Karoo

Book Review

The Plains of Camdeboo: The Classic Book of the Karoo, by Eve Palmer, Penguin Books

“Few people have had the good fortune to be born in a desert. I was.”

So starts Eve Palmer’s tale of the Karoo, a semi-desert region, stretching across the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. The word Karoo is derived from a Khoisan word meaning “land of thirst”, and though I wasn’t born there, I have had the good fortune to pass through it a few times, travelling between my family’s permanent home in dry diamond filled Kimberley, and their coastal vacation home.

The Plains of Camdeboo is an almost exhaustive account of life in a place thought to be without life. The Karoo is arid and seemingly colorless, yet Palmer paints a world of color and movement, full of birds and plants, and tales of lions and explorers. “…[O]urs is a country of life. We have only to walk or ride into the veld to know this and be caught up in its pattern: the squat, fat, angled plants; the hunting spiders that flicker between them;… the pale and wild gladioli; the cobras; the scorpions; the mantis coloured like a flower;… the koringkrieks lurching on immense and crooked legs. Here moves a steenbok, a duiker, a springbuck, a lark clapping its wings above us;... the smell of rain, wild asparagus; mountains and hills floating in a mirage of water; a white hot sky, the sound of cicadas and wings and wind.”

Her descriptions are extensive. Entire chapters are devoted to nothing but cobras or one species of tree. While the thoroughness might be tedious, you can’t help but get absorbed in her anecdotes. Instead of reading like a scientific study, you feel as if you were there at Cranemere Farm, alongside her family, the farm’s workers, and its many visitors as they divulge its histories and the charm of this unique area. These accounts read like poetry, and can only come from someone who truly values this world around her. I can relate, having grown up on a farm myself. There are patterns in nature that repeat themselves throughout the seasons, things to look forward to or mourn as the year moves on. There are details that are only realized upon close and frequent observation. Palmer sees order in the workings of nature. Her prose is heavy with science, yet what makes her work readable is her enthusiasm for both wild and tame, and the realization that some things lie “…in the realm of speculation, mysticism, and faith. The Karoo breeds few atheists. Perhaps this is accident and its plant and animal world, so bizarre and yet so methodical, plays no part in this at all; or perhaps, unguessed by its people, the pressure of a great plan is about them.”