Dreaming the Karoo by Julia Blackburn

Author:Julia Blackburn [Blackburn, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2022-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Along with what he said, Tamme made more than 140 drawings and paintings which gave form to ‘what had been left behind or forgotten’ – I ari; using //ku//kuno, ‘to picture for oneself those distant things’.

Like !Nanni, he also made maps, but his maps included sketches of the people who lived in the different areas of the country. One of these sketches shows an Ovambo man with a child, ropes and a wooden boat, such as the one that first carried him away.

XXVII

16 September 2020. As I write this I am sitting by the sea. I listen to the soft rhythm of the waves. The sunshine is warm on one side of my face. I have just been swimming and the water was soupy grey but not cold and utterly calm, and for a while I stood at shoulder depth, the soft gravelly sand swallowing at my feet, planting me like a tree.

Where I started on the path that led to this particular stretch of coastline there was a notice saying that reptile specialists were collecting snakes, lizards and slow worms, newts, toads and frogs, in order to move them somewhere else, because this land of marsh and trees and tangled undergrowth, of blackberries ripening, birds tut-tutting and a peacock butterfly exhausted by the effort of summer, clapping its wings open to show with brightly painted eyes that it still lives – this land is scheduled to be torn apart by bulldozers so that a third nuclear power station can be built next to the first one which is not working but not decommissioned either, and a second one which does work but not very efficiently.

My heart sometimes races with the cacophony of the dangers that are crowding towards us from every direction. The loss of small things. The loss of enormous things. The sense of being voiceless in a world without pity. But I need to put all this to one side in order to see the !Kun boys as they try to navigate themselves through their time.

The second two arrived six months later. They also had made a journey of several months from the place that was their home to Walvis Bay. /Uma was said to be in his teens, but he had the soft roundness of a young child, and Da was tiny and only six years old or maybe less. They were brought to Cape Town as part of what was called a ‘consignment of Berg Damaras’.

I have just read that in 1878, Palgrave with his benign gaze and his bushy beard, along with the Cape governor, had annexed the port of Walvis Bay as a ‘point of control’ for trade and export. Palgrave had also drawn up the rules for what was called the Indentured Labour Scheme.

Between 1878 and 1882, hundreds of Damara families and many solitary children who were described as orphans were brought to Walvis Bay. The children had all been stolen and then sold and bartered in exchange for guns and now,

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