The Namib, Kalahari and Karoo: Reading the desert in selected Southern African literature

Abstract

The world’s desert regions have long inspired the imaginations of writers as landscapes whose aridity exposes the limits and possibilities of life. This thesis examines the lesser-known southern African deserts, the Namib, Kalahari, and Karoo across a range of prose genres. Spanning life writing, social realism, mythic realism, historical fiction, and crime fiction, the selected texts reflect interconnected desert ecologies that draw together human and more-than-human life with the material and the elemental. In inaugurating a desert humanities for southern Africa, this thesis proposes a “garocentric” imaginary that recognises the distinct forms of knowledge, storytelling, and resilience that emerge through aridity. Countering Romantic, colonial, and rugged individualist portrayals of the desert as a void, Henno Martin’s The Sheltering Desert recasts it as a place of shelter. Martin’s desert philosophy interweaves scientific observation with spiritual insight to recognise the distinctive resilience shaped by aridity. Carol Campbell’s two Karoo novels register the changing nature of the landscapes of both the Karoo and a newly democratic South Africa for the itinerant karretjiemense (carting-people). My Children Have Faces uses the natural contours of the desert to drive a narrative in which a family’s identity is rooted in the Karoo. The Tortoise Cried its Only Tear draws upon the region’s mythology to reconnect the protagonist with her lost desert heritage. Moving north to the Kalahari, Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather depicts a desert under extreme drought. More-than-human beings, such as birds, illustrate how desert resilience arises through interdependence rather than solitary endurance. André Brink’s An Instant in the Wind, set in the seventeenth century, situates the semi-desert Karoo in relation to South Africa’s forests and coastlines. For the protagonists, their exposure to the elements of wind and sun strips away their prejudices and enables a connection that transcends time, race, and class, envisioning the desert as a space of encounter rather than isolation. Returning to twenty-first century post apartheid South Africa, Karin Brynard’s Homeland stages conflicts surrounding land repatriation in the Kalahari and the ethical implications of European bioprospecting of medicinal desert plants.