Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip to South Africa was cut short by the sudden emergence of Covid, to March last year. Blackburn had gone to Cape Town, and then into the dry interior, the Karoo, to explore the lost world she had found in an obscure volume that she had once chanced upon in the London Library.
Specimens of Bushman Folklore, by the linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, published in 1911, contains the texts – life stories, origin myths, tales about animals, accounts of murders of women and children by the encroaching colonists – given by many of the /Xam, a Bushman group of hunter-gatherers. These informants were captives, hundreds of miles from their homes. Blackburn writes:
Nearly all of the prisoners held at the Breakwater Jail were being punished for stealing or killing or eating a sheep, and many more were murdered at the place where the crime was said to have been committed.
The Karoo is now a silent landscape, ruthless emptied of its teeming wildlife
As death and terror spread across the globe early last year, Blackburn bolted home to England.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in