The “fountains” of Kuru man watered the gardens of one of Britain’s earliest missionary stations in southern Africa. But when the great spring on the edge of the Kalahari Desert seemed to falter, the country’s most famous missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, warned that the continent was turning to desert. It was the start of a great spiritual and environmental panic that persists to this day – the myth of the desertification of Africa. The supposed cause has gradually changed from heathen religious practices to perfidious farmers. But this epic story of advancing sand dunes, lost soils and dried-up river beds has defied all the evidence for more than 150 years. And, always, the natives have been to blame.
WHEN David Livingstone, a young Scottish doctor and clergyman, first set foot in Africa early in 1841, he was determined to bring “civilisation” to the continent and cure its people of their heathen ways. He landed in Port Elizabeth early in 1841 and took an ox wagon north to the missionary station at Kuruman on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. There he found a small patch of civilisation already in place. The head of the mission, Robert Moffat, had created a garden out of the dusty wilderness. Behind the station’s picket fences were vegetable and flower beds irrigated by a local spring. It was a green idyll that made a big impression on the young man.
But soon drought came and the local springs began to dry up. In 1843, Livingstone wrote to his masters at the London Missionary Society: “One of the finest watered countries in the world” was being