Nama

Namaqualand is a dry region of hills and plains north of the Cape, home to Nama Khoekhoe pastoralists. Around the copper mountains near Springbok, local communities mined and smelted copper long before the arrival of European prospectors. They fashioned the metal into beads, arrowheads and other objects. Reports of Nama copper reached the Dutch settlement at the Cape, and in 1685 its commander Simon van der Stel led an expedition north to examine the deposits. At the mountain he called Koperberg, his party collected samples of the ore.