Mariental

The friend of Witbooi who rode to Mariental alone

On 3 October 1904 Hendrik Witbooi ended ten years of peace with the Germans. The next morning the district chief at Gibeon, Henning von Burgsdorff, got on his horse and rode north to Marienthal, Hermann Brandt’s farm, to find him. He went alone. The two men had fought each other in 1894 and then become friends, close enough that people in the colony remarked on it, and Burgsdorff seems to have believed he could talk the old Kaptein round.

He was shot as he reached the Witbooi camp. The man usually named as the killer is Salomon Sahl, one of Witbooi’s soldiers. What exactly happened was never settled, even with witnesses. The German side decided Witbooi had lured him in. Nothing found since supports that, and the killing probably went against what Witbooi wanted. His body was found a year later, dried out in a cleft in the rocks, and taken home to the family estate near Frankfurt an der Oder, where it was buried in June 1906.

Sahl did not outlive him by long. The story, which the historian Klaus Dierks takes from a 1991 book by Zondagh (Connie Zondagh, one of Stampriet’s oldest residents, has published several local histories), is that lightning struck and crippled him and that he died of thirst in the Kalahari the following April. Treat that as legend. The names are real enough though: a farm near Mariental still carries Burgsdorff’s, and Maltahöhe, which he founded in 1899, is called after his wife Malta. Two towns about 110 km apart, both named for a German’s wife.

A post office that kept closing

Brandt had not bought the farm alone. Klaus Dierks’s biographical register has his brother-in-law Oskar as partner in the deal with Witbooi, and puts the Brandts’ wedding at Taung, in what is now South Africa’s North West province, on Christmas Eve 1894.

Marienthal got a post office on 1 February 1900, listed under its Nama name as well. Witbooi’s men wrecked it in the first days of the war, along with the one at Gochas. The railway from the south reached the place in December 1911, and less than four years later the post office shut again. That was 27 April 1915, the day the Germans beaten at Gibeon came through in retreat from the South Africans.

Nine years after that, on 26 July 1924, an Afrikaner named F.J. Jooste founded the National Party of South West Africa here. It wanted the territory absorbed into South Africa, and Dierks marks it as the first time white voters in the country divided along party lines. Its first branches were all in the farming south and east, in places like Gibeon, Kub and Gochas.

The camp west of town

The hardest part of Mariental’s record is recent. On 4 May 1978 South African forces raided SWAPO camps in southern Angola. The people they brought back, 36 women and 96 men by The Namibian’s count, were put in a detention camp at Kaiganachab, west of the town (the paper spells it Keikanachab), and held there for six years without trial. Dierks notes that there were children among the captives. In 2012 some of the former detainees were still waiting to be recognised as war veterans.

I have found nothing that directs a visitor to the site.

Milk, lucerne and the ostriches that left

The green fields below Hardap Dam are largely lucerne. It is the main crop on the government’s Hardap green scheme, where it is cut about every 45 days. Next door is milk. The !Aimab Superfarm had 1,400 cows in milk and was producing more than 30,000 litres a day when President Pohamba opened it in August 2009, in a cow house built to an Israeli design.

Ostriches went the other way. In 2004 Agribank put up a loan facility for 49 up-and-coming farmers and a Mariental producer. More than four birds in ten died, and by the end of 2005 the bank had decided the business would never pay and pulled out. The farms that once lined the road north of town were gone by 2016, though one was still there to be flooded on 2 April 2020, when 100 mm fell on the eastern side in two hours. That flood had nothing to do with Hardap Dam. It was the Aub River, and it went straight through the sand banks built to hold it. (The dam’s own long quarrel with the town is on our Hardap Game Park page.)

Red dunes up the C20

There is no wildlife to speak of in town. The animals are on the private Kalahari reserves off the C20 to the north-east, starting about 30 km out, where the long red dunes run in parallel lines with flat grassy valleys between them known as streets.

Oryx (gemsbok) and springbok are the two animals every account of a drive here mentions, from a magazine writer in 2004 to the lodges today. Eland, wildebeest and ostrich are on the reserves too. One family who stayed at Bagatelle in October 2024 wrote of oryx grazing beside their rooms near the pool, and now and then a white rhino.

Be clear about the cheetahs. Bagatelle’s are orphans and other animals that cannot go back to the wild, placed there with the Cheetah Conservation Fund and kept in an enclosure. Guests watch them fed at sundowner time. It is a good look at a cheetah and not a wild sighting, and writers have described the same arrangement since 2004.

What I would look for hardest is smaller: sociable weaver nests, the haystacks wedged into the camelthorn trees. One nest can hold more than a hundred pairs. Researchers who put thermometers inside found the chambers shifting by only 7 or 8 degrees while the air outside swung from 16 to more than 33. Cape cobras and boomslangs raid them, so look up before you stand underneath.