Kang

Thirty runaway oxen and one well: Kang before the tar

In November 1894 about thirty trek oxen broke away from a police post out in the Kalahari, far to the north of Kang. They were the fat ones, held back for the long wagon haul across the Kalahari to Mafeking. Riders followed the spoor north to a pan, saw it swing south at a full gallop, and gave up the chase. The oxen turned up at Kang, roughly 260 km from that pan in a straight line, with no water anywhere on the way and the worst heat of the year under way. More than two thirds were dead. The Bakgalagadi living at the well said the first animals to arrive had thrown themselves into the well pit and been trampled by those shoving in behind. Siegfried Passarge, the German geologist who wrote the story down in Die Kalahari (1904), used it to show how far thirsty animals will travel. He also remarked that the villagers had most likely slaughtered the animals themselves.

The pan that made the village

That well is the reason Kang is where it is. Passarge lists Kang among the big brackish pans on the wagon roads from Mafeking, Kanye and Molepolole to Ghanzi, each with a well fed by a spring in the limestone floor. Villages along the Molepolole road had nothing but suck-wells, hollows where the damp in the sand was drawn up through a tube. A study of Bangologa settlement in the University of Botswana’s journal Pula names Kang as one of the pan-side sites those herders lived at and then left, moving after water and grazing before they settled around Hukuntsi. The village still sits beside its pan.

Kang has another name. In ǃXóõ it is ǀná̰m, a word that opens with a click. ǃXóõ, also called Taa, had about 2,500 speakers in 2011 and may carry more distinct sounds than any other language on record. The linguist Anthony Traill studied it with speakers at Lone Tree, up the highway towards Ghanzi.

A tightrope walker digs for water

The oddest visitor on record is William Leonard Hunt, a Canadian who walked a high wire over Niagara in 1860 and performed as the Great Farini. In 1885 he took wagons into the Kalahari with his adopted son Lulu, a former acrobat who came along as photographer. His book says they reached a place his guides called Kang Pan at about nine one morning after days of living on tsamma melons, and found it had just dried up. They dug a pit four feet deep in the mud and got a foot of milky water. Across the pan stood empty shelters, and melon vines already picked clean. On the way in they had outspanned under a sociable weaver nest that Farini put at nearly six feet thick. That same night, a few hours’ trek beyond the pan, by his telling a lion crashed into the circle round the camp fire, mauled one of his men, Klas, jumped on a wheel ox and was shot through the eye by Lulu.

Read him with care. A.J. Clement went through the journey in 1964 and concluded Farini never got as deep into the desert as he said. The lion may belong with his “lost city”. The dry pan and the digging sound like someone who had done it, though a day after the lion he has the wagons in sight of Lehututu, which is a long way west of the Kang on today’s map. Farini also mentions a trader named Harris killed at Kang Pan some time before, which is his word alone.

A better witness is Livingstone, who late in 1852 met a traveller named McCabe coming back from Lake Ngami. McCabe had struck straight across the desert from south of Kolobeng in a year of unusually heavy rain, and his cattle went 21 days on wild melons and nothing else. Farini had heard the same story thirty years on, as nineteen days without water between Ghanzi and Kang Pan.

Sand to the diffs until 1995

A member of the 4x4 Community forum who went up to Ghanzi with his father in school holidays in the 1970s remembers the tar ending about 15 km out of Lobatse and the sand starting some 25 km beyond Kanye. Their 1969 Ford F250 dragged both diffs along the middle ridge of the track, and nobody talked about kilometres, only hours.

The 161 km from Sekoma to Kang were finished in June 1995, paid for by an Arab development bank and the Kuwait Fund. Kang to the Ghanzi junction followed in September 1997. The planners chose to leave most of the road unfenced so that game and cattle could keep crossing, and the evaluation written afterwards admits what that meant: animals standing on the tar, and crashes.

What you will see, and what you won’t

Kang is not a wildlife stop. The game people talk about is on Kalahari Rest, the private game lodge up the highway, and its own species list gives the game away: waterbuck and impala do not belong in dry Kalahari sandveld, so some of what you see was presumably brought in. As for the predators it mentions, leopard and brown hyena keep to the dark and cheetah are thin on the ground anywhere, so I would not count on any of them. Campers who stop there write mostly about the quiet and the sunsets, and one poster warns that the stop on the highway is very noisy. The real herds start beyond Hukuntsi. One overlander’s 2022 trip report has springbok in the hundreds on the Zutshwa track.

The village has its moments. A Sunday Standard writer who came for the Western Kgalagadi dance festival in 2011 counted eleven groups, watched a healing dance round a fire, rode a camel, ate gemsbok, and found the village quiet soon after eleven. In April 2019 the ruling party held its congress here, with soldiers and game rangers on guard, and Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, who had set out to take the party leadership from President Masisi, withdrew on 5 April, the day after losing in the High Court.