up about lost cities, sending him on a lifelong quest to find Farini’s ruins.
Modern experts reckon that Mapungubwe had a population of about 5,000 inhabitants and was the centre of a prodigious kingdom that stretched from the south of the Limpopo to the north of the Zambezi, and east all the way to the Indian Ocean in present-day Mozambique, where they traded in ivory and gold with sailors from the Levant. Some of their distinctively sculpted gold artefacts made it as far as India and China. Today Mapungubwe is a World Heritage Site.
Coinciding with the discovery of Mapungubwe, a profusion of San and Bantu folklore about mysterious ancient cities built by the ‘strange ones’ or ‘old people’ suddenly surfaced. Most of these stories were recorded by one of the most prolific Lost City searchers – a politically connected professor of medicine at Stellenbosch University named ‘Francie’ Daniel du Toit van Zijl. The stories he collected in the 1950s alluded to a chain of ancient forts, built by past civilisations, spanning the subcontinent from east to west. These forts included Mapungubwe and the famous ruins of Great Zimbabwe, and were allegedly designed to secure the safe transport of gold and silver to ports on either coast. Farini’s Lost City could have been such a fort, and there were probably others, as yet undiscovered.
Ibbetson, Paton’s Lost City nemesis, was one who fervently believed Farini’s ruin was an outpost of a succession of grand forts. Characteristically, he fancifully hypothesised that the civilisation responsible for building Farini’s city had eventually left from the west coast of Africa on rafts, making it all the way across the Atlantic to South America – there establishing the Inca and Aztec civilisations. At the time of their departure into the Kalahari, Ibbetson boasted about mounting a follow-up Kontiki-like expedition to prove his hypothesis. He never did. Nor did he find Farini’s Lost City in the Kalahari.
Speculations even emanated from the academic sphere. Pre-eminent French geographer, writer and explorer François Balsan was among those who made unfounded assertions. He was the leader of the 1951 Panhard-Capricorn expedition, which was (and probably still is) the most scientific and systematic of the Lost City searches ever conducted. His folly concerned a rock painting known as the ‘White Lady’, which is found under an overhang of the Brandberg mountain in the Namib Desert. The painting, reputed to be about two thousand years old, allegedly depicts a white lady in ornamental dress. Balsan posited that the White Lady was “a portrait painted in very ancient times, perhaps of an Egyptian woman, if these Mediterranean colonists a thousand or two thousand years before Christ had branches in Austral Africa.” The rock painting has drawn attention from scholars ever since it was ‘discovered’ in 1918. Amid thousands of other ochre-coloured depictions in the region, the White Lady stands out because she is much larger, more detailed, painted all in white and appears to be wearing ornamental attire similar to that of an Egyptian pharaoh. Not much was made of this observation until 1929 when a copy of the image landed on the desk of French anthropologist Henri Breuil. The Frenchman noted a similarity between the White Lady and ancient images found in Crete. He concluded that both were Phoenician in origin. The theory has since been thoroughly discredited by researchers who pointed out, for instance, that the White Lady has a penis and is therefore male, that he does not have a Mediterranean profile, and that he is holding a typically San – not Mediterranean – bow and arrows.
The ancient seafaring civilisation connection was even founded on hearsay. In 1947, as part of his research for To the River’s End, Green interviewed Borcherds, the veteran Lost City searcher from Upington. The old man, then in his eighties, was still “keenly interested as ever in the ruins”. Borcherds told Green an intriguing story. A police sergeant had once told him that, many years before, while patrolling the ‘lost city area’ mounted on a camel he had come across “an ancient stone quarry” with squared blocks that matched Farini’s description. The officer added this fascinating rider: he unearthed “the remains of what appeared to be a boat, fourteen feet in length”. Borcherds was also convinced that a city had developed on a flowing riverbank and that an advanced race of people, whoever they were, had had access to river transport. The boat, he told Green, was final and conclusive evidence that an ancient city existed. “It is only a matter of time,” he reckoned, “before the dunes give up their secret.” Borcherds died a year later.
It wasn’t the only ‘discovery’ of maritime evidence in the dunes of that part of the Kalahari. A large expedition in 2002, sponsored by a variety of companies including Mitsubishi, Kodak and Garmin, conducted a thorough ground and air search for Farini’s Lost City. Using microlight aircraft, the team concentrated its search, as I had on my first expedition, on the area around Farini’s coordinates. Using a twenty-by-twenty-kilometre search grid, the various search parties picked their way in 4x4s through the dense shrubs. Their aim was to locate strings of pans that once made up rivers, since they too surmised that Farini’s ancient city was a port and therefore had to be close to water. They had more luck than I did. The team discovered some Stone Age tools, a neatly planted orchard, and a fish trap!
But the team did not find the city there. Expedition leader Greg van der Reis, however, remained undeterred: “If traders were sailing the oceans 4,000 years ago,” he mused, “and the archeological finds point to the Egyptians mining gold and diamonds in Africa at the times of the pharaohs, is it not possible that a city such as the one described by Farini could have been built in the diamond-rich Kalahari?”
Wilbur Smith dedicated an entire novel to this sort of conjecture. The Sunbird, written in 1972, was one of Smith’s favourites. He confessed that King Solomon’s Mines had heavily influenced the plot
