BURCHELL AND THE COUNTRY OF THE BUSHMEN

How many times have you driven through a landscape and wished you could have seen it centuries ago? In 1811, the English artist and explorer, William John Burchell, travelled through South Africa. Join us as we follow in his footsteps.

- WILLEM VAN DER BERG

I t’s February 2024 and I’m standing on the same patch of Karoo where William Burchell stood in September 1811. I look around and see what he saw. A rock amphitheatre closes around me

like a protective hand. I hold up the drawing he made and it becomes my view. The green bushes on the page are the kriedorings before me.

The title of Burchell’s drawing is “The Rock Fountain in the Country of the Bushmen”. He describes how he listened to the friendly (but unintelligible to him) conversations of the Bushmen under a blue sky as he illustrated the scene. The pool of water he drew has since dried up, and the big white dishes of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) rise on the other side of the hill, their metal ears turned to the stars to hear if there’s life elsewhere in the Milky Way. Still, at this desolate place 13km west of Carnarvon, it’s amazing that the earth looks almost as it did 213 years ago.

William John Burchell arrived in Cape Town late on the afternoon of 26 November 1810. He was young – barely 28. And not very tall, standing only 162,5cm. It was his first time in Africa. He wasn’t an explorer per se, but he wanted to travel around the interior of southern Africa to learn more about the region’s people, plants and animals. He didn’t have a tertiary education but he had a curious mind and a generalist’s appreciation of botany, zoology, geology and astronomy. In the six months before he departed from the Cape, he also learnt how to speak Dutch so he could communicate with the people who would accompany him on his trek, and the farmers he might encounter on the road.