Karretjie People

PRONUNCIATION: KAH-ri-ki
LOCATION: The Great Karoo in South Africa
POPULATION: Several thousand
LANGUAGE: Afrikaans
RELIGION: None

INTRODUCTION

Travelers who journey between the interior of South Africa and the coast cross the vast arid scrublands of the central plateau. This is the Great Karoo (derived from a Khoekhoen or “Hottentot”—a pejorative term—word for desert), and this is where the Karretjie People (karretjie means “donkey cart”), can usually be seen criss-crossing the plains in their donkey carts.

Most of the Karretjie People are descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the area, the hunting-gathering Xam San (also known as “Bushmen,” a term that in some quarters is regarded as pejorative but is still sometimes used by such people themselves) and the nomadic-pastoral Khoekhoen (“Hottentots”). Archaeological evidence, DNA analyses, the historical record, local folklore, and oral tradition not only confirm the early presence of the Xam San and Khoekhoen in the area, but also the changing nature of their interaction with the more recently arrived pioneer white farming community from the south. The first sporadic contacts in the 1770s were followed by extended periods of conflict, intermittent times of peace, increased competition for resources, and eventually the powerful impact of a burgeoning agricultural economy and commercialization in the rapidly developing towns. The competition for resources, at least initially, centered around two issues. First, the farmers hunted the game in the hunting grounds that the Xam San regarded as their own. When they then began slaughtering the more easily accessible domesticated stock of the farmers, they themselves became the hunted. Second, the farmers and the Khoekhoen were in competition for the same grazing lands for their stock.

Eventually though, the lifestyle of both the Xam San and the Khoekhoen were transformed. In the case of the Xam San, for example, they changed from nomadic hunters to become so-called “tame Bushmen” farm laborers. They retained, at least initially, their nomadic ways, first on foot, later with the help of pack animals, and eventually with donkey carts. A few of those who were not hunted or who had not died of some foreign disease, like the smallpox epidemic early in the 18th century, still sought refuge in remote areas or rock shelters. Finally, though, most of the Xam San squatted near towns or were drawn into the agricultural economy by becoming laborers on the white farms. Like their parents and grandparents, most of the adult Karretjie People were born on a farm and, in spite of their present truly nomadic existence, many of them have a history of having lived at least semipermanently on a farm. It was on the farms that their ancestors first learned the skill of shearing. When wool-farming as an enterprise expanded, the Karretjie People, with the help of the mobility afforded by the donkey cart, developed an itinerant lifestyle in order to exploit shearing opportunities on farms spread over a wide area.

LOCATION AND HOMELAND

The Great Karoo, the region frequented by the Karretjie People, is a semidesert some 260,000 sq km (100,000 sq mi) in extent and 900 m to 1,200 m (3,000–4,000 ft) above sea level. It is a summer-rainfall area with extreme temperatures in both the summer and the winter. Strong winds and dust storms characterize the months of August and September and occasionally blow for the duration of the summer. The summer rains begin with light showers in October, but temperatures remain quite low. In fact, light snowfalls are known to have occurred as late as September. Temperatures increase quite dramatically during November, and temperatures above 40°C (105°F), during the summer months until February are not unusual. Rain during the summer is sporadic and often occurs in the form of thunderstorms, when 2.5 cm (1 in) or more of rain may fall in a short time, only to be followed by a long dry period. Temperatures decrease by April, and this usually also marks the end of the rainy season.

Topographically the region consists of vast plains dotted with flat-topped hills. In the valleys and on the plains the soil layer is thin, resulting in vegetation consisting mainly of Karoo scrub and grasses, much favored by both sheep and the remaining wild game, mainly a variety of antelope and smaller animals. The Karoo has become famous for Merino sheep and, hence, wool-farming, although Angora goats for mohair, and cattle and horse-breeding, and more recently game-farming, are also to be found. None of this land is owned by the Karretjie People, but as itinerant sheep-shearers this is the area that they roam, and they certainly regard these open spaces as their domain. It is difficult to obtain accurate census figures on a moving population, but Great Karoo-wide the Karretjie People probably number several thousand although many of them have recently become sedentary and hence no longer truly itinerant Karretjie People.

LANGUAGE

Virtually all the Karretjie People are unilingually Afrikaans-speaking. The few exceptions include isolated elderly individuals who still speak a Khoesan dialect or a language like Griqua or Korana, the language of their forbears. The Afrikaans that most of them speak was brought to the Great Karoo by the 18th-century Afrikaner hunters and pioneer farmers. Because most of the ancestors of the Karretjie People became farm laborers and were often, at least relatively and temporarily, isolated from their own wider social network and intensively exposed to Afrikaner culture, their own language gradually lost its currency.

While mostly intelligible to Afrikaans-speakers in general, the Afrikaans that the Karretjie People speak is peculiar to them and is enriched by characteristic words and sayings, such as skêrbestuurders, literally, “sheep-shear managers or drivers,” i.e., sheep-shearers; klipbrille, literally, “with stone spectacles” or “glasses,” i.e., being illiterate; and hulle regeer al weer, literally, “they are governing again,” i.e., they are arguing again.

Most personal names derive from an Afrikaner tradition, although many are peculiar to the Karretjie People. Some names follow the names of animals that are, or were, found in the area. Some common names are Mieta Arnoster (the last name is from the Afrikaans renoster, “rhinoceros”); Hendrik Sors, Katjie Geduld, Plaatjie Januarie (the last name literally means “January”); Meitjies Verrooi (the first name literally means “little maid,” the “little” indicated by the diminutive “-tjie”); and Struis Maneswil (the first name is an abbreviation of the Afrikaans volstruis, “ostrich”). Karretjie children also have what is known as a kleinnaampie (literally, “small name” or nickname). For instance, the little girl Marie Jacobs is also known as Rokkies (literally, “little dress”), and her twin brother Simon Jacobs is known as Outjie (literally, “little guy”).

FOLKLORE

The relative isolation, as individuals on farms, of the forbears of the Karretjie People resulted in them “losing” much of their early traditions and beliefs. Their relative isolation today as a community has prevented them from significantly adopting the myths and folklore of the sedentary communities in their area. Thus, there is only a vague awareness of being descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the region, and many of the few stories and folktales that the Karretjie adults do relate to their children are derived from the Afrikaners or from the teachers at the farm schools that a few of these children started attending.

A story that is told, and which serves to discipline young girls, is that of the Oranatan (probably derived from Orangoetang, Afrikaans for “orangutan”). The Oranatan lives in a cave and moves around at night. He captures any young girl who ventures outside her karretjie shelter at night, takes her to his cave, and keeps her there for himself forever.

RELIGION

Although some of the Karretjie People were married in a church or by a magistrate, it is more common for such a union to be sanctioned simply by virtue of its recognition by the Karretjie community. Children from the former type of marriage take the last name of the father, while in the case of the latter type of union, they take the last name of the mother.

Very few of the Karretjie People are members of a church or a religious organization or have ever, for that matter, been exposed to religious activities. A few have been baptized by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Mission church, either in a church or by virtue of a minister visiting the farm where their parents worked. Those couples who have had a church marriage (referred to as ge-eg, “properly” married) are the exception, and those who live together are regarded as having an appropriately sanctioned union.

MAJOR HOLIDAYS

Neither religious nor secular holidays have any particular significance for the Karretjie People. The unpredictability of their employment as itinerant shearers is such that they are idle almost as many days as they are shearing. The selective observance of the national holidays of South Africa by the farmers for whom they work in large part guides the activities of the Karretjie People on such days. The Christmas–New Year period, when there is no shearing activity in any event, is a time for celebration and efforts are made to have more to eat and drink available, their meager resources permitting.

RITES OF PASSAGE

The passage of a Karretjie person from one social role to another is marked by very little ceremony. The transformation of a person from childhood to adulthood is probably the most significant. Boys, for example, learn to shear by helping their fathers from an early age. They “graduate” from at first shearing the less important wool from the same sheep to eventually, when they are strong and skilled enough, shearing independently. Birthdays are not marked by any ceremony, but when boys are old enough and are shearing on their own, they obtain their own karretjie (cart) and donkeys and are no longer regarded as children.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Even after a long absence, greetings between spouses, siblings, and between parents and children are often noticeably unemotional, undemonstrative, and occasionally even totally absent. When they do greet each other or others, it might be by means of a handshake. When asked, “Hoe gaan dit?” (“How are things going?”), the response may be, “Darem opgestaan” (“At least I got up [this morning]”) or “Nee, die oë blink” (“No, the eyes are shining”).

The small Karretjie family may share meals together and may ride together in the donkey cart to visit family or friends at a neighboring farm or another outspan (a “neutral” site or place next to the road where they erect their overnight shelters and unyoke or outspan the donkeys), but the adult males are then inclined to drink, chat, and joke with each other in a group. The women drink and socialize in their own group while the children play together. Such visiting takes place over weekends and often results in long drinking sessions, which sometimes result in arguing and even fighting.

Karretjie children play together as a group well into adolescence, although there is an increasing tendency for girls' and boys' activities to separate as they become older. A special relationship between a boy and a girl is not always clearly apparent in the sense of them sharing time and activities apart from the rest. The itinerant lifestyle, and the small and close-knit Karretjie community at a particular outspan, precludes this.

LIVING CONDITIONS

It is a useful rule of thumb to regard a karretjie (cart) as the focus for a Karretjie unit because it provides transport for each family and becomes part of the overnight shelter. A Karretjie unit does not necessarily replicate a household, however. For domestic purposes like cooking, eating, and child care the karretjies of parents and married children, or of married siblings, may function together as a unit. Each Karretjie family constructs its own shelter, normally in the gang (corridor) next to the road. Sheets of corrugated iron, plastic, and hessian are normally used to construct such a shelter, which consists of a single space with no divisions. The number of people at an outspan is relatively small, and an average of 2 to 14 Karretjie units occupy a particular outspan.

The Karretjie People suffer from the harsh extremes of temperature in this part of South Africa during winter and summer. During winter they are constantly suffering from coughs and colds. They are, however, generally in relatively good health. Adults normally seek medical treatment only in absolute emergencies, such as in the case of a difficult childbirth, chronic illness, or serious accident. In case of illness, people far from town are largely dependent on the compassion of neighboring farmers, although a mobile clinic is now reaching some of those on the outspans and farms. Although pregnant women are now advised to go to town to give birth at a hospital, most are still assisted by older women at the outspan because of the practical difficulties involved in getting to town, especially in case of an emergency.

Most of the outspans have neither clean water nor toilet facilities, and this creates extremely unhealthy conditions for the people living there. Water has to be fetched from nearby taps, windmills, or a river in one instance. The Karretjie People's health is closely related to their environmental conditions and circumstances. High infant mortality rates, low birth weight, poor diet, undernutrition, and diarrhea are significant factors that determine the quality of these people's state of health.

Although the Karretjie People tend to use plants from the natural environment for the treatment of common ailments such as colds, a mobile medical unit nowadays alleviates some of these problems. Its activities are mostly directed to preventive care, in particular family planning, and curative tasks. Mobile clinics have a regular visiting schedule and consist of medical teams with separate units. The medicines provided are fairly inexpensive, but children under six years old receive free medical treatment. In some areas, feeding schemes have been initiated by social workers, and teams try to reach people at outspans twice a week.

FAMILY LIFE

Karretjie families on the outspans are relatively small. Although there are a few single-parent families, most families consist of a mother, father, and from one to six children, with three children being roughly the average. Some of the families are extended by virtue of a grandchild, grandparent, or a sibling of one of the parents living with them. As soon as boys are skilled enough, they start shearing independently and, as a result, often form an independent Karretjie unit. The composition of the Karretjie unit also frequently changes by virtue of children or grandparents temporarily joining other units in order to take advantage of available resources.

Women play a significant role in the family structure but remain in a subordinate position because decision-making is done mostly by the head of the Karretjie unit, in this case the senior male and shearer. Adult women and older girls assist in packing and unpacking the donkey cart before and after traveling, they wash clothes and prepare food for the family, and they are the primary caretakers of young children.

Most Karretjie families keep pets, of which dogs and cats are the most popular. Dogs are also used for hunting purposes. When the Karretjie moves as a unit, the dogs are tied behind the cart and run along, while cats are placed on top of the load of the cart together with the old people, children, chickens, and accessories.

CLOTHING

The Karretjie People seldom have money to buy items such as clothes. The clothing that they own is mostly secondhand. Men wear shirts and trousers and are fond of caps, while women wear dresses and sometimes head cloths. The decorations that the Karretjie People wear are not of much value and are usually used handouts from the surrounding sedentary communities. Rings of copper and safety pins are popular.

FOOD

The staple ingredient of the Karretjie diet is mealie-meal (cornmeal), at least when times are “good.” When shearing on a farm they buy supplies, mainly mealie-meal, sugar, coffee, and tobacco, “on the book” (on credit) from the farmer's store. With any extra money from a shearing assignment, the Karretjie People may undertake a pilgrimage to town before returning to their “home” outspan. At other times, the “not-so-good” or “in between shearing” times, the krummelpap (crumbly-thick porridge) becomes slappap (soft porridge) and eventually dunpap (thin or watery porridge).

The Karretjie people do not eat at regular times. Depending on the availability of food, they normally have two meals a day, i.e., breakfast and supper. They own only the necessary utensils, such as a pot for cooking porridge, a few cans to fetch water, and sometimes only two or three spoons that a family shares during a meal.

Found on the fringe of a gravel road, the occasional carcass of a rabbit is a welcome addition to the usually depleted Karretjie menu. Snares are also set in the veld for rabbits, or antelope like steenbok and duiker. Young boys also set traps and try to entice birds into them by sprinkling a trail of porridge crumbs. The environment does not present much in terms of edible wild roots and berries, although some use is made of the Karoo vegetation for medicinal purposes. Some of the outspans offer alternative resources, such as a river for fish, including yellowfish, carp, and modderbek (literally, “muddy mouth,” this fish feeds on the river bed), or prickly pears, which ensure a juicy, vitamin-rich option during their brief bearing season in the summer.

EDUCATION

Until 1992 almost all the Karretjie People were illiterate, having never had the benefit of schooling or even access to a school. Since then the children have started attending farm schools in the area. The farmers or farmers' wives who run these schools fetch the children at the outspans, provide board and lodging for them by means of a government subsidy, and return them to their Karretjie homes on Friday afternoons or, depending on the particular school, only for school holidays.

Because of an adult education program, which was started in 1995, adults at some of the outspans received literacy training, as well as practical and skills training. Some of the children drop out of the farm schools for practical reasons (or because other children discriminate against them) but then participated in this adult education program.

As formal education is a recent and limited development for these communities, the process through which children are prepared for full participation in their community is still an essential function of the Karretjie unit. Informal education is part of everyday life, and the children learn by observing and imitating their parents, other adults, and siblings' activities. The experience of moving to an outspan or farm in itself is educational because they cover vast distances and frequently encounter new regions and different sets of people.

Most of the parents are anxious for their children to attend school and want them especially to learn the skills of reading and writing so that they can get a sit job (sitting down, e.g., clerical work) instead of a staan job (standing up, e.g., shearing). Some, however, admit that the schooling of their children may interfere with their mobile way of life, and that the children who do attend school are changed by the experience and often become critical of certain aspects of the nomadic way of life, and even of their own parents' behavior.

CULTURAL HERITAGE

With their long history of illiteracy, the Karretjie People have no recorded cultural heritage and, obviously, no literature. The Karretjie People have also lost virtually all of their oral tradition, and that which they have is quite “shallow,” or relatively recent. The songs that they sing, and the music with which they identify, have all been taken over from surrounding sedentary peoples. This also applies to dancing, although here there is some measure of innovation, much of which is apparent during weekends of socializing.

WORK

Virtually all the males of the Karretjie People are, or will eventually become, sheep-shearers. To supplement their meager income, or to tide them over from one shearing season or assignment to another, they do odd jobs on the farms: they hoe burweed, dig irrigation furrows, erect or repair fencing, and build windbreaks for sheep kraals (corrals). They may also get temporary employment in a town as painters or gardeners. When the men are shearing, the women may get part-time work at the farmhouse as assistants to the domestic workers or in the garden. They may also help in the shearing shed, sorting the wool locks, extracting foreign matter like burrs from the wool, or sweeping up the wool off-cuts on the floor (young children also do this) where the shearing is in progress.

The Karretjie People are generally recognized as the best shearers in the region. Although as hand-shearers they are slower (a shearer averages approximately 30 sheep a day) than the professional teams shearing with electric machines, many farmers prefer to use them because: (1) unlike the other teams they are not unionized and hence do not drive as hard a bargain; (2) their shearing is neater; (3) the farmers claim to get along better with them because they can converse with them in Afrikaans (as opposed to many of the organized shearers, who are Xhosa-speaking); and (4) farmers do not want or have to have them permanently, or even semipermanently, on the farm.

A farmer intending to shear stops at an outspan (often one with which he has a long-standing arrangement) and informs the spokesperson of the Karretjie shearing team that he intends to start shearing on a given day. He tells them how many sheep or goats there are to shear and how many shearers he needs. A price is tentatively negotiated, and the shearers either get a prepayment there and then or receive it as soon as they arrive on the farm. This confirms the arrangement, although the contract remains verbal at all times.

The price paid per sheep shorn depends largely on the farmer, from as little as R1.00 (approximately $0.13) for the short-wooled Dorper sheep (mainly kept for the meat), to perhaps starting at R2.00 (about $0.26) for Merino sheep. Additionally, each shearing team is given one sheep for slaughter for every 1,000 sheep shorn. The shearers buy their shears, which last them for “three or four farms,” from the farmer for about R40.00 ($5.10). Rations are usually bought on credit from the farmer's food store—these prices are often higher than those in town. After shearing for two to three weeks, and after deductions, the shearers may receive a net payment of as little as R40.00 ($5.10). Odd jobs pay R10.00 to R20.00 ($1.28–2.56), and women who work as temporary domestics in town have been known to be paid only R5.00 ($0.65) a day. Some farmers allow the whole Karretjie unit, i.e., not just the shearers, onto their property and occasionally even make housing available for the shearers, but most shearers claim that they do not want to stay in a proper house and prefer their own Karretjie shacks.

Outside observers often perceive the Karretjie People as trekking around haphazardly because of an eager desire or fondness for traveling. Their movements are directed, however, by an intricate interplay of seasonal, social, economic, and ideological factors that result in discernible, though flexible, regularities. Geographical mobility is a reaction to adapt to the scarcity of resources and to optimize the precarious access to available resources. The key to such survival strategies has been the ingenuity of the Karretjie People and the mobility that their donkey carts afford them.

SPORTS

The strenuous itinerant lifestyle of the Karretjie People, the fact that they hardly ever find themselves in the same location for any length of time, and the fact that they have been removed from the mainstream of the surrounding society for so long have together resulted in a complete lack of participation, and even an awareness of, or an interest in, organized sports activities. It is only much more recently, with the advent of limited schooling, that some of the Karretjie children have become exposed to such activities. The small boys do however kick a ball around, if they managed to get hold of one, otherwise an empty plastic bottle serves the purpose.

ENTERTAINMENT AND RECREATION

The Karretjie People mostly entertain themselves. They have no access to electricity and hence have no television, but a few have decrepit portable radios, to which they listen when they have enough money for batteries. For the most part, they socialize, go visiting, go hunting (illegally) with their dogs or with snares, and, when near a river, they fish.

FOLK ART, CRAFTS, AND HOBBIES

Karretjie women can usually be seen mending or altering clothes and making lappies komberse (patchwork blankets). Men busy themselves fixing donkey harnesses and carts and repairing shoes. Little boys make ketties (slingshots) for hunting birds, and clay animals when their overnight shelters are near water. Little girls make their own stokpoppe (stick and rag dolls).

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

The farmers who employ the Karretjie People as shearers are not contractually bound, as the undertaking to shear and the price are both determined by verbal arrangement. These shearers are the most unprotected source of labor in one of the most protected economic sectors in South Africa. A shearer can be quite arbitrarily dismissed, often works long hours or not at all, has no insurance or guarantee of assistance in unemployment, disability, old age, or on leave, and has extremely tenuous access to medical and educational facilities.

South Africa's first democratic election on 27 April 1994 provided the Karretjie People with their first-ever opportunity to cast a vote. Although most of them were not in possession of the required identity documents or voter cards, temporary arrangements were made for many of them. But the ability to vote and the new government now in power have not changed their lives and circumstances at all. Subsequent elections have come and gone, but if anything, the Karretjie People are worse off now than they were before the first. They have, through a series of historical external interventions, progressively been denied access to the resources of the area, most significantly the main resource, land. The process that was set in motion with the arrival in the area of the first white farmers in the 1700s has produced a hierarchical and rigidly ordered social system. The process has furthermore produced in most of the residents in the area (not least of whom, the Karretjie People themselves) a collective, conditioned mind-set of tacit acceptance of the status quo—a status quo of inequity and intolerance, and a monopoly of resources that transcends the statutory transformations brought about by the election of a democratic government. The advent and expansion of game farming in the Merino-wool farming districts frequented by the Karretjie People, increased professional sheep-shearing competition and general changes in the agricultural economy of the area, have resulted in dwindling shearing opportunities. This has further forced the Karretjie People into a downward spiral of poverty. Sooner or later they have to sell their donkeys and karretjie, hence lose their mobility and have even less access to shearing assignments. They end up in informal settlements or squatting on the fringes of the towns in their region, scrounging to keep life and limb together.

Although in going about their daily activities the Karretjie People are cheerful, humorous, and ostensibly even optimistic, they are realistically aware of the hardships of their way of life and only too mindful of how little the future seems to hold for them. As marginal people, they not only occupy the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, but in a wider community of divisions and opposition, the particular sociocultural, political, and economic niche in which they find themselves is now even more precarious and vulnerable in the extreme. The hardship and uncertainty tends to translate into feelings of helplessness and frustration, which are regularly manifested in weekend-long bouts of drinking and fighting that, on some occasions, resulted in the deaths of family members and friends.

GENDER ISSUES

The pattern of gender roles and relations amongst the Karretjie People have been transmitted and enculturated over generations. This is a matter both of a conditioned continuation of an inherent value system and practical considerations. The foraging Xam San, forbears of the Karretjie People, roamed the Great Karoo for centuries, the men hunting the game and fending off intruders or aggressors, the women collecting wild roots and berries and taking responsibility for the small children and domestic chores. When the Xam San themselves became the hunted with the arrival of European farmers, many of them became “tame Bushmen” on the farms. The physically stronger males became farmhands learning the requisite skills, including shearing when Merino sheep were introduced into the area. The females were employed as domestic help in the homestead. The descendants of these people retained their mobility, first on foot, then by means of pack animals and finally with the donkey cart. They adapted to the niche livelihood of becoming a floating community of shearers providing this specialist service in a burgeoning wool-farming economy. The male, as shearer was, and still is, the provider for the Karretjie domestic unit and he controls the finances. The female, as mother, generally stayed at their shelter tending to their off-spring and domestic matters. Although all the Karretjie People are of small stature, the males are physically stronger and even should the possibility of females, as shearers, have been contemplated by the farmers and the Karretjie People themselves, they would have been hard put to master and sustain such strenuous activity over continuous 12-hour working days.

Although Karretjie children play together at an early age, their play and other activities separate as they become older. They learn by observing and imitating their parents' roles and responsibilities. The boys make slingshots to shoot birds, help with the donkeys and aspire to become shearers as soon as they are old, and strong, enough—in fact they join their fathers in the shearing shed at an early age and are gradually initiated into shearing. The girls make and play with dolls and help their mothers with domestic duties, fetch water and tend to those children even smaller than themselves.

So the Karretjie male as main wage-earner is also the decision-maker e.g. in terms of when to break camp, what the next destination is to be, etc. This also translates into the domestic context and husband/wife interpersonal relations. Despite the fact that women play a significant role in the family and domestic organization and situation, they remain in a sub-ordinate position in every respect—even to the extent that a husband would reprimand, castigate, and even manhandle his partner or wife if, according to him, she has been disobedient. This is of course, exacerbated when there is drinking involved over weekends.

All of this flies in the face of the fact that individual rights and particularly discrimination on the grounds of gender are protected in the Bill of Rights of the South African constitution. The circumstances of the Karretjie People are such though, that much as the benefits of citizenship are not accorded them, so too are they often essentially beyond the reach of the cornerstones of democracy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Jongh, M. “Kinship as Resource: Strategies for Survival among the Nomads of the South African Karoo.” In African Anthropology, 11(2) 1995.

———. “No Fixed Abode: The Poorest of the Poor and Elusive Identities in Rural South Africa”. In Journal of Southern African Studies. 28(2) 2002.

———. “Strangers in Their Own Land—Strategies, Social Resources and Domestic Fluidity of the Peripatetic Karretjie People of the South African Karoo”. In: Berland, J.C. & Rao, A. (eds.) Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on Peripatetics Peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. London: Praeger, 2004.

———. “Human Agency, Asymmetrical Relations and Socio-cultural Systems. Itinerancy and Sedenterism in the Great Karoo of South Africa”. In International Journal of the Humanities (3). 2006.

De Jongh, M. and R. Steyn. “Itinerancy as a Way of Life: The Nomadic Sheep-Shearers of the South African Karoo.” In Development Southern Africa, 11(2) 1994.

Steyn, R. “Child-Rearing and Child-Care in a South African Nomadic Community.” In African Anthropology, 11(2) 1995.

—by M. De Jongh