Dreaming the Karoo: A people called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn is the author’s account of her time in the karoo region of South Africa. Blackburn conducted her research at the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and her chapters alternated between hiking through the semi-desert visiting the /Xam and their historical sites, and scrambling to find out what was happening back home with the world in a rapid state of lockdown. Ironically I found the chapters about COVID more interesting than those about her field research. Blackburn consulted the resources of linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from the 1860’s and 1870’s and reproduced Bushman artworks and their photos, and included their quotations on every page. Colonialism decimated the Bushman way of life, forcing the people off their land and their landscape was looted of its flora and fauna. One of the most moving quotations came from a Bushman called Dia!kwain:
“We shall see whether we make those people cry as we do, for they do not seem to know that we are people.”
I remember when in senior kindergarten in East York reading about the quagga. It was from an encyclopedia or large book of animals we had in our classroom. I was sad to discover that the quagga was extinct, and at the time I first read about it, the species had been extinct for only 88 years. This animal which resembled a zebra in the front and a horse in the back was often mentioned in the cited Bushman tales. At the time Bleek and Lloyd were conducting their research, there were still quagga roaming the karoo. The species was made extinct by the late nineteenth century.
What I found particularly interesting is that some of the interviews Bleek and Lloyd conducted were with Bushmen who were confined to the Breakwater prison. Some of these Bushmen, trapped in a new society that made them feel like foreigners in their own land and unable to grasp the laws suddenly imposed upon them, had a special arrangement to leave Breakwater to live with the Bleek and Lloyd team, where they could study them at length. The name of the prison sounded familiar, as I stayed there, now known as the Breakwater Lodge, in 2013 on my first visit to South Africa. My room was a converted prison cell, and perhaps I walked the same halls as ǀAǃkunta and ǁKabbo.
Blackburn fortunately had established good contacts that enabled her to get around South Africa when she was all too often confronted by yet another locked gate. The karoo of today–cordoned off by electric fences into private estates owned by white settlers–stood in sharp contrast to the karoo in the time of ǁKabbo, when he used to roam freely to hunt springbok with poison-tip quartz arrowheads.
COVID took its toll in those early months of 2020 and Blackburn wrote of the friends and colleagues she had lost during that time, which seemed to parallel the losses the Bushmen faced 150-160 years earlier. The alternation of timelines made it seem as if no one was ever safe, as a mysterious virus had the power to kill as mercilessly as the settlers who stormed through the karoo and pushed the Bushmen out.
Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue
