Recommended South Africa books
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Recommended Books about the Northern Cape
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| The First Bushman's Path: Stories, Songs and Testimonies of the Xam of the Northern Cape by Alan James The "First Bushmen", or the "First-there-sitting-People", established the path along which all dead people and animals would travel to get to their final holding place, a great hole in the ground. And it was these First Bushmen who had been the original occupants of the land in which the Xam lived, and about whom stories were told. So declared Kabbo, one of the last of the Xam San to narrate the stories and oral traditions which had helped to make the Xam who they were, and to construct their land and make it livable. In these poems, Alan James has produced considered versions of a selection of the Xam narrations transcribed in the late 19th century, including many which have thus far received little, if any, literary or critical attention. The poems are supplemented by explanatory notes, helpful in particular to those who are unfamiliar with Xam history and culture. This title is an accessible and informative re-presentation of a wide range of the oral testimonies of Xam culture, whose riches continue to claim the attention of those who have succeeded the Xam in their land. |
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| The Forgotten Frontier: Colonists and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century by Nigel Penn Traditionally, the Eastern Cape frontier of South Africa has been regarded as the preeminent contact zone between colonists and the Khoi ("Hottentots") and San ("Bushmen"). But there was an earlier frontier in which the conflict between Dutch colonists and these indigenous herders and hunters was in many ways more decisive in its outcome, more brutal and violent in its manner, and just as significant in its effects on later South African history. This was the frontier north of Cape Town, where Dutch settlers began advancing into the interior. By the end of the eighteenth century, the frontier had reached the Orange (Gariep) River. The indigenous Khoisan people, after initial resistance, had been defeated and absorbed as an underclass into the colonial world or else expelled beyond it, to regions where new creole communities emerged. Nigel Penn is a master storyteller who brings a novelist's sensitivity to plot and character and a command of the archival record to bear in recovering this epic and forgotten story. Filled with extraordinary personalities and memorable episodes, and set in the often harsh landscape of the Western and Northern Cape, The Forgotten Frontier will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of history. |
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