This afternoon Mitsubishi presented us with a beautiful Triton double cab 4×4 vehicle for our expedition which gets underway tomorrow morning very early.

At long last we are ready. Tomorrow evening the members of this historic expedition will converge on the little town of Hukuntsi where we will meet the local Nama people and listen to a presentation by Carsten Mohle.

We have been planning this mission for months. We are now going to search for and find the battlefield where the forces of Simon Koper’s KharaKhoen and those of the German Schutztruppe led by Captain Friedrich Von Erckert engaged each other on 16 March 1908. Captain Von Erckert was killed by one of the first shots and was buried on the battlefield together with 12 of his fallen men. Simon Koper managed to escape and spent the rest of his days in Lokgwabe near Hukuntsi, a free man, hero to his people.

Readers of this blog will know that the exact location of this battlefield has been lost and many people including ourselves have tried to find it. This time we come prepared with experts, most notably Xander and Ben van Wyk who have imported special equipment to search the area. We are confident that we will succeed.

From Saturday morning we will be out of reach, except by satellite phone, but as soon as we find real evidence we will let the world know. Watch this space.

This blog is about my book with the title The Scourge of the Kaiserbird and starts with Day 1, posted on 1 April 2018. That followed on “Dag 91: Die Keiservoël Oor Namaland“,  my 91 blog posts about the original Afrikaans version. In October I will be taking an expedition to locate the battlefield described in Chapter 37 of the book. My blogs are currently focusing on this great battle.

“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.