TWYFELFONTEIN
"Twyfel" is the Afrikaans word for "Doubtful" and the word "fontein" means fountain. There is a very interesting book that was written about the farmer and his family who tried to make it work there during the apartheid era. Check Uncle Spikes Book Exchange for this book. The ruins of their homestead can be seen there to this day. Naturally today its known for all the Bushmen engravings. Personally its one of the entry points into Damaraland, the road to Doros Crater, Rooiberg and Gaias Fountein and in particular the Brak River where the folded mountains are located.
Twyfelfontein valley has been inhabited by Stone-age hunter-gatherers of the Wilton stone age culture
group since approximately 6,000 years ago. They made most of the
engravings and probably all the paintings. 2,000 to 2,500 years ago the Khoikhoi, an ethnic group related to the San (Bushmen), occupied the valley, then known under its Damara/Nama name ǀUi-ǁAis (jumping waterhole). The Khoikhoi also produced rock art which can clearly be distinguished from the older engravings.
The area was uninhabited by Europeans until after World War II, when a severe drought caused white Afrikaans speaking farmers (Boers) to move in. The farm was later procured by the apartheid government as part of the Odendaal Plan and became part of the Damaraland bantustan. The white settlers left in 1965.
Topographer Reinhard Maack, who also discovered the White Lady rock painting at Brandberg, reported the presence of rock engravings in the area in 1921.
A more thorough investigation was only conducted after David Levin
studied the feasibility of farming in 1947. He rediscovered the spring
but struggled to extract enough water to sustain his family and his
herd. Slowly becoming obsessed with doubts about the capacity of the
spring an Afrikaans-speaking friend began calling him David Twyfelfontein
(David Doubts-the-spring) in jest. When Levin bought the land and
registered his farm in 1948 he gave it the name Twyfelfontein. While commonly being translated as doubtful spring, a more accurate translation for the word twyfel is therefore "questionable" or "uncertain".
