The name "Kalahari" is derived from the Tswana word Kgalagadi, meaning "the great thirst".
Geography and Climate
The Kalahari Desert covers about 500,000 kmē of the arid to semi-arid, sandy southwestern area of the African continent. 70% of Botswana and parts of Zimbabwe, Namibia and the Northern Cape Province of South Africa form part of the inhospitable, yet beautiful Kalahari Desert.
Some sources extend the area of the Kalahari to over 2.5 million square kilometres and include Gabon, Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Zambia.
Some people recon that the Kalahari is not a true desert, though! Some parts of the Kalahari receive over 250 mm of erratic rainfall annually, and are considered to be quite well vegetated. The Kalahari is only truly arid in the south-west, where less than 175 mm of rain falls annually. This makes the Kalahari a "fossil desert".
The Kalahari is characterised by vast red-brown sand-covered areas with no permanent surface water. Drainage in this area occurs via dry valleys, seasonally flooded pans, and the large salt pans of Makgadikgadi in Botswana and Etosha Pan in Namibia.
Summer temperatures in the Kalahari range from 20 to 40°C. In winter, the Kalahari has a dry, cold climate with frosts at night. The average low winter temperature can be below freezing point.
Kalahari Nature Reserves
A number of nature reserves protect the sensitive wildlife in this inhospitable area, including The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the world's second largest protected area, Khutse Game Reserve and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (which includes the Kalahari Gemsbok Park).
Kalahari Economy
There are large coal, copper, and nickel deposits in the Kalahari region. One of the largest diamond mines in the world is located at Orapa in the Makgadikgadi in northeast Kalahari.
Tourism is a mayor source of income for many communities living in and around the Kalahari.
Fauna And Flora
Brown hyenas, lions, meerkats, several species of antelope (including the oryx or gemsbok), and many of bird and reptile species live in the Kalahari region. More than 400 different plant species (including the wild watermelon or tsamma) live in the Kalahari, but the vegetation consists mainly of grasses and acacias.
People Of The Kalahari
The Kalahari is the ancestral land of the many distinct tribes of Bushman or !Kung San peoples. The names Bushman and Basarwa are sometimes used to refer to them, but the people themselves decided that they prefer the name "San", as they have no word that refers to them collectively. ("San" is a Khoi word meaning outsider, and "Basarwa" is a Herero word meaning person who has nothing)
The San are thought to have been the first human inhabitants of Southern Africa and except for the numerous occurrences of San or Bushman rock art, there are other evidence indicating that they have been living in southern Africa continuously, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, for at least twenty thousand years.
