Pofadder

Pofadder (meaning Puff Adder in English) is a very small town in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. The surrounding districts are arid, sparsely populated, rugged and picturesque. There is little in the way of cropping and local farmers run sheep or goats for a living.

Some claim that Pofadder was named after Klaas Pofadder, a koranna (Koi-Koi) Captain of the area. Others maintain that this is an exercise in latter-day political correctness and that no record exists to prove that the village was not named after the venomous snake that is common enough in the district.

The settlement is situated on the main route from Upington to Springbok and lies 60km from the Onseepkans borderpost to Namibia.

Like Kalamazoo and Timbuktu, Pofadder is used to represent somewhere very remote, far away and out of the main-stream of the world. This usage is most common in South Africa, while Timbuktu is used in most of the Commonwealth for this purpose and Kalamazoo in the USA.