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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
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