A LOCUST HUNT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 1 November 1924, Page 15

A LOCUST HUNT.

IN THE KALAHABI DESERT. An expedition into the Kalahari Desert has been organised by the South African Government to discover the breeding-places of the locusts that come forth in the summer and swarm over the farms of South Africa, destroying everything in their wake. *lt is hoped eventually to send a small army into the desert, armed with sprayers and all the paraphernalia for killing the pest. Meanwhile the reports received from the reconnoitring expedition tell of queer tribes and queer customs. The expedition first penetrated some 200 miles to the native village of Molopolole. Here they were received by the native chief Sebele and his wife, both of -whom drersed in European fashion and spoke English. The natives in the kraal were of the Bawkene tribe, known as the aristocrats of the Kalahari. lii their midst there exist in hand-to-mouth fashion some 50 white men and women, who perform odd jobs. They are the descendants of semi-nomadic forbears who trekked adventurously from the Cape, ■ only to settle among the Bawkene natives, whose workmen, to all intents and purposes, they have become. Being white, by the laws of the country they are denied pastoral and agricultural privileges; and now they seem to have lost the means or the initiative to clear out and reestablish themselves in a community of their own kind. A further trek westward by the expedition into the desert showed that the Kalahari is by no means all desert ; much of it is well covered with growing timber and grass. Bushmen, Kalaharians, and other natives are scattered across its vast area with their herds of cattle, sheen and goats. Despite their mere scratching® of the soil and their total inability to store water or bore deeply for it, they successfully cultivate a certain amount of grain. With up-to-date dams and boreholes there are unmeasured tracts of the Kalahari which could be cultivated with profit. And as a cattle country it has excellent, far-spread grazhig areas. . At present, in some places, the bushmen obtain water in the dry season by sucking it from the sand beds through straws which lead up from a ball of straw buried a few feet under the surface. The bushman then, bv means of a second straw used simultaneously, transfers, the water from his mouth: to an open tortoiseshell. The buehmen also fill ostrich eggs with water, seal them up, and bury them for subsequent use.