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This indicates that the name had been used for a long time even before the
arrival of the Europeans in that area in the second half of the 19 th century.
The following discussion focuses on some of the different interpretations
and meanings attached to the name “Makgabeng”. According to Martin
Jackel, the Berlin missionary who succeeded Robert Franz at the Blouberg
mission station of Leipzig in 1914, “[t]ranslated in German Makgabeng
means: ‘of little grain’, and this area is indeed despairingly unfertile [sic],
also in the spiritual sense of the word” 2 . The missionary Jackel did not give
further elaboration on the German translation of that word except the
reference, “of little grain”. The problem with this interpretation is that the
name was being used long before the first appearance of Germans
(missionaries), and therefore the suggestion that infertility of that area (of
little grain in real and metaphoric terms), as construed by Jackel, does not
relate to the original naming of that area. In other words, the German
missionary only assumed that the direct translation of the word was
attributed to what he came to experience about the area, namely, its
agricultural infertility as well as the lack of (or little) enthusiasm of the local
communities about Christian teaching which they, the missionaries,
tirelessly strove to achieve.
2 M. Jackel, Gananoa: In Memory of Robert Franz, Unpublished, p. 17.
2