Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam
JULIA BLACKBURN
(JONATHAN CAPE, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
“We are few. It is so.” When a man called //Kabbo talked about his relations in the mid nineteenth century, he seemed to be expressing a sense of loss and deracination, not just about his immediate family but about all of the /Xam people (pictured, a 1911 group), deprived of their ancestral land and denied their language and culture. The /Xam lived in the Karoo, an area in present-day South Africa, which was being settled by the Boer during //Kabbo’s lifetime.
Julia Blackburn’s interest in the /Xam took root in 1974, when she first came across Specimens of Bushman Folklore by the philologists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the Anthropology and Ethnography section of the London Library. Half a lifetime later, in March 2020, she is finally travelling for research in the Karoo when she hears about the coronavirus – the “tiny enemy that wears so many crowns” – spreading across the world. Her trip is cut short. Suddenly, she is on a flight back to Britain, and then confined, lonely and locked down, in her house in Suffolk, where she longs “with something like an ache in my bones for the gathered closeness of family”.
