The price of a country, in 1885, came to twenty-five firearms, one salted horse, and a cask of brandy. That was what William Worthington Jordan paid the Ondonga chief Kambonde ka Mpingana for fifty thousand square kilometers of northern Namibia - a stretch of bush and pan running some 170 kilometers from Okaukuejo in the west to Fischer's Pan in the east. On that ground a band of weary Boer trekkers declared a republic. They named it Upingtonia, after a Cape politician they hoped would back them. He didn't. Within two years the republic was gone, its founder murdered, its name a footnote. But for a moment, there was a Boer state at the edge of the Kalahari, and its short, strange life is one of the odder episodes in southern Africa's colonial scramble.
These were the survivors of one of the hardest migrations in Boer history. Beginning in the 1870s, families had loaded their wagons in the Transvaal and struck out across the Kalahari for southern Angola - the Dorsland or "Thirstland" Trek, a name earned in the bodies it cost crossing waterless country. In Angola they ran into Portuguese authority and disappointment. Some turned back. Others drifted south again, and in 1885 a group of these trekkers came to rest at Grootfontein, on land Jordan handed them for free. They were people who had already buried too much to the desert, looking, once more, for somewhere to stop. The republic they raised was less an empire than an exhausted attempt at home.
William Worthington Jordan was the unlikely broker at the center of it all - a trader and adventurer who had positioned himself between the Boers and the Ondonga kingdom. His purchase from Kambonde was not a simple land deal but a move in a dynastic struggle. Kambonde wanted Jordan's help against his rival and brother, Nehale lyaMpingana, and the guns that changed hands were as much alliance as payment. Jordan then gave the trekkers their footing at Grootfontein. He had made himself the indispensable middleman of a new state - and, as it turned out, the man whose fate the whole fragile enterprise was tied to.
The Republic of Upingtonia was declared on 20 October 1885, with Grootfontein as its capital and George Diederik P. Prinsloo as its president. The name was a bet: Thomas Upington, premier of the Cape Colony, was the patron the trekkers hoped would lend protection and legitimacy. Little came of it. By 1886, with no support arriving and the new state already fighting the Herero around it, the Boers gave up on the name along with the hope behind it. They renamed the republic Lijdensrust - "rest from suffering," or perhaps "resting place of sorrows." Few state names have ever been so honest. A country that begins by renaming itself after grief is not a country with long prospects.
The end came through the rivalry Jordan had meddled in. In June 1886, Nehale lyaMpingana - the brother Kambonde had wanted defeated - had Jordan killed. With the man who had bought the land and brokered every alliance suddenly dead, the republic lost its keystone. Dependent on German protection it could not secure and undermined by the local powers it had presumed to deal with, Lijdensrust simply came apart. Most of the Boers trekked back toward Angola, the way they had come. In 1887 the territory was folded into German South-West Africa, and the dream of a trekker republic in the Kalahari dissolved into the larger machinery of European colonization. It had lasted not much more than eighteen months.
Historic Upingtonia centered on Grootfontein in north-central Namibia, near 19.57 degrees south, 18.12 degrees east. Grootfontein Airport (ICAO FYGF) is the modern reference point and serves the town that was the short-lived republic's capital. The territory the trekkers claimed stretched west toward Okaukuejo - now the main rest camp in Etosha National Park, with its own airstrip - and east toward Fischer's Pan on Etosha's edge. From altitude the great white glare of the Etosha Pan dominates the region to the northwest, an unmistakable navigation landmark. Visibility over this high, dry plateau is generally excellent, with seasonal dust and summer thunderstorms.