Grootfontein

The meteorite they wanted to mine for nickel

On 26 May 1921 the general manager of the South West Africa Company in Grootfontein, a Mr Tönnesen, wrote to the London office about a lump of metal on the farm Hoba West. From an assay and a rough measurement he worked out that it might hold ten tons of nickel. The metal was too ductile to blast, he reported, so the company would try a saw and after that an oxy-acetylene flame.

That letter is the earliest mention of the Hoba meteorite that L. J. Spencer of the British Museum could find when he wrote it up in 1932, and it treats the thing as ore. Spencer’s explanation for why nothing came of it was that meteorites in South West Africa belonged to the government. The letters from 1921 kept at the museum in the old fort are less tidy. Pretoria wanted the meteorite, or a large piece of it, for a South African museum, the Inspector of Mines doubted any saw or flame was up to the job, and in November Tönnesen was still asking who owned it.

Two men claimed the find

The usual version has the farmer Jacobus Hermanus Brits ploughing behind an ox in 1920 when the plough screeched and stopped. Brits told it differently. In a signed statement of October 1954 he said he was living on the farm and out hunting one winter when he sat down on an odd black rock in the white limestone, scraped it with his knife and saw it shine. He cut off a piece with a chisel and took it to the company in Grootfontein. The statement lay in the museum until the Cape Town physicist Peter Spargo published it in 2008.

Spencer never heard of Brits. The man in his paper is Michael Hanssen, who occupied the farm and wrote to Pretoria in September 1921 announcing that he had discovered a huge meteorite and asking what it might be worth. By the time Spencer made enquiries Hanssen had left, and “late in 1920” was as close as he could get to a date.

Spencer saw it on 5 September 1929, the last day of an International Geological Congress excursion. One car broke down on the way from Tsumeb, and most of the delegates had chosen the game around Etosha instead. The steel tape measurements he published work out at 60 tons, the figure still quoted.

Two days and a pile of hacksaw blades

In those years the top of the meteorite sat level with the veld, and Spencer noted that a dozen people could walk about on it. Round the metal was a foot of dark, flaky rust he called iron-shale, and by adding that back on he reckoned the block was nearer 88 tons before it started to weather.

The block is also a magnet. W. R. Feldtmann, who was running the company by then, took a compass to it and found one end pulling the south point of the needle and the other end the north, with a dead zone in the middle. The scars have a history too. In 1930, with the Administrator’s permission, Feldtmann had a wedge of about 2.5 kg cut off for the British Museum. It took two workers two days and a great many hacksaw blades. The piece already carried two older cuts nobody had authorised, and one top edge had been melted with a blowpipe by somebody Spencer called “some stupid person” in print. Souvenir hunters kept at it into the 1960s at least. One estimate puts the total loss at half a ton.

A fever swamp before it was a town

The big spring was the reason anyone stopped here, and it nearly finished them. The Boers of the 1885 republic led the fountain water onto wheat, mealies and tobacco, and malaria was one of the things that drove them out two years later. A second trek came up from the Transvaal in 1892 under Jean Lombard, and the company let some of the families settle. The heavy rains of 1896 and 1897 brought fever again and many of them retreated to Omaruru.

The man in charge of the district from 1897 to 1900 was an army doctor, Philalethes Kuhn, who went on to a career in tropical medicine in Germany. One history of the trekkers credits him with draining the marsh round the spring and says that is what brought the Boers back. The Tree Park in town is close to that same fountain.

The ape in the vanadium mine

The mine at Berg Aukas, about 20 km east of town, produced something stranger than zinc and vanadium. On 4 June 1991 the palaeontologist Martin Pickford found part of a lower jaw, molars still in place, in a block of cave breccia from the mine. It was named Otavipithecus namibiensis the following year. The animal was an ape of 15 to 20 kg that lived on fruit and soft leaves about 13 million years ago, and it was the first ape of that age found anywhere in southern Africa.

One bird worth the stop

Grootfontein has no game to speak of, but birders stop for one species. The black-faced babbler lives only in northern Namibia, the north-west corner of Botswana and Angola, and one field guide calls it more furtive than other babblers. Roy’s Camp, about 55 km up the B8 near the Tsumkwe turnoff, is the exception. A piece in Travel News Namibia in 2010 had the birds going about the camp in parties of four to seven, turning over leaf litter and making a nasal racket, with a nest just behind the restaurant. On the 4x4 Community forum in 2023 one regular called the camp the best place on the planet for them, and four others named it as the stop between Grootfontein and Rundu. The bare-cheeked babbler is a different trip: it is a bird of the north-west, around Kunene and Etosha.