AFRICA’S LOST TOWNS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 30 December 1925, Page 9

AFRICA’S LOST TOWNS.

THE AIARCH OF THE DESERT. The Kalahari, the vast desert between the Orange and the Zambesi rivers, where Professor Schwarz is re- , ported to have discovered new towns . and people, was once a fertile land containing immense lakes, but to-day is largely a sandy, scrub-covered waste, where" no surface water exists in the drier months of the year. In the middle Kalahari are two great depressions called N’garni and Alakarikari, from the lakes which once filled them and originally covered thousands of square miles. They are joined by the Botletle river, arid were once fed by the Okavango, K wan do, and _ Zambesi rivers. It is supposed that this mighty inland sea burst its bonds and poured its waters over the Victoria Falls. Livingstone, who discovered N’gami in 1850, was the first to realise the existence of the earlier and greater lakes. Even in his day N’gami covered many square miles. To-day it is a grass flat, and the Alakarikari, which held large numbers of hippopotami and crocodiles, Ims been dry for many years. When marching just north of N’gamiland three years ago I came across numerous and curiously parallel old river beds, vestiges of the greater inland sea. The Kalahari is' slowly drying up, . and may become a second Sahara, and as "this desiccation is affecting neighbouring countries in South Africa. Schwarz advocates the reclamation of the Kalahari by damming two of the rivers which once fed the great lakes in such a manner as partly to restore them. In such a country is it possible

that collections of houses in such numbers as to merit the term ‘ ‘town ■ may have existed when the country was well watered —and their ruins may have been covered-and lost in scrub, jungle and sand. . . Extensive stone-built rums have been found through Alozambique and South Rhodesia which are supposed to be the work of early Arabs, and possibly Phoenicians, who built them when searching for the gold of Oohm They may hav© penetrated to the Kalahari when it was hotter watered, though this is unlikely, and the “towns” mentioned as having been found m the Kalahari are more likely to be the : numerous and often large ruined vil- ; lages abandoned through drought or i inter-tribal wars. . -

The population of the Kalahari has ■ crreatly decreased, but even in. 1921 i there 'were 17,000 neople and perhaps 150,000 cattle in N’gamiland alone, I where the natives are mainly Alakubas, 5 one of the' Alakalaka or slave tribes, f and their overlords, the Batawana. i Both have hitherto always been looker., upon as African Bantu negroes, with no affinities to the Sakalava Madagae- . can tribe as the Schwarz report suggests. for the Aladagascar people are 1 mainlv of Alalay-Polynesian stock. Jnst to the north of N’gamiland is ' another Bantu tribe, the Mambukushu, whose chief is a great rainmaker who ’ guards a mysterious rain-making not, and is said to use a baby’s blood in 5 his rain-making medicine. ’ The country! and people in N’gami- • land are vc-y interesting, hut scarcely - unknown, for there is an English i Magistrate resident there, and, a. par- - Ho J survey has been made and pub- - lished in the Geographical Journal.- - Colonel J. G. Statham, in the Daily Alail.