Almar Gordon Stigand, soldier and colonial civil servant,
was the son of William Stigand, British consul at Palermo, Italy, and Agnes Catherine Senior. He was
educated at the famous public school in Rugby, Warwickshire. From 1896 to 1898
he served in the police force of the Cape Colony and then entered the civil
service of Bechuanaland (now Botswana plus the northern districts of the
Northern Cape, South Africa). He was stationed in Mafikeng and during the
Anglo-Boer War was in active service in defence of that town. At the conclusion
of the war in 1902 he was transferred to Gaberone and in 1904 became an acting
assistant civil commissioner. During World War I (1914-1918) he participated in
the campaign in German South West Africa (now Namibia) during 1914/5, arrived
in England in March 1916, served in the West Kent Regiment, was a member of the
British Military Mission to Rome, and attained the rank of Captain.
From before World War I Stigand served as magistrate of Ngamiland,
an administrative district of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) with
its headquarters at Maun. There he went far beyond the requirements of his
official duties to explore and map the Okavango Delta and the wider Ngamiland
and Ghanzi regions, doing his elaborate mapping work by compass traverse and
becoming an authority on the geography of the region. He published his 'Notes
on N'Gamiland', including a map, in The Geographical
Journal (London, 1912, Vol. 36, pp. 376-379) and in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South
Africa (1913, Vol. 3, pp. 379-392). About ten years later he contributed another
paper, titled 'Ngamiland' (with map), to The
Geographical Journal (1923, Vol. 62, pp. 401-419). Among others he
discussed the levels of Lake Ngami and speculations of its drying up by David
Livingstone* and others. Stigand himself described the paper as of less
importance than the map. Logan (1969) described the paper as 'A
non-professional and only half-accurate account of the area'. However,
according to VanderPost (2005) the map belonged to a new era of professionalism
and became a leading example of mapping in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The
culmination of Stigand's work was the official publication of his two-sheet 'Sketch
map of Ngamiland and Ghanzi', at a scale of 1:500 000, by the Geographical
Section of the (British) General Staff in 1925. In that same year, when he was
resident magistrate of Molepolole, his knowledge and map proved useful to the
expedition led by the geologist A.L. du Toit* to investigate the feasibility of
the Kalahari irrigation scheme proposed by E.H.L. Schwarz*.
Stigand visited England in July 1923 and returned to England again in May
1930. By 1929 he was on the Royal Army Reserve of Officers and a senior
resident magistrate in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In 1919 he married Olympia Pearsall in Rome, Italy, but they had no children.
