Kgalagadi’s Auchterlonie museum

By Roxanne Reid
You’re in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, hugging the dry Auob riverbed north of Twee Rivieren looking for cheetah when you notice the ruins of  stone buildings along the calcrete ridge. Further you turn off to Auchterlonie picnic spot to enjoy your coffee. Before you leave, wander around Kgalagadi’s Auchterlonie museum and discover what it was like to live here 100 years ago.

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The restored stone-and-thatch cottage stands on a windswept ridge surrounded by blue skies and semi-arid Kalahari duneveld. It’s dark inside, with only two small shuttered openings for windows. There’s room enough for  a table and a few riempie chairs in one half and a bed with a patchwork quilt in the other.

As you look around the interior of the little museum, which documents the pastoral lifestyle of the people who used to live here in the old days, you’ll realise what hardy, independent people they had to be. 

Nearby the museum are some picnic shelters where modern-day visitors to the park can stretch their legs

Auchterlonie perches on a calcrete ridge overlooking the dry riverbed with its borehole

First they had to make the walls of mud or, in Auchterlonie’s case, the local calcrete stone. They had to cut camelthorn branches – just about the only tree of any size that grew here – to make rafters. They had to collect duinriet grass to thatch the roof.

To get the thongs to tie the whole caboodle together, they’d first have to shoot a gemsbok or red hartebeest, then prepare the hide by soaking it in lime and water to get the hair off, then wash the lime off with salt and work it by hand to soften it before cutting it into strips. For a touch of luxury, they’d shovel dung onto the floor and burnish it until it was hard.

The very simple living room

But why would anyone want to live here in the middle of the boondocks, where the living was hard, the climate fiercely hot and dry in summer and icy cold on winter nights?

It all had to do with the assassination of an Austrian archduke in faraway Europe, an act that sparked the First World War. Germany had colonised what was then South West Africa (now Namibia) long before, in 1884. But when war broke out 1914, the British-aligned government of the Union of South Africa got their knickers in a bit of a twist. What a catastrophe it would be if the Germans invaded the Union from their base in South West Africa!

A tiny bedroom takes up half of the little cottage

So they drilled a series of boreholes along the Auob River to provide their troops with water if they had to be sent here to fight off the Boche invaders. Those who lived at Auchterlonie – and similar cottages all along the riverbed towards what is now Mata-Mata on the border with Namibia – were put here to look after the boreholes. Many were recruited from the local community and allowed to ‘settle’ next to the borehole with their families and livestock.

Of course, history tells us that the South African invasion of South West Africa eventually took another route. But the borehole guards stayed on, largely forgotten by the authorities.

Some of the typical blacksmith's tools of the era

If you wander around the site, you’ll find a reconstructed animal kraal, a cooking shelter, a smithy and a tan pit, where animal hides were treated to be used for bridles, saddles and clothes. There’s also a well, which would have been dug by hand. There’s an info panel in the museum, quoting sheep herder Karel Raats, who explained that dynamite would be put in the hole and lit – kaboom! Then someone would have to lower himself down to the bottom of the well to put all the loose rocks in a bucket that would be hauled to the surface by a pulley.

The tan pit where animal hides were soaked and treated

After the war ended in 1918, few people were willing to settle on these dry and desolate ‘farms’. In 1931 the area was proclaimed a national park and the existing farmers were resettled along the Kuruman River. Their basic little homes along the Auob were abandoned – until SANParks restored Auchterlonie in 2004. 

Next time you make pit-stop or picnic stop at Auchterlonie, thrilled with your experience of game viewing in the park, try to imagine what it must have been like to live there 100 years ago.

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