Promised Land. Karl Kemp
Promised Land
Published by Penguin Books
an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd
Reg. No. 1953/000441/07
The Estuaries No. 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
First published 2020
Publication © Penguin Random House 2020
Text © Karl Kemp 2020
Cover photograph © EPA-EFE/Nic Bothma
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
PUBLISHER: Marlene Fryer
MANAGING EDITOR: Robert Plummer
EDITOR: Alice Inggs
PROOFREADER: Dane Wallace
COVER DESIGN: Monique Cleghorn
TEXT DESIGN AND MAPS: Ryan Africa
TYPESETTING: Monique van den Berg
INDEX: Sanet le Roux
Set in 11 pt on 14.5 pt Minion
ISBN 978 1 77609 475 2 (print)
ISBN 978 1 77609 476 9 (ePub)
Vir my ma Regina,
my linkerhand wyl ek skryf.
Contents
Maps
PART ONE
1. The Great Cattle-Killing and Other Stories
10. A Plurality of Revolutions
PART TWO
19. Foreigners on the Banks of the Jukskei
Preface
Anysberg
IN THE KLEIN KAROO there is a valley that curves around the rust-coloured rock of the Anysberg. My family bought land there in 1996 from an old boer called Saaiman.
My father was a young lawyer then, having left Pretoria for the Western Cape not long before, and couldn’t afford much more than the land; there was no house on the property, just a dilapidated foundation with two rooms and a kitchen covered by a basic ceiling. It was a ruin that could once have belonged to anyone.
The land on which my father wished to sculpt rows of olive trees – a childhood dream of his – lay to the west of the homestead, arid, jagged with crags and covered in bush. We spent the better part of the first year rebuilding the house, living sparsely and in marked contrast to our actual home in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. At night, I counted the cracks in the walls to fall asleep.
We were perpetual outsiders in the valley for the first few years: urban Afrikaners who played at farming twice a month on weekends, so long disconnected from their roots that it seemed almost an insult for them to return now. I was oblivious. I ran around the perimeters tracking scorpions and stabbing aloe plants with my pocket knife.
On a scorching day some months after my father bought the land, I followed a path to the only other white-owned house in the immediate vicinity between us and the Saaimans. It belonged to a man called Hennie, and he had no land, just the house, and one sow chained inside a small cage in the front yard. My parents found me there, digging through a pile of cracked tiles, rusted metal and afval, and rushed me back to the house. I didn’t see Hennie, but the front door had been open.
Hennie slept with the volk, said