Karoo - Lawrence Green

Karoo - Lawrence G. Green - Timmins - 1975 - Hard cover with dust cover in very good condition.

The countless springboks are my flock
Spread oer the unbounded plain.
-Thomas Pringle

THOSE vast springbok migrations which devastated the karoo districts of South Africa almost up to the end of last century must have formed the most dramatic scenes in the whole world of mammals.One cannot see everything, but I am sorry these cavalcades of fur and flesh occurred before my time. There was a trekboer once,
a natural artist as a story teller, whose tale gave me the human side of it; one of those tales which carried the ring of personal experience in every vivid detail.
This man had left the Transvaal with his family in the eighteen­-seventies as a boy of ten. They were members of the first Thirstlandtrek, a group of people impelled by real or imaginary grievances, and certainly by a restless spirit, to seek a new country.
Many died in the desert. Some reached Angola. But this family of Van der Merwes broke away from the ill-fated wagons and headed south. They spent their lives trekking with their sheep and cattle in search of grass. When the old people died, the son Gert went on living the only life he knew; sometimes in Bechuanaland, in the Kalahari and often in the North West Cape. By the time he was twenty-one he had a wife and three children, two coloured shepherds and a Bushman touleier to lead the oxen and find the way from one water-hole or vlei to the next.