Stephen Gray
‘The rest camp at Witsand Nature Reserve was at last unveiled in October 1998 by the Northern Cape Premier, Manne Dipico, on behalf of the Diamantveld District Council under which it falls.” So reads an engraved stone at the office complex, in the shade of a camel-thorn tree of record girth.
Obviously there is no mention of the embarrassing Griqua land claim made at the hand-over ceremony of the property to the Northern Cape Nature Conservation Service.
Signs of communities having occupied the reserve area, as I was to learn, actually trace back 40 000 years. A pan to the north, once strewn with microliths, shards, hand axes and grinders, indicated that there humans and their food sources had long converged. Witsand was a regular workshop and slaughterhouse, a successful survival ground in the semi-desert.
Donkey-driven wells on Witsand kept its ranchers in production – at least from the recorded date of 1903, when, with fencing, the overgrazing problem set in: cattle, down to sheep, down to goats. After an earlier wrangle over rights, lasting 15 years, its grasses all but extinct, in 1993 Witsand became the charge of Jeanene and Reinhardt Jessnitz, its conservators.
As they say, they just had to hunker down on it, allow it to restore itself. Still it supplies water to the farmers in the lee of the Langberg. Local rangers are in training for diplomatic outreach. A conservancy belt around it is planned.
The Jessnitzes recall horror stories of the last farmer there, reduced to getting his herders to sell off those Stone Age trophies at the roadside for tickeys; of buggies and toboggans paying to come in to flatten those spectacular dunes.
For the wonder of Witsand (as its name implies) is just that: mountains of sand raised above the thornveld over a 10km stretch, up to 5km wide and 30m in height. Actually they are fossil dunes (they no longer move), wide-sculpted aeolian sand in linear and parabolic shapes. They are outstandingly beautiful, isolated like that, blooming.
But the point is they rest upon an aquifer of quartzite basins, containing a bulk of rainwater as large as the Hartbeespoort Dam. Nor are they orangey waves stained with iron oxide, Kalahari- style. Like time itself, they have been leached paler and paler to white-out. And they are unique to the world.
With tourism manager Bertus Bester, I did some clambering up them. Combing his hands over a special place on the southern slope, he could coax out of the grains their famous moaning, crooning response. This is the notable brulsand: a roaring dune. Well, whimpering, as you trickle the particles of that pile-up through the hourglass of your fist.
Now those dune streets are restoring their root-systems: gha grass is colonising, beetles are recovering (several of which have not yet been classified). There are new spider species that come out after the rain, the zigzags of bird spoor, then duikers and steenbok.
At Witsand one walks a lot – trudges rather. Take a water bottle and keep good bearings because you can easily get lost in the gorgeous infinity.
Luxury chalets are available, and provisions are on sale. There is also a campsite and picnic site for day visitors. Witsand Nature Reserve is to the west of Postmasburg, and may be reached either from the N14 to the north, or from the R64 to the south. For enquiries and bookings telephone (053) 313-1061.