Garibams

Garibams is a Khoekhoen name for the mouth of the river now called the Orange. The name means river mouth, identifying this Atlantic river crossing rather than an inland town. The indigenous place name preserves a different layer of geographical knowledge from the European names subsequently applied to the river and its mouth.

In 1779 Robert Jacob Gordon travelled north from the Cape through Namaqualand and reached the Orange River mouth. His fourth journey continued inland along the river, with excursions to its northern side, before returning through Namaqualand. Gordon's surviving journals, maps and drawings document this late eighteenth-century encounter with the lower river. The estuary therefore belongs both to a landscape named in Khoekhoen and to the expanding geographical investigations undertaken from the Cape.