The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People

Published by Penguin, 2005, paperback, illustrated, 420 pages, some library stamps otherwise condition: very good.

The first people of South Africa, Stone-Age hunters and gatherers from the mountains and the arid flats of the interior, did not survive the arrival of settlers from Europe. Within decades an ancient world of sorcerers, hunters and artists was lost forever, along with the stories they told. We would know next to nothing of their myths, their beliefs or the rituals that governed their lives if it were not for six bushmen, five of whom had been sentenced to hard labour in a Cape Town prison in 1869. Released into the country home of a Prussian linguist and his English born sister-in-law, they were invited to teach their language and to share a previously unknown world on the verge of extinction. Over the next 18 years they worked together to capture this lost world of myths, songs, pictures and moving personal histories. The notebooks answer questions about ancient rock art and describe the awful tragedy of a vanished people.