I do not like to think too much on this Africa. It is too large and too empty,” he said. “People like De Buys, they astonish me with their courage – or perhaps it is a lack in them; they cannot imagine. I think that is one way to be not afraid:...
Ours was the age of enlightenment, he said, when the battle cry was, ‘We must know, we shall know!’, and reason would depose superstition and we be liberated by it.
He leaned into Le Voir’s face with the calliper and breathed on him, holding forth on this new science of which calibration was the test; these measurements would describe classes of being and we who had provided the parameters would be fit within ...
There is no ‘what if’. Only in stories.
He has entertained the thought that his neighbours like having one of him in the district, having their own Englishman, although he will insist that he is as South African as they are. But perhaps his presence is more in the nature of a provocation, ...
These women who move through this landscape, holding themselves safe amid the terrible and sudden dangers, holding their limbs close to their bodies to lessen their profile, to lessen the places life can catch at them, and still maintaining movement,...