For hundreds of years the vast territory of the Kalahari remained a blank on the map. Yet it gripped the imagination of poets, painters, writers, dreamers, adventurers and not a few charlatans. This book is a whimsical anthology of those who were inspired by this desert, those who lived in its bitter confines and those who died in its dry embrace.

This Memoir covers Judge Tebbutt’s career as a radio and television commentator, advocate, judge, judge president of Botswana, businessman (managing director of Syfrets), chairman of the UCT Convocation, charity fund-raiser and public figure. Judge Tebbutt was interviewed on his career by Prof Michael Bruton at Nicolas Ellenbogen’s Orange Theatre recently in front of an appreciative audience who showed interest in the forthcoming Memoir.

The concession to mine gold at Tati was granted to a British baronet, Sir John Swinburne, by Lobengula, last king of the Matabele. Although called by colonial imperialists as a "savage king" and a "native despot", Lobengula was "exceedingly well-made (in height about 6 ft 10 inches), corpulent, with a commanding presence and, when in a good temper, having a kind heart and a full appreciation of humour". The gold at Tati, which was discovered by the geologist Carl Mauch, was actually on the site of pre-historic diggings that had been mined there 400 years previously by the Makalanga people. Tati lay on the missionary road to the north, used by Livingstone and Moffat, and it was part of Cecil Rhodes's dream of a continuous tract of British imperialism from Cape to Cairo. The annexation of Bechuanaland was a direct result of the conflicts between the tribes within the area and the threats from President Kruger and from Germany which had recently colonised Angra Pequena. Gold from the early diggings here found its way to Great Zimbabwe and the famous golden rhinocerous from Mapungubwe was probably fashioned from gold mined at Tati. This forgotten corner of the sub-continent encapsulates a chapter of our history involving five countries, powerful men, much subterfuge, a botched invasion, a rebellion, land annexation, prospectors, hunters, traders and adventurers. It is a story begging to be told.

This book is a story of success, of the triumph of man over a wilderness; of the triumph of science over disease; of the conversion of a Valley of Death into a paradise. It tells of the shaping of one of the cornerstones of South Africa from a stone which the earlier builders not only rejected, but found an almost insurmountable obstacle. It tells of men and women of all races, principally Boer, Briton and Hollander, toiling against great odds, some for sheer love of adventure, some for wealth or personal advantage, some with a true desire for the common weal; of some who came and shortly went their ways elsewhere; of many who closed their lives here in a twilight of apparently hopeless failure; of some few who lived through the later stages of travail and of hardship to see at last, 'The stubborn thistle bursting into glossy purples, richer than the most voluptuous garden roses'. Each and all of these men and women of the past did their bit, great or small, consciously or unconsciously, with objects of self or of the common good, towards the shaping of the Stone, but the Great Architect could and did combine those individual efforts to the shaping of the things to come; none could foresee how great would be the eventual victory over the inimical forces of Nature, how great would be the use to which future generations would put the generous gifts of Nature in this Region of ours[: the Lowveld]." -H.S. Webb, first president of the Lowveld Regional Development Association, in his preface to the South-Eastern Transvaal Lowveld published in 1954