African Reservations

Famous for its scenic beauty and the Eye of Kuruman, a geological feature bringing water from deep underground to the surface in the Kalahari Desert, this town was named after the Kuruman River (which is dry except for flash floods after heavy rain). Kuruman was a London Missionary Society mission station founded by Robert Moffat in 1821 and the place where David Livingstone arrived for his first position as a missionary in 1841.

The Kalahari Meerkat Project, made famous by the television series Meerkat Manor, is located nearby and is also the home to famous author and Sanusi or Zulu traditional healer, Credo Mutwa.

Kuruman has relatively mild weather patterns compared to other Northern Cape towns, such as Upington and Springbok, and is surrounded by more vegetation as compared to the Upington and Springbok, which are surrounded by desertic environments. The local people in Kuruman mainly speak Tswana and Afrikaans.

The name Kalahari is derived from the Tswana work “Kgala”, meaning the great thirst, or “Kgalagadi”, meaning the waterless place. It has been inhabited by the Bushman for 20 000 years as hunter-gatherers, who lived in a harmonious relationship with the environment until the influx of African and European man. However, due to its harsh environment, modern day man found its unfavourable conditions unsuitable to develop. Even with the introduction of borehole water, farming of livestock was a difficult pursuit. It is for this reason that man has had almost no impact on the land, and the Kalahari has remained a true wilderness area.

The southern Kalahari, due to its location and local climatic conditions, receives somewhat more rain than the central Kalahari, allowing it to support a large diversity of life. It is for this reason that the southern Kalahari is frequently referred to as the “Green Kalahari”.