The Lost City of the Kalahari Desert: Fact or Fiction?

Ancient civilizations, lost cities buried beneath deserts or hidden in the heart of a jungle, protected by fierce beasts and deadly curses; mankind’s curiosity about what came before has led us to the Valley of Kings and into deep oceans searching for a mere glimpse of the fabled City of Atlantis.

Africa, considered by some to be the cradle of mankind, is no stranger to ancient civilizations. From the pyramids of Egypt to the lost tribes of Ethiopia and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, ancient man’s footprints can be found across the continent.

Today, however, we’re heading south, to the country of South Africa, located on the Southern-most tip of Africa, where we’ll be delving into a mystery more profound than the abundance of unoriginal names. We’ll be exploring the Kalahari Desert with its mysterious lost city.

The Discovery

The year is 1885. The place: deep in the Kalahari Desert, a semi-arid region covering much of Botswana as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa.

After coming face to face with venomous snakes, vicious lions, and native tribes which he described with about as much respect as you can imagine from a white man in Africa in 1885, our intrepid Canadian explorer, one Guillermo Farini, made an astounding archaeological discovery: A city, undoubtedly part of an ancient civilization, buried beneath the shifting sands of the Kalahari Desert.

An Exciting Prospect

So, who was Guillermo Farini and what was he doing in the Kalahari Desert in 1885?

According to some sources, Guillermo Farini, a master of many trades, was determined to be the first man to cross the Kalahari Desert. This may be true, but in the introduction to his book, Through the Kalahari Desert, it appears that he was far more interested in the tales of diamonds. The first diamonds had been discovered in the late 1860s and 1870s, so by 1885, the diamond rush in Kimberly was in full swing.

Attending a show at the well-known Coney Island, on Long Island, New York, Farini met Kert, or Gert in some sources, a mixed-race hunter with some San ancestry. Kert painted a picture of paradise – grass covered plains, fertile savannahs and forests, teeming with game, and, of course, stories of diamonds that could be found, just lying about, bothering no-one, in the sands of the Kalahari Desert.

Farini was a savvy businessman, among other things, and soon Kert found himself aboard the Roslin Castle, along with the rest of the Farini expedition, departing London for Cape Town on January 7, 1885. Some speculate that Kert might have been homesick when he met Farini in far off New York. If this was his way of flagging down a ride home, he succeeded in spectacular fashion.

The Expedition

The Farini expedition was a small one. The party mainly consisted of the explorer and his adopted son, known at the time as Lulu, who turned out to be quite the photographer. The UK National Archives digitized Lulu’s images and published them on its Flickr feed, for the curious among you. They were also accompanied by Kert, who would act as a guide, and, eventually, took on a second guide, Jan Abrahams. Two African workers or servants were also included but, unfortunately, their names were never recorded.

Whether for fame or diamonds, in 1885, the Farini expedition set out from Hopetown, in the Kimberly area, first heading towards Upington. A small town established in 1873, Upington is situated in what is known today as the Northern Cape, close to the Namibian border and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. From there, they travelled east, to Wilkerhout Drift, where they turned north, heading towards Lehututu and Lake Ngami in Bechuanaland, today known as Botswana.

After crossing the Molope River, the party came across what their guide, Jan, at first considered to be the Ki Ki Mountains on the Nossob River. However, Mr Farini, being so well-versed in Kalahari geography (note the sarcasm), quickly came to the conclusion that they were too far south for it to be the Ki Ki mountains and that they had, in fact, rediscovered something long lost to the red sands.

If you find yourself somewhat confused at this point, you’re not alone. Many place names have changed since South Africa, Namibia and Botswana gained their independence from their colonial overlords. There also seem to be some disagreement on the actual names of some places among the various sources. Add to that Farini’s inaccurate map, and the party could have been on the moon for all we know.

Through the Kalahari Desert, published in 1886, detailed the Great Farini’s adventures, from discovering waterfalls to hunting giraffe and saving a dying German trader only identified as Fritz L. It’s about 450 pages long and not what I consider light reading. While it certainly has historical value, the author’s racism, anti-Semitism, and his general disrespect for anyone not English grate on the nerves after a while, so I’m going to focus solely on the discovery of the ancient ruins and leave the rest of his expedition to those braver than myself.

A Great Discovery

A half-buried ruin – a huge wreck of stones On a lone and desolate spot; A temple – or a tomb for human bones Left by man to decay and rot.

Rude sculptured blocks from red sand project And shapeless uncouth stone appear; Some great man’s ashes designed to protect, Buried many a thousand year.

A relic, may be, of glorious past, A city once grand and sublime; Destroyed by earthquake, defaced by the blast, Swept away by the hand of time.

— G. Farini

Based on Farini’s own book, lectures and interviews, as well as research done by fellow explorers over the last 100 years, it’s clear that, at this point in their expedition, the party was hopelessly lost. So, until we rediscover this fabled city, we have only Farini’s description of the ruins, which is quite detailed considering they only explored the ruins for about 3 days.

Camping near the foot of what was not the Ki Ki Mountains, beside a long line of stone, Farini’s first impression was that the line of stone, presumably a wall, looked like the “Chinese Wall after an earthquake”. Upon closer inspection, they found the ruins of an extensive structure, in some places buried beneath the sand. According to the explorer, they traced this wall for nearly a mile, and described it as mostly a huge heap of stones, all flat-sided, with cement visible between the layers.

The general outline of this wall was an arc and, inside the arc, at intervals of about 40 feet, was heaps of masonry in the shape of an oval. It was about a foot and a half deep, with a flat bottom, and hollowed out at the sides about a foot from the edge. Some of the heaps inside the arc were cut from solid rock while others were formed from more than one piece of stone that fitted together perfectly.

Most of these heaps appeared to have been buried beneath the sand and, after a day of digging, which the local tribesmen accompanying them on this leg of the journey found entirely pointless, Farini came to the conclusion that what they found must have been either a city or a place of worship, or, in his words, “the burial ground of a great nation”, perhaps thousands of years old.

At this point, Jan made it clear that his people would not be digging out old rocks. They had had a successful hunt and were eager to return home to their wives. Farini insisted to stay and explore the ruins further. Jan and the hunters were there as guides, not cheap labour, and left the crazy Europeans to waste their strength by digging in the sands while going hunting. In his book, Farini, perhaps a bit petulantly, stated that the digging was much easier without the help, though I find that hard to believe.

So, the next day, without help and witnesses, the party continued their exploration and made astounding discoveries. Digging down in the middle of the arc, they came across a pavement, about 20 feet wide, made of large stones, forming a Maltese cross. In the centre of this cross was the base of a monument, or possibly an altar or column, composed of loose pieces of fluted masonry.

According to his book, Lulu Farini looked for hieroglyphics or inscriptions but couldn’t find any, so he made sketches of the ruins which Farini intended to give to those more knowledgeable on the subject to decide who once occupied this amazing city in the middle of the desert. Of course, providing correct coordinates or a more accurate map of where to find these ruins would’ve made this task much easier.

The Hunt for a Lost City

While there wasn’t that much interest initially, starting in around 1933, at least 30 documented expeditions have been launched into the heart of the Kalahari Desert, looking for the elusive lost city. Interesting things have been found. A city is not among them.

Travelling through the Kalahari today requires a powerful aircon and careful planning to replenish water supplies and do vehicle maintenance, so imagine doing it in 1933 without Google maps and an Engen 1 Stop every 50 kilometres (fuel stations with tuck shops and bathrooms for those unfamiliar with South Africa). So, to preserve everyone’s sanity, let’s focus on a few of the more influential expeditions.

While interest in the lost city was rekindled in 1923 by Prof E.H.L. Schwartz, a professor from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, the first expedition dedicated to finding the lost city of the Kalahari left in 1933 and was led by two South Africans, F.R. Paver, editor for the Johannesburg Sun Newspaper and Dr W. Meent Brocherds, a physician from Upington.

Before setting out, Paver made a thorough study of Farini’s expedition and decided to focus their search on the middle river of the three Nossob tributaries, a dry riverbed known at the time as the Molentswane River. On the way north, using a car and a light truck, the expedition picked up a desert trader, named Jooste, a young farmer from Gordonia, Nikolaas Coetzee, and a local, probably Khoisan, guide.

According to Coetzee, while hunting east of the Nossob River, he came across an arrangement of stones very similar to what Farini described in his book. Being in a hurry at the time, he didn’t bother to explore the place and only had a rough idea of where to find it.

So, off the party went, sometimes burning as much as a gallon of gas for every seven miles as they fought through the heavy sands. They decided to follow the dry riverbed of the Molentswane River, but lost the tributary on the first day. On the second, their guide admitted that he’d never actually come this far. They passed Dimpo pan, reaching the edge of dune country with no sign of a city.

Returning to the Nossob by a different route, they found limestone formations but decided that Farini, being intelligent and observant, couldn’t have mistaken the limestone for the ruins of a city.

Despite not finding any trace of a city, both Paver and Brocherds firmly believed in the city’s existence. Sometime later, Paver wrote in a letter that ”… you could spend months in the sand dunes without covering a fraction of the area in which the ‘lost city’ could be located”.

Three years later, in 1936, a South African writer and journalist, Lawrence Green, set off on a 6 day expedition, covering the area north of the Paver and Brocherds expedition site. In his book, he describes travelling through desert that no man had camped before. Green describes spotting a limestone outcrop, a line of sand hills, an unmapped river, and a single well. He came to the conclusion that the best way to search for the elusive city would be by aeroplane.

After returning to Cape Town, Green met up with Brocherds again who told a story he’d heard that gives even more veracity to the tale of a lost city. According to Brocherds, a police sergeant told him of his own discovery in the Kalahari, in the area of the lost city, while patrolling on camel-back. Apparently, the sergeant came upon an ancient stone quarry. Some of the stone had been squared on the spot and were still there.

Close by, buried in the sand, the sergeant found what appeared to be the remains of a boat, about 14 feet in length.

This was not the only story, of course. Native tribes had stories about a place in the desert where people once lived. Two farmers, who didn’t want to be identified as they were poaching at the time, claimed to have stumbled across the lost city, and Scotty Smith, a well-known Kalahari adventurer with a somewhat liberal interpretation of the law, also spoke of visiting the ruins.

After these two expeditions, a great many followed. It soon became clear that Farini’s map and directions in his book was somewhat inaccurate, and the search area was expanded. As technology advanced, so did search techniques and soon light aeroplanes were used. So far, Farini’s city has not been found, but the searches have not been entirely fruitless.

In around 1951, the French writer and traveller, Francois Balzan, discovered (I’m not entirely clear how or where) that there were two old roads, now buried, connecting the Nossob with the central Kalahari. He theorized that the Nossob might have been a convenient route for trade caravans, suggesting the need for a “base camp” of sorts somewhere in the area.

On the eastern bank of the Nossob River, about 20km north of Kai Kai, he discovered the stone quarry Brocherds mentioned years before (though there is no mention of a boat). It was small and round, essentially stones stacked in a circle, and he came to the conclusion that it most likely served as a gathering place for the San people in the region.

Balzan’s expedition also found traces of ancient peoples in rock paintings depicting water, hunting and fishermen. Clearly, there had been a civilization in the ancient Kalahari. Their city, however, remained elusive.

Probably the most significant expedition was that of A.J. Clement in 1965.

After carefully studying Farini’s book, calculating distances and the speed at which the expedition most likely travelled, Clement came to the conclusion that the ruins of the lost city, if it existed, would be located closer to Rietfontein, a town north of Upington, near the Namibian border, south of the Molopo river, not north, and nowhere near the Nossob river, as far as I can tell.

The Clement expedition set out on Easter Monday and they were not disappointed. Around 15 miles outside of Rietfontein, they came across a site called Eierdop Kopjes (translated as Eggshell Hills), that closely resembled Farini’s description. They found a large, oval shaped amphitheatre, about a mile in length, and, in several places, there was a striking resemblance to a double wall. There was just one problem. The site was not the ruins of an ancient city.

What Clement found, and what he believed Farini described, are natural rock formations – the result of weathered dolomite intrusions. However, his descriptions, despite this not being a city, seem to coincide with what Farini himself discovered in 1885. In his paper on Farini’s lost city, Clement states that some of the boulders could easily be confused with square building blocks while one or two rocks showed some fluting and were encrusted with a mortar-like substance, which Farini could’ve mistaken for cement. There were several examples of flat rocks, perched on underlying rocks, like table tops, and Clement feels that at least one of these, more impressive than the rest, resembled one of Lulu’s illustrations.

Apparently, the mystery has been solved. However, not everyone is convinced – and so the expeditions continued.

In 2002, Greg van der Reis led an expedition into the Kalahari Desert, deciding to start at the original coordinates Farini mentioned in his presentation to the Royal Geographical society. While they agree that the coordinates are probably incorrect, it’s not like anyone else have found anything in last 100 years, so they figured it’s as good a place to start as any. While they did find traces of civilization in the form of dry wells and stone-age tools, they didn’t appear to be any closer to finding the lost city itself.

In 2016, the reality TV-show, Destination Unknown, ventured into the Kalahari in search of Farini’s lost city. Presenter Josh Gates and local explorer, Adam Cruise, use the photographs taken by Lulu to map their route, instead of Farini’s map and narrative. Credit where credit is due, this is not a bad idea. Their search focuses on the Augrabies area and, like many expeditions before them, they find traces of civilization in the form of etchings and rock art, but no sign of the city itself.

It appears that the search for the mysterious city has finally left the realms of hard science and ventured into the field of entertainment – I have a feeling Farini would be proud.

Is Any of It Real?

We haven’t actually answered the big question yet. Are there ruins of an ancient civilization buried beneath the sands of the Kalahari Desert? To answer this, we need to consider probably the two most influential people in this mystery - the great explorer who made the discovery, G. A. Farini, and the work of A.J. Clement. So, who exactly was Guillermo Farini?

Born on June 10, 1838, in Lockport, New York, as William Leonard Hunt, into a rather conservative family, Hunt was raised in Bowmanville, near Port Hope, in Canada and is still considered as one of Canada’s most famous sons – and not without good reason. Hunt had a pretty amazing life.

His father wanted him to become a doctor, but Hunt had other plans. As a young man, he changed his name to Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini and threw himself into show biz. This got him disowned by his father, but it didn’t prevent him from having an astounding career as an acrobat, stuntman, promoter, businessman, and even serving a stint in the army.

The Great Farini was probably best known for his stunts crossing the Niagara falls. Walking a tight rope, he crossed the Niagara falls multiple times, doing all sorts of stunts along the way – standing on his head, walking on stilts, climbing down to the Maid of the Mist, a pleasure boat taking tourists up close to the falls, and having a glass of wine before climbing back up to the rope to continue his stunt.

But his career was not limited only to the US and Niagara falls. Farini performed all over the world, including in front of the Prince of Wales. Sadly, his career also caused the death of his wife, Mary Osbourne, when a tight-rope stunt went wrong in Havana, Cuba, and she fell to her death.

In his 30s, aware that his acrobat days were behind him, he became a promoter and manager for other acts, such as Krao, the missing link. Farini was also an inventor — we can thank him for the flip seats in movie theatres — and a savvy businessman. Instead of simply passing a hat whenever he did his tricks, he negotiated sponsorships for his stunts and even managed to get a share of the train tickets sold to tourists flocking to Niagara falls to see him perform.

Finally, Farini served in both the Union Army during the American Civil war, where he devised a way to cross bodies of water (hopefully not using a tight rope), and during World War I, translating German stories on the war effort. He was an explorer, a self-taught botanist, and even a painter.

So, there’s no denying it – Farini was no hack. He was smart, charming, and accomplished a great deal more in his career than most of us ever will.

However, despite his many accomplishments, Farini was not an archaeologist or a geologist – he was a showman.

So, did the showman lie about finding a lost city in the Kalahari Desert? Some people think so and, considering that the city still hasn’t been found over 100 years later, it’s difficult not to ask that question.

In Farini’s defence, at the time of his expedition through the Kalahari, the desert was not as well documented as it is today – as we already saw, Farini’s map is considered incorrect, so it’s quite possible that the expedition was nowhere near where they thought they were. On top of that, it was Farini’s first time in Africa and the Kalahari has some unique rock formations that someone with no training or experience in geology could easily misinterpret.

However, Farini was an entertainer – when it came to telling stories and giving people what they wanted, this man was good at what he did. Discovering a lost civilization in a place where few people could contradict him could translate into fame and money. It’s also quite notable that there doesn’t appear to be any clear photos of these ruins, only water-colour illustrations.

The second thing we need to consider is the expedition and findings of A.J. Clement. Clement made a very detailed study of Farini, the man, and his expedition and found some interesting discrepancies.

One of Clement’s first concerns, and a very important one when retracing someone’s steps to find a lost city, is exactly how far Farini actually travelled. Clement looked at Farini’s dates of arrival and departure in South Africa based on booking records, his time travelled by train to Hopetown and back, and deducted an estimated time for stopping during his trek to rest and explore, as recorded in his book, and concluded that Farini was only travelling for about 125 days. If he did go all the way to Lake Ngami and back, he must’ve averaged 60 miles a day. With an ox-drawn wagon, this is simply not possible.

Secondly, it appears that Farini himself either became confused, or purposefully changed, the route his expedition took. In a newspaper interview with a journalist from the Cape Argus newspaper, immediately upon his return, he described his outgoing route to be via the Nossob River to Lehututu. However, in his book and lectures, produced some time after his return, he appeared to have turned north at Wilkerhout’s drift and reached Lehututu via a place called Khuis on the Molope River. Either Farini wasn’t entirely sure of the route of his expedition, or he intentionally changed the route – perhaps to make his journey appear longer than it really was. Regardless, this change immediately throws everything into question.

If the explorer himself was uncertain regarding the actual route he took, it’s entirely possible that he was mistaken as to where he found the ruins. If he was fabricating a part of his journey, are there any ruins to start with?

Of perhaps a more subjective nature, as people’s memories can be flawed, in the Johannesburg Star of October 1923, an interesting comment appeared. An old Kalahari hunter, Tasker, was shown a picture of Farini posing next to a dead giraffe. Tasker claimed that Farini’s book was made up of a collection of hunter’s tales and that the man himself never went further north than Kheis. Paver and Brocherds, the first expedition in 1933, also interviewed an old farmer in Upington. The man remembered Farini but stated that the explorer had only been away for about 6 weeks – that is not nearly enough time to trek all the way across the Kalahari and back.

Dr Clement agree that Farini definitely travelled through Upington and at least as far as Mier, Rietfontein today, as his descriptions of the terrain is correct - whether he went much further than that is unclear.

Dr Hans Schinz, a German missionary and scientist, travelled in the Kalahari extensively between 1884 and 1887. When questioning Europeans living in Ghanzi, as well as the Bechuana people living on the shores of Lake Ngami, none of them had ever seen or talked to Mr Farini.

If we look at his book, in a manuscript of 450 pages, only 16 pages deals with his trip from Lehututu to Lake Ngami. 23 pages later, he’s back in Mier and, with the exception of an European settler in Kerses, the nearest settlement to Mier, he didn’t appear to have had any contact with any European settlers at all. While this certainly doesn’t prove him to be deceitful about what he found and how far he travelled, it’s far easier to exaggerate your journey, and your findings, if there is no-one to contradict you.

Most damningly, however, is the report that Kert, the guide hitching a ride back to South Africa, later told Prof E.H.L Schwartz that the stories about the ruins were false (though I couldn’t verify this) and Jan Abrahams, when question by Dr Brocherds, recalled Farini and the hunting trip up the Nossob River, but couldn’t recall any ruins being found. According to Farini himself, Jan was not particularly interested in the ruins in the first place. However, even if he didn’t recall the ruins, I’d expect Jan to, at the very least, recall the crazy Europeans digging in the sand for old rocks.

Ancient Civilization in the Desert

So what does this mean for ancient civilizations in the Kalahari? Is it impossible? Definitely not. Many of the expeditions looking for the city, and many scientific expeditions into the Kalahari that had nothing to do with fabled cities, found proof of civilization existing as far back as the stone-age.

However, there is some agreement among scientists that the climate of the Kalahari probably hasn’t changed that much in hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The main requirement for a city is water, and water in the Kalahari is scarce and deep underground. Logistically, it’s simply not the best place to build a large city.

Farini may have exaggerated finding a lost city in the heart of the Kalahari, but I’m not entirely convinced that it was an intentional hoax set up purely for the purpose of fame and fortune. If that was the case, he would’ve made a much bigger fanfare of the discovery, dedicated far more pages in his book to his lost city, and at the very least hinted to some big reveal in his interview with Argus reporter – he was a showman after all. Instead, it appears that the story of the city was first mentioned in the Royal Geographical Society lecture delivered before the publication of the book, and then included in the book afterwards when there was some interest in this lost city.

In short, I don’t believe Farini covered nearly as much ground as he claimed, but I do think he came across something interesting. Whether it was a natural rock formation or the ruins of a lost civilization, we’ll never truly know since Farini’s book is, unfortunately, much like the man himself - larger than life, bordering on fiction, with enough showmanship to keep explorers looking for a lost city over 100 years later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Guillermo Farini?

Guillermo Farini, born William Leonard Hunt, was a Canadian explorer, acrobat, stuntman, promoter, businessman, and inventor. He was known for his daring stunts, including crossing the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, and his expeditions, such as the one through the Kalahari Desert in 1885.

What did Guillermo Farini claim to have discovered in the Kalahari Desert?

Guillermo Farini claimed to have discovered the ruins of an ancient city buried beneath the sands of the Kalahari Desert during his expedition in 1885.

What was the purpose of Farini’s expedition to the Kalahari Desert?

Farini’s expedition to the Kalahari Desert was initially driven by tales of diamonds and the desire to be the first to cross the desert. However, he also made an archaeological discovery, claiming to have found the ruins of an ancient city.

Who accompanied Farini on his expedition to the Kalahari Desert?

Farini was accompanied by his adopted son Lulu, a guide named Kert, another guide Jan Abrahams, and two African workers or servants whose names were not recorded.

What did Farini describe the ruins he found in the Kalahari Desert as?

Farini described the ruins as a half-buried structure with a huge heap of stones, forming an arc with heaps of masonry inside it. He suggested it could have been a city, a place of worship, or a burial ground of a great nation.

What did A.J. Clement’s expedition find in 1965?

A.J. Clement’s expedition found natural rock formations, specifically weathered dolomite intrusions, which resembled the description of the ruins given by Farini. These formations were located near Rietfontein, north of Upington.

What evidence supports the existence of ancient civilizations in the Kalahari?

Many expeditions and scientific studies have found proof of civilization in the Kalahari dating back to the stone age, including rock paintings, stone-age tools, and ancient stone quarries.

What are some of the criticisms of Farini’s claims about the lost city?

Criticisms include discrepancies in Farini’s travel dates and routes, lack of clear photographs of the ruins, and conflicting accounts from his guides and other witnesses. Some suggest he exaggerated his journey and findings for fame and fortune.

What is the general consensus among scientists about the possibility of a large city in the Kalahari?

While it is not impossible, scientists agree that the Kalahari’s climate and scarcity of water make it logistically challenging for a large city to have existed there.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Lost City of the Kalahari Desert: Fact or Fiction?
• Hero image source by Luca Galuzzi (Lucag) / openverse, by-sa.