From where does your interest in the Karoo and idea for the book stem?
Although my career as a historian has been in the UK, I was brought up in Cape Town in the 1950s and 1960s. As a child I travelled through the Karoo every year, by train to Pretoria. The landscape was foreboding but its starkness was appealing.
My research interest in the environmental history of the Karoo came by an unusual route. Trying to understand more about the history and experience of African people was a central project. I did my doctoral research in Mpondoland in 1976-7 when the government policy of betterment or rehabilitation was still an important issue. Government planned to move rural African people from their scattered settlements into villages to demarcate selected areas for agriculture and to fence the vacated pasture lands.
INTERVENTIONS
The plan was to cull cattle
