BOOK EXCERPT: The Great Elephant Crossing: Did elephant herds once rumble through the Karoo plains?

We all have some kind of bucket list, right?

My husband’s and my list is very obscure. It includes the Orange River in flood, the perfect night photo of a hedgehog, tracking a UFO in the Karoo, mass at Pella Cathedral in Bushmanland, the mane of a Kalahari lion in a dust storm, and Nieu-Bethesda when it snows.

We were also once set on finding a very special ironstone hill on a farm called Springbok Oog, somewhere between Vanwyksvlei, Brandvlei, Verneukpan, Keelafsnyleegte (Throat-slitting Flats) and the blue horizon in the Upper Karoo. On that hill is a particular boulder where a mother elephant and her baby have been perfectly etched.

We had first seen an image of it in a book published in 2005, and it became burnt into our brains. Perhaps it was the sheer beauty of the arid land with its gleaming black rocks. Or maybe it just seemed so incongruous that anyone had engraved an elephant there, in the Karoo’s driest quarter.

For nearly 20 years we dreamt about this elephant and her calf.

Club Talk

The Coldstream Guards were stationed during the South African War at the Graaff-Reinet Club; there are stories embedded in the walls, pictures, arcane paraphernalia and the memories of its members.

Head into the throng around the bar counter on a busy Friday night and you’ll meet all kinds of people who can tell you about elephant traces in this part of the Karoo.

Here’s John Allen Biggs, just retired from a life of farming on Vrede. This farm supplied the first burghers of Graaff-Reinet with fresh fruit, vegetables, walnuts and milk. It was also a place long used by elephants, says Biggs.

“There is actually a wetland on Vrede called Elephant’s Wallow. If you know where to look, you will see an elephant path from Vrede over the Camdeboo Mountains.”

The trampled forger

In that case, could there have been elephants crossing the drier plains of the Karoo further north?

In February 2023, our friend Adri Smit – who promotes the dryland via her website Ons Karoo en Kontrei – shared pictures of a grave, between Carnarvon and Prieska. Beneath the large, inscribed stone is the body of ivory hunter and convicted money forger Carel Kruger, trampled to death by a wounded elephant in 1791.

Many explorers of the early 1800s, including Henry Lichtenstein, mentioned the grave as a landmark.

Equipped with a set of sketchy directions, we headed northeast from Carnarvon on the R386, looking for Kruger’s grave. It seemed impossible to imagine elephants here. They must surely have towered over the bossies and skimpy trees, a target for every hunter.

We’d driven a third of the way to Prieska when suddenly the road kinked and we saw a white-painted corbelled house on the verge. The name “Karelsgraf” was clearly painted on the lintel.

Even better, there was a small graveyard opposite it. Could Kruger’s grave be here? We found a cairn under a massive tree and a stone angel watching over a row of family graves. But this was not the place. Adri’s photograph of Kruger’s gravestone showed that it was out in the open, with no others nearby.

We sought help by knocking on the front door of the farmhouse, a gracious old building surrounded by a well-watered lawn. No answer. We knocked again. Nothing. So we turned back to Carnarvon, passing a homestead where a family of farmworkers lived.

On impulse, we stopped and asked if they knew the whereabouts of Carel Kruger’s grave. A young man immediately pointed to a gate on the other side of the road.

“Just go straight through there and follow the road. You’ll see it.”

We drove the bakkie through what seemed like a miniature green forest before popping out on the other side, an enormous empty pan and the wide horizon spreading before us.

He was right. Suddenly it was there, slightly anticlimactic in that vast space. The large flat sandstone boulder was surrounded by smaller rocks. You could clearly see “1750” and “Graf” on it. Somewhat more worn by the elements and gnawed by lichen, were “1791” and “Carel”. It was dry, and during the drought it must have looked like a dust bowl.

Eye of the springbok

We’d foreseen all kinds of problems getting to this mythical elephant mother and her baby, etched on a dolerite boulder atop a remote hill by the |Xam people, or San.

Dr David Morris of Kimberley’s McGregor Museum was convinced the |Xam would have seen elephant in this area, in part because they had words for them: ≠xoa (elephant) and *≠gomma *(trunk).

Then he gave us contact details for the farm’s owner, Karel Kemp. We didn’t hold out much hope for a reply to our polite enquiry about photographic access to the site.

Karel startled us by answering immediately. We were most welcome, he said. He was based on another farm, but would be happy to see us at Springbok Oog.

We met him in a modest, neatly kept farmhouse on a property notable for its Dorper sheep, quiver trees and dark dolerite boulders. Karel’s father, Charl, had wanted to create a lodge here for interested visitors, and in 2017 Dr Morris and archaeologist Dr Janette Deacon had given input into a Heritage Impact Assessment. Covid then stalled all plans.

Deacon was still a regular visitor to the farm, said Karel. She would come for months at a time to map the etchings.

In the Heritage Impact Assessment, Deacon and Morris explained their importance:

“The rock engravings and archaeological sites on Springbok Oog and (neighbouring farm) Olifantvlei are highly significant at local, national and international level. In the 1870s a small group of |Xam San men, who called themselves ‘Flat Bushmen’ because the landscape in which they lived was relatively flat, were arrested for stock theft and taken to the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town.

“During their time there they were interviewed by a German philologist, Dr Wilhelm Bleek, who was keen to learn a Bushman language. After their release from prison, three of the Flat Bushmen, |a!kunta, ||kabbo and his son-in-law |hanǂkass’o, lived in the Bleek family home in Mowbray in Cape Town for several years.

“Bleek, and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, learned the |Xam language and wrote down the information that the men gave them about their lifestyle, beliefs and memories in |Xam and then translated it into English. More than 11,000 pages of testimony were written down in this way between 1870 and 1879. They remain the only substantial verbatim records in a Bushman language ever written down for posterity in South Africa.”

A map drawn in 1870 by Bleek with information from ||kabbo marks the places the men knew so well. And here we were, in what was once their home – now a priceless outdoor gallery dedicated to people and beasts long gone.

“After good rains, the thirsty giants would move south and westwards from the Orange River into this semi-desert area,” Deacon wrote in My Heart Stands in the Hill.

“Elephants are also a favourite subject on the next ridge of hills south of the Strandberg, on the other side of the Carnarvon Leegte, previously known as the Olifants River. Here the original farm name, marked on ||kabbo’s map, was Olifantvlei or Elephant Lake.”

A story is like the wind

We drove the short distance behind Karel to the hill. He showed us where most of the etchings were, then left us alone with them. The natural black patina on the ironstone boulders gleamed in the slanting afternoon sun, polished by time and the wind.

At first, there was no birdsong, no buzz of insects, nothing but a ringing peace, the murmur of a rising breeze and the crunch of our footsteps.

The horizon stretched all around us. Quiver trees stood everywhere, in broken formation. To the southeast, we could glimpse the dark Kareeberg hills.

A lizard peered at us from behind a rock. We were in the company of living and etched animals – accurate and fantastical: elephant, eland, giant elephant shrews, wildebeest, blesbok and zebras.

The breeze became an early winter Karoo wind. According to Deacon, the |Xam believed every man had his own kind of wind that blew when he was born, and remained with him like a physical attribute all his life.

“A story is like the wind, it comes from a far-off quarter and we feel it,” ||kabbo told Bleek during their historic interviews.

There on that hill, amid a stony vastness, we sensed the story of ancient elephant passage through the Karoo. It blew over us, as it had blown over the |Xam artists and their subjects, the giants that once walked this part of the world. DM

*This is an excerpt from Karoo Roads IV, part of the five-book Karoo Heritage Collection (Karoo Roads I-IV and Klein Karoo Magic) now on sale for only R1 300 (including taxes and courier fees) from Karoo Space. For enquiries, please contact Julienne du Toit at *[email protected]