Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned

This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province in the country of my birth, South Africa. To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and windswept scrubland plateau, flat as far as the eye can see but cut by deep, rocky canyons tight with the most intense and diverse profusion of succulents on the planet: flowering aloes, spiky aloes, furry aloes, ground-creeping aloes and the strange giant palm-like aloe, the Quiver Tree.

Jostling among them, the thorn bushes are murderous. You’d be mad, heroic or both to farm here, but our hosts do, grazing sheep over their thousands of hectares watered only by a couple of wind-pumps with drinking troughs. Scorched by day, frozen by night, to make your life here you’d need either to believe in Destiny with a capital D, or to have no choice.