Northern Cape (arid Karoo & Khoisan)

The empty quarter: nearly a third of South Africa's land and about two per cent of its people, most of it Karoo scrub and Kalahari sand. Water defines everything here. The Orange River crosses the province and supports irrigated agriculture along a narrow ribbon, and away from it the land carries sheep at very low densities and little else. This is the part of South Africa where Khoisan history is least buried: the San were hunter-gatherers across the whole region, the Khoikhoi herded in it, and the rock art of the Karoo and the Richtersveld records thousands of years of occupation. Commando raiding by trekboers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries destroyed San society across most of the province, in what is now generally described as a genocide, and the descendants who survived were absorbed into farm labour and into the Coloured classification. The Griqua, of mixed Khoi and colonial descent, built their own states at Griquatown and Philippolis before losing them. Kimberley in the east changed world history: diamonds found in 1867 created De Beers, made Cecil Rhodes, and financed the expansion that carries his name north of the Limpopo. The Big Hole there is among the largest excavations ever dug by hand. In 2004 the ‡Khomani San received a land settlement in the Kalahari, one of the few restitution claims to return an ancestral hunting territory. The province now hosts the core of the Square Kilometre Array. Upington and Kimberley are the only sizeable towns. The Namaqualand flower bloom follows the brief spring rains. Sutherland hosts the Southern African Large Telescope, sited for the region's dark skies. Temperatures swing more than anywhere else in the country.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history