Once, outsiders considered Kuruman in the Kalahari thornveld an interesting place, but today its popular allure is gone. In the early nineteenth century, the area just north of the Orange River (Figure 1-1) was a remote and exotic destination for visitors from the Cape, but its dusty and bleached-out landscape could not long distract explorers from the lush allure of the interior. Thus, it was “left to wither on the vine,” on a “bygone road to Africa.” Once, historians found that this southern Tswana region provided good evidence about a process that interested them – imperial annexation in the nineteenth century – and wrote about the area including Kuruman. Eventually, however, the interests of Africanist historians changed from imperial annexation to colonial struggles and negotiations. While twentieth-century South Africa was a dynamic scene of political contest and cultural innovation, observers have perceived this region as an underpopulated and quiescent backwater. In short, in earlier times some visitors and historians found the place interesting, but few have found anything in its more recent past worth dwelling upon.

This book returns to Kuruman to construct its socio-environmental history. My project has been to comb rich sources about this place for evidence of people interacting with the environment and, through their environmental relations, with each other. By looking at different groups of people and their relations with the nonhuman world around them, I have united the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in one extended narrative and found a historical dynamic behind the quiescence.