A Namibian story has it that one morning during the early 1950s two men glided their light aircraft onto a diamond-strewn beach in the Namibian Sperrgebiet (German for no-go or forbidden zone) with the intention of collecting a large amount of diamonds hidden by one of them in rocky outcrops near the beach. On take-off from the beach the aircraft however nose-dived after one of the aircraft’s wheels struck a rock. They were subsequently spotted by the restricted diamond areas’ security personnel and arrested.
Fact or fiction?
Charity store offers up visual evidence
The author is constantly in search of historical South African images. On a recent visit to a Pretoria based charity organisation, the standard question was posed: “Would you have any old South African photographs?”
In majority of instances the response to this would be: “No, we throw them away”, but in this particular instance the charity store volunteer stated that she had some images stashed away somewhere. A few minutes later she appeared with 16 black & white images dating from the early 1950s by the photographer JJ Katzke, all 16,5 x 22cm in size.
The initial attraction was the four photographs of an aircraft stranded on a beach. The rest seemed of little interest, even unrelated to each other. However, when the helpful charity store volunteer stated that she would sell the batch of 16 images for R32 (around $2 or £1.6), the deal was concluded.
Back home, after much googling, the story around these images started to unfold. Soon...
