Discover the history behind the Auchterlonie museum

Travelling in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, a vast wildlife preserve in the Kalahari Desert region of Botswana and South Africa bordering Namibia to the west, be sure to include a stop at the Auchterlonie museum to discover what it was like to live in the area more than a century ago.

The restored stone and thatch cottage has only two small shuttered openings for windows, and there is a room just large enough for a table and a few riempie chairs in one half and a bed with a patchwork quilt in the other.

The interior of the little museum documents the pastoral lifestyle of the people who used to live there in days gone by.

They built the walls of Auchterlonie from the local calcrete stone, cut camelthorn branches to make rafters, and collected bush grass to thatch the roof. To tie everything together, they had to shoot a gemsbok or red hartebeest, then prepare the hide by soaking it in lime and water to get rid of the hair, wash the lime off with salt, and work it by hand to soften it before cutting it into strips.

For a touch of luxury, they had to shovel dung onto the floor and burnish it until it was hard.

Wandering around the Auchterlonie site there is also a cooking shelter and well, which would have been dug by hand.

Why live there?

It all had to do with the assassination of an Austrian archduke in faraway Europe – an act that sparked the First World War.

Germany had colonised South West Africa (now Namibia) long before, in 1884. But when war broke out in 1914, the British-aligned government of the Union of South Africa questioned what a catastrophe it would be if the Germans invaded the Union from their base in South West Africa.

They therefore drilled a series of boreholes along the Auob River to provide their troops with water if they had to be sent there to fight off invaders.

Those who lived at Auchterlonie – and similar cottages all along the river towards what is now Mata-Mata on the border with Namibia – were put there to look after the boreholes.

Many were recruited from the local community and allowed to “settle” next to the borehole with their families and livestock.

The South African invasion of South West Africa eventually took another route, but the borehole guards remained, largely forgotten by the authorities.

In 1931, the area was proclaimed a national park and the existing farmers were resettled along the Kuruman River. Their basic little homes along the Auob were abandoned – until SANParks restored Auchterlonie in 2004.