Karibib

One biscuit a day: how Botha's army took Karibib

At two in the morning on 5 May 1915, General Louis Botha left a place called Pot Mine, north-west of Otjimbingwe, and rode for Karibib. He stopped twice, an hour each time. At five that afternoon he was in the town, close behind the last German troops. We know the timings because a policeman in his bodyguard, Eric Moore Ritchie, was a writer by trade and had a book out in London before the year ended.

You would expect a frightened town. What Ritchie describes is German families out on their doorsteps in their good clothes, watching dusty horsemen look for the nearest water tank. The post office had shut two days earlier and the garrison had pulled out, leaving the women, the children and the old behind.

An army on a fraction of its rations

The men who rode in were close to starving. They had crossed the Namib faster than their supplies could follow. Ritchie says most units were on a half, a quarter or an eighth of their rations, which came to under a biscuit a day with a little meal and fresh meat. Hungry soldiers in a town full of shops is normally a recipe for looting. Orders went out within hours, officers were billeted quietly, and houses occupied by women were marked with a white cross, and nobody without authority was allowed near them. Word that the Lusitania had been sunk arrived just after the occupation, and Ritchie, who is not a neutral witness, insists no German in town heard so much as a hard word over it.

Botha raised his flag on 6 May and made Karibib army headquarters, because it was in practice the junction for the railway running north, where the German forces had gone. The line from Swakopmund came through here too. He left for Windhoek by motor car on the afternoon of the 11th to take the capital formally and was back by the 14th. Within a week he was meeting Governor Seitz at the farm Giftkuppe, out towards Omaruru, to talk about an armistice. Three days of that got nowhere. The Imperial War Museum in London still holds six typed pages dated 26 May, kept among the papers of a Lieutenant Colonel R B Turner: an English translation of what the Germans told their own troops about why. The war ran another seven weeks.

What the occupation cost the town

Before 1915 Karibib was the place where the railway was mended. The central workshop of the little 600 mm line stood here, and after the Windhoek side was rebuilt to the wider Cape gauge in 1911, every passenger and every crate had to change trains at Karibib station. That nuisance was good business.

The South Africans ended it. They relaid the track from the coast in Cape gauge, and it reached Karibib on 17 August 1915, five weeks after the German surrender. (In June a Captain von Losnitzer and his men had still been blowing up stretches of the line towards Okahandja.) With one gauge all the way from Swakopmund to Windhoek, nobody had to change at Karibib any more. The workshop here was closed and the work moved to Usakos.

Tombstones, tiles and the Bank of England

Blocks of up to about 30 tonnes have gone for export, and the stone travelled a long way: to Argentina, Japan, China and back to Germany. A list of buildings said to have used it includes the Bank of England, Frankfurt Airport, Bremen’s main station and Parliament in Cape Town. I have only found that list in one place, so treat the grander names with a little care. The everyday trade was humbler. An older edition of the Bradt guide put output at about 100 tonnes of finished stone a month, most of it tiles and tombstones.

The business nearly died more than once. A German-trained stonemason bought it in 1950 and brought in a band saw and a power plant, by the 1970s it was almost idle, the Wittreich family restarted it in 1982, and in 2013 it was sold to Chinese investors.

Petalite, lepidolite and a mineral called karibibite

In the farmland outside town a ridge runs for about 1,200 m. It is the Rubicon pegmatite, a body of very coarse rock up to 70 m thick, and for decades people dug into it for petalite, which is now nearly worked out. Petalite is the mineral in which lithium was first identified, in Sweden in 1817, and lithium takes its name from the Greek for stone because of it. Karibib is one of only a handful of places in the world listed as having petalite worth mining, with Bikita in Zimbabwe and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia among the others. Its first big use was in the glass-ceramic of CorningWare oven dishes, long before anyone wanted lithium for batteries.

The neighbouring Helikon pegmatites cut through marble and carry lepidolite, a lithium mica that comes in purple and grey. Both mines produced from the 1950s. Then the battery boom arrived and, oddly, things went quiet: the last owner mothballed the project in 2022, its parent company was liquidated in 2025, and in 2026 a British firm formed that February applied to buy it. In September the competition commission said it intended to approve the sale.

In 1973 three mineralogists working on these pegmatites, Oleg von Knorring, Thure Georg Sahama and Pentti Rehtijärvi, described a new mineral from here: soft, brownish-yellow needles of iron arsenite. They called it karibibite. The reference samples are kept at the universities of Leeds and Helsinki. The Henckert shop on the main street, which began as a small gem shop in 1969, used to show what else the hills hold. The same old Bradt edition describes a floor display of tumbled stones, every one from the local area, with amethyst, tourmaline, aquamarine and garnet among them.