The Last Days of Hans Schwabe

Last week I wrote about the Kalahari and the Le Riche family who became synonymous with the management of the new national park proclaimed there in 1931.  A few years after that Britain proclaimed a game reserve across the border in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Joep le Riche was given the game management of that also.  A very small group protected a huge area of semi-desert. Even in the apartheid years, the two countries co-operated there.  There was no choice.



Botswana became independent and relations cooled for many years.  There was even talk of a fence along the border between the two game reserves which would have been disastrous; game must be able to move long distances to search for food in this type of environment.  Cooler heads prevailed and the fence was never built.  Three years after the democratic elections in South Africa, the two countries proclaimed the first cross-border park: the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, an area of fifteen thousand square miles, jointly managed, and allowing visitors to move around freely across the international border within the park just as the animals do. 

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

Going back to the fifties when I first visited the area, Joep le Riche was keeping a firm hand on the South African area and a firm eye on what would become the Botswana Gemsbok National Park.  At that time no diamonds had been discovered in Botswana, although there is a story that De Beers knew about one of the deposits and kept it quiet until after independence, perhaps out of concern that such potential wealth might derail the independence process.  But lots of people were looking around, convinced that the rich alluvial diamond deposits of the Atlantic coast to the west had to have come from somewhere in the interior.

One such man was a German geologist from South West Africa named Hans Schwabe.  He regularly traveled through the south of the Kalahari park and sometimes visited Joep le Riche on the way.  On the afternoon of 20^th October 1958, he joined Joep for coffee but the conversation took a strange turn. What did Joep think of the possibility of finding diamonds in the Kalahari? Hans inquired.  Would it be possible to get permission to do some prospecting?  Joep laughed.  Stories of a diamond bonanza in the Kalahari were nothing but fables and rumors.  He had lived there all his life and seen nothing.  As for prospecting, it was strictly forbidden in a national park.

Windmill water pump along a dry river

Shortly after that Hans took his leave.  He drove off towards South West Africa as Joep expected, but shortly after leaving the camp he hid his car in the bushes and waited.  When there was no sign of anyone following, he carefully cut across to the Nossob road, heading north along the Botswana border.  At Kwang Pan he parked his car and headed into the veld.

A day later the Bechuanaland police phoned Joep to tell him that an abandoned car had been found.  They didn’t have the manpower to search for the occupants and he agreed to do so.  With his son, two constables and a Bushman tracker, Joep set out on the Nossob road.  As soon as he saw the car he recognized Hans Schwabe’s Oldsmobile.  They got out and looked around.

There were a number of curious things.  There was a note from Hans which read: “No water for the car, no water for myself, no food, follow this road.  Monday 8am. H Schwabe.”  Two sets of tracks led from the car and one led back - apparently Schwabe had started out, returned, and left again.  Joep checked the radiator.  It was full.  And water was at Rooikop, 10 miles south.  Why was Hans walking north?

The group started following the second set of tracks away from the car.  Soon they climbed out of the river bed and continued along the calcrete ridge.  The trackers spotted signs of prospecting – rocks chipped, sand sieved.  “He is digging his own grave,” said Joep.  “We must hurry; soon the sun will set.”

Shortly after that they came to a high point and in the distance they saw a tree in which a vulture sat.  Under the tree they found the remains of Hans Schwabe, his body already mutilated by predators.  There was nothing to do, and he was on the Bechuanaland side of the border.  They agreed that it was best to bury the body right there.  They did so, covering it with a cairn of stones.   Joep scratched the words: “Here lies Hans Schwabe.  Died 22.10.58.” Then they left him to the desert.

The grave of Hans Schwabe

We first heard this story from our friends in Kasane, then again from Jill Thomas at Berrybush Farm in the southern Kalahari. We finally found the above account (in Afrikaans) in the book Gee My ‘n Man! by Hannes Kloppers published in 1970.  It’s an intriguing story leaving many questions unanswered.  What was Schwabe looking for along the banks of the dry Nossob River?  Diamonds indicators would be in the river.  Why did he pretend to be out of water when such was obviously not the case, and why did he return to the vehicle and then leave again?  How did he become disoriented so soon and then die so quickly with help not far away? Was he attacked by lions?  If so, why were they not on their kill?

As Stanley and I pondered the tale, we started seeing an idea for a mystery…

Michael – Thursday.

PS  Speaking of mysteries, Strand Magazine has announced the winners of their competition to provide an ending to their Graham Greene novella THE EMPTY CHAIR.  Seems it's some character by the name of Michael Stanley...
(See: http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2011/02/unfinished-murder.html)

An Unfinished Murder

Graham Greene is famous for his novels, which he initially divided into ‘literary works’ and ‘entertainments’, but he also wrote many intriguing shorter works. His first novel – The Man Within – was published in 1929. It seems that three years before that, he set out to write a short detective novel called The Empty Chair. It’s an Agatha Christie-style mystery. A group of guests spend time together at a manor house in the English countryside in winter. One morning there is an empty chair at the breakfast table, and it transpires that the missing guest has been murdered in his locked room. (It’s not a locked-room mystery though; there is an open window with a convenient balustrade that runs around the house.) The story unfolds through the eyes of Sir John Collis – a famous, but aging, actor – who joined the party only the day before the murder. His involvement with the group is sufficiently remote to allow him to become the confidant of the rather eccentric detective-inspector by the name of Maybury. (He is not the only character with whose name Greene had fun. There is also an overweight man by the name of Chubb, and the lady of the manor rejoiced in the maiden name of Joy before she was “happily widowed” into the aristocracy in a stroke of “well-earned” luck.) The story was written at the time when Greene was having instruction in Catholicism, and one of the characters is a Catholic priest with intriguing theological perspectives.

The novella was never finished. Perhaps Greene lost interest in it and looked for something deeper to cut his teeth on, or perhaps he meant to come back to it one day and then forgot it. It’s also not impossible that he set up so many twists and clues that he wasn’t sure how to tie it all together at the end. More of that later. In any case, the handwritten unfinished manuscript came to light at a university in Texas a few years ago and created quite a stir.

The story was obtained by Strand Magazine and the first three chapters were published in 2009. Chapter 4 was published last year in their June-September issue (which was handed out at Bouchercon and also, coincidently, contained a Michael Stanley short story). The editor Andrew Gulli chatted with Professor Cedric Watts about the new discovery and its importance on BBC radio:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8170000/8170149.stm

The question is: how does the story finish? The last chapter Greene wrote will appear in the next issue of the magazine. Surely the readers can’t be left forever wondering whodunit? So Andrew decided to open it up to the readers of his magazine, asking them to write an ending in 5000 words. $500 prize and the winning ending to be published after Greene’s chapter 5.

It really sounded like fun, and Stan and I had just sent off the revised manuscript of our third book, so why not? How hard could it be? The characters are all set up, the clues are in place. All one has to do is use them to solve the mystery and write a last chapter or two.

Well, it was fun, but it wasn’t easy. There are too many clues to easily resolve, yet they don’t point clearly to any particular culprit. And 5000 words doesn’t allow much leeway to unravel knots. There are a variety of possible endings but some are trite, certainly not what Greene would have had in mind. In the BBC interview Andrew Gulli describes Greene as the “greatest writer of the twentieth century”. I guess that’s arguable, but he’s certainly up there. Obviously it would be pretentious to try to be Greene writing the story, but we did try to produce the sort of ending which we think he may have found acceptable.  After all, this was the man who reputedly said: "In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths".

Well, it will be interesting to see who wins. Whoever it is, I’m looking forward to finding out who really was the murderer!

 Michael - Thursday