Presently my focus and that of my blogs are on the search for the lost battlefield of the Kalahari. In one month’s time I will return to that area to conduct and hopefully conclude this epic search.

However I interrupt this line of writing to show my readers a historic video which I made in 2017. I visited Captain David Fredericks leader of the !Aman Namas of Bethany and a grandson of Timoteus Fredericks, brother of Cornelius, hero of The Scourge of the Kaiserbird. I believe it was the last video interview of the famous captain because he passed away a while after it. Captain Fredericks was one of the principal litigants in the claim for $30 billion reparation from Germany.

He talks in Afrikaans and very softly, but he essentially tells how information from Shark Island was relayed to the outside world during that terrible period of 1904-1907 when thousands of Namas and Hereros were imprisoned on Shark Island in the bay of Luderitz. He also tells how Cornelius Fredericks trained his soldiers.

I knew that I had to get some video footage of this famous Nama personality and hope to use it in a future documentary television programme because he was the last surviving person to have talked first hand to a Nama combatant of that war.

The Scourge of the Kaiserbird,” originally published in Afrikaans as “Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland,” is available from all leading bookstores in Namibia, through Namibian Book Market, and in South Africa from Upper Case, formerly Graffiti, in Menlyn Maine. Copies can also be ordered from kosiemarais@gmail.com  It is available on Kindle and worldwide in paperback from Amazon. Visit my Amazon author’s site by clicking on https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07HFTTQ2B where you can also place orders.