BLUE SKIES OF THE KALAHARI

The Kalahari desert is a vast unspoilt wilderness of desert, salt pans, scrub and bushvelt. Dotted in this wilderness are small towns and large farms. It encompasses areas in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. And in this untamed land lies a former military outpost that turned into a colonial town called Mafeking in the early 1880s.

One hundred years later South Africa and Mafeking was facing a crisis. The British empire had given away its dominions and the Afrikaner government was besieged on all fronts. The homeland within which Mafeking was situated was a well-run panacea of racial equality, ‘a place for all’, was the phrase coined and stamped within the hearts of its people. 

Into the folds and coverlets of this vast land walked Stanley William Chapman, a man seeking a new home to fulfil his life’s longings and quell his restlessness after his travels around the world and his wanderings throughout Africa. WWII had ended but the turmoil this had left within his soul had not. This scent of adventure and new lands was an attraction his son could not ignore, so following in the footsteps of James Chapman, a hunter and explorer in 1843 and another ancestor, LT John Chapman of the Consul, who had sailed around the world in 1610, Stanley’s son joined him, travelling to Kuruman in the Kalahari. It is a town deep within the bowels of South Africa and the Kalahari bushvelt. A place that no-so-long-ago was populated by wildebeest, zebra, giraffe, crocodiles and lions, all being sustained by the Kuruman River that had long ago dried up.

This was to be the start of an adventure that neither had bargained upon, nor dreamed of. Where love across South African racial and religious boundaries played out in Shakespearean fashion, where civil strife and unrest reared its ugly head, a story of potentates, racism and the hatred of both blacks and whites, and, a country in divide. But, despite the blood drenched streets the blue skies of the Kalahari spread benevolently across the vast land below it, unknowing and uncaring of the lives and dramas played out, all to the beat of its own drums.