Anthology / African Studies
“Kalahari—what a beautiful word. It rolls off the tongue with satisfying ease, seeming to apply distance. A great wilderness of waving grasses, humming with grasshopper song under a hot wind and a sky of vibrant blue.”
–Rupert Isaacson, The Healing Land
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.
–Andrew Marvell (1621-78)
Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,
With only one fair spirit for my minister.
That I might forget the human race,
And hating no one, love her only.
–Lord Byron
For hundreds of years the vast territory of the Kalahari remained a blank on the map. Yet it gripped the imagination of poets, painters, writers, dreamers, adventurers and not a few charlatans. This book is a whimsical anthology of those who were inspired by this desert, those who lived in its bitter confines and those who died in its dry embrace.
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