49 Fun Facts About Kalahari

What colour is the sand that covers vast areas of the Kalahari?

Red sand covers much of the Kalahari because a thin layer of iron oxide, in effect rust, coats each grain.

The name Kalahari is said to come from a Tswana word meaning what?

The great thirst is the usual gloss of the Tswana word kgala, and it fits: most of the Kalahari has no streams at all, and standing water lies only in a few scattered waterholes.

Roughly how large is the Kalahari Desert?

About 900,000 sq km is the usual estimate, yet across all that space only one river, the Okavango, flows the whole year round.

Why do geographers hesitate to call the Kalahari a true desert?

Too much grows there: grasses and thorn trees cover most of the sand, and the north has open woodland and even forest, so much of it counts as dry savanna.

Which true desert lies immediately to the west of the Kalahari?

The Namib is a strip of coastal desert along the Atlantic, almost rainless yet often wrapped in fog bred by the cold Benguela Current; the Kalahari merges with it in the southwest.

In what form does most of the Kalahari's rain arrive?

Summer thunderstorms bring nearly all of it, and the water sinks straight into the deep sand; in winter no rain falls for six to eight months.

During which months is frost common in the Kalahari?

June to August is midwinter south of the equator, and on this high plateau the clear, dry air lets the day's heat escape, so nights commonly drop to freezing.

Which cavern beneath the Kalahari holds the largest documented non-subglacial underground lake?

Dragon's Breath Cave was named for the warm, humid air that rises from its mouth; the lake hidden below was only discovered in 1986.

Which Kalahari antelope is famous for pronking?

The springbok pronks when alarmed or excited, bouncing stiff-legged high into the air with its back arched, a display thought to warn the herd or confuse a predator.

Which spiky orange fruit with green, jelly-like flesh is native to the Kalahari region?

The kiwano is native to much of Africa south of the Sahara, but its name is a trademark coined in New Zealand, where farmers began raising it for export in the 1980s.

The languages of the Kalahari San are famous for which unusual sounds?

Clicks are written with signs such as ! and ǂ, which is why names like ǃKung and Nǃxau look so strange in print: the exclamation mark stands for a sharp pop of the tongue.

In what do the San traditionally store water in the Kalahari?

Blown-out ostrich eggshells make light, strong canteens; in a drought the San suck water up from damp sand through a hollow grass stem and let it run into the shell.

The San tip their arrows with diamphotoxin, a slow-acting poison produced by what?

Beetle larvae of the genus Diamphidia supply the toxin, which bursts the blood's oxygen-carrying cells, so a wounded animal weakens only slowly.

Which South African writer brought the Kalahari San to world attention in the 1950s with The Lost World of the Kalahari?

Laurens van der Post first made the journey for a six-part BBC television series in 1956; the book of the same name followed two years later and became his best-known work.

Anthropologists' 'Kalahari Debate', begun in the 1980s, asks whether the San were always what?

Isolated hunter-gatherers is how Richard Lee's camp saw them; revisionists led by Edwin Wilmsen argued that the San had long traded with, and been pushed aside by, their neighbours.

In the 1980 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, what falls from a plane among a band of Kalahari hunters?

A Coca-Cola bottle, tossed from a passing plane, is taken for a gift of the gods; when the band starts fighting over it, the hunter Xi sets off to give it back.

Jamie Uys's 1980 Kalahari comedy was shot in Botswana and in Tsumkwe, in what is now which country?

Namibia, then South African-run South West Africa, was home to the film's star, Nǃxau ǂToma, a bush farmer who had reportedly seen only three white people before he was cast.

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park straddles the border between Botswana and which country?

South Africa holds about a quarter of the park and Botswana the rest; the border between the two halves has no fence, so the animals cross it freely.

How often are the Nossob and Auob rivers in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park said to flow?

About once a century is the old saying, though the beds may run briefly after a big storm; water moving underground keeps their grass and thorn trees alive in between.

The lions of the Kalahari are famous for which trait?

Black manes are the trademark of the big Kalahari males, and more than decoration: in lions a dark mane signals a well-fed male high in testosterone, though it also makes him run hotter.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve covers almost a tenth of Botswana, an area about the size of which European country?

Croatia, at about 56,600 sq km, is only a little larger than the reserve's 52,800; in 2008 bush fires scorched roughly four-fifths of the reserve.

The San's removal from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, ruled unlawful in 2006, came after prospectors found what there?

Diamonds were assessed at Gope in 1996 and the removals began the next year; the government denied any link, but a mine opened inside the reserve in 2014.

In which Central Kalahari valley did Mark and Delia Owens camp for seven years, as told in Cry of the Kalahari?

Deception Valley is a fossil riverbed in the heart of the reserve; Delia Owens, who studied its lions and other carnivores, later wrote the novel Where the Crawdads Sing.

The Okavango Delta became which numbered site on the UNESCO World Heritage List in June 2014?

The 1000th inscription went to a wetland whose flood arrives in the dry winter months, drawing animals from far around just when the land about it is at its driest.

The Okavango's annual flood begins as rain in the highlands of which country?

Angola's uplands feed both the Okavango and the Cuando; after an unusually wet season there, the overflow can run on past the delta to fill Lake Ngami and reach the great salt pans.

What happens to nearly all the water that reaches the Okavango Delta?

It evaporates or is used by plants: almost none flows out, so a great river simply ends in the swamps of northern Botswana without ever reaching the sea.

Which tree is a landmark of the Makgadikgadi pans and the northern Kalahari?

The baobab is one of the largest and strangest trees of the region; one giant near the pans, named after the explorer James Chapman, is said to have served 19th-century travellers as a post office.

A 2019 DNA study named the ancient Makgadikgadi wetland as the possible homeland of which species?

Homo sapiens, the study argued, arose about 200,000 years ago beside what was then a vast, fertile lake, and stayed for some 70,000 years before spreading out.

Which birds arrive on the Makgadikgadi pans in tens of thousands during the rainy season?

Flamingos flock in when rain floods the salt crust, and the pans are one of the few places in southern Africa where they breed; zebra and wildebeest follow the new grass.

What kind of animal is a meerkat?

A small mongoose, the meerkat forages in packs while one animal stands upright as a sentinel, watching for eagles and other predators and barking the alarm.

Adult meerkats teach their pups to handle which venomous prey by first disarming it for them?

Scorpions are regular prey: adults bite off the sting before handing one to a pup, a rare, well-documented case of wild animals actively teaching their young.

Which zoologist founded the Kalahari Meerkat Project, the long-term study behind the TV series Meerkat Manor?

Tim Clutton-Brock, a Cambridge zoologist known for decades of work on Scottish red deer, set the project up to learn why meerkats cooperate in raising one another's young.

Which meerkat family starred in the documentary series Meerkat Manor?

The Whiskers were one of more than a dozen families under study; their matriarch, Flower, became the star, and a book and a television film later told her life story.

Which Kalahari antelope carries a European name that first meant male chamois, an Alpine goat-antelope?

Gemsbok was first the Dutch or German name for a male chamois; it was carried over in southern Africa to a desert oryx, though the two animals are not closely related.

How do gemsbok get the water they need in the Kalahari without drinking?

Eating wild melons and roots is enough: tsamma melons and wild cucumbers can supply all the water a gemsbok needs, and it will dig a metre down for tubers.

The Kalahari's camel thorn is kameeldoring in Afrikaans, a name that really refers to which animal?

The giraffe is kameelperd in Afrikaans, so the tree is really the 'giraffe thorn'; it is protected by law, and its seeds can be roasted as a coffee substitute.

Hoodia gordonii, the Kalahari succulent nicknamed Bushman's hat, became threatened by collectors after false claims that it was what?

An appetite suppressant is what marketers called it, on no good evidence; trade is now regulated, and the San won a share of the royalties from research that drew on their knowledge.

Which Botswana hills, called the 'Louvre of the Desert', hold more than 4,500 rock paintings?

The Tsodilo Hills pack their paintings into about ten square kilometres, and local people still revere them as a place of worship visited by ancestral spirits.

Which South African town, fed by a spring called 'The Eye', is known as the Oasis of the Kalahari?

Kuruman's spring, the Eye, brings up water from deep underground in the middle of dry thornveld; at the mission there Robert Moffat translated the Bible into Tswana and had it printed.

Which Botswana town in the middle of the Kalahari is the centre of the country's beef-ranching industry?

Ghanzi's ranches date from the 1890s, when settler families were granted blocks of land there; for decades they lived in isolation and poverty before the beef trade took off.

Which long-legged Kalahari bird of prey hunts on foot, stamping snakes and lizards to death?

The secretarybird stalks the grassland on legs armoured with thick scales against snakebite; its crest is said to recall the quill pens clerks once tucked behind their ears.

Which two hyena species both live in the Kalahari?

Spotted and brown hyenas both live here; the southern Kalahari is the main stronghold of the brown hyena, which spends most of its nights ranging far and wide in search of food.

By what name are the San generally known in Botswana?

Basarwa is the collective name used in Botswana; the San have no single word of their own for all their groups, which is why labels given by others have stuck.

Fossils from which site in northwestern Botswana show the Kalahari was far wetter 30,000-11,000 years ago?

The region then had permanent water and abundant vegetation, and probably even supported hippopotamuses.

What are the ancient dry riverbeds that cross the northern Kalahari called locally?

Omuramba, plural omiramba: these old channels were flowing rivers in a wetter age, and today they run only briefly after heavy rain, though pools may stand in them.

Which small Kalahari bird builds haystack-sized nests that can stay in use for a century?

The sociable weaver's thatched colonies are among the largest structures built by any bird and can house a hundred pairs; the inner chambers keep the birds warm through freezing winter nights.

What kind of weather system sits over the Kalahari through its dry, cloudless winter?

A high-pressure anticyclone, the Kalahari High, settles over the interior every winter in place of the low pressure of the warmer months, and the skies stay clear for months on end.

Which people fled into the western Kalahari in 1904 to escape German colonial troops?

The Herero, routed at Waterberg, were driven into the dry Omaheke, where most of the refugees died; those who got through settled in the Kalahari, where their descendants still live.

Which explorer crossed the Kalahari in 1849 to make the first European sighting of Lake Ngami?

David Livingstone made the crossing with the hunter William Cotton Oswell; the Royal Geographical Society gave him a prize for it, the start of its long backing for his journeys.