Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned

This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province in the country of my birth, South Africa. To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and windswept scrubland plateau, flat as far as the eye can see but cut by deep, rocky canyons tight with the most intense and diverse profusion of succulents on the planet: flowering aloes, spiky aloes, furry aloes, ground-creeping aloes and the strange giant palm-like aloe, the Quiver Tree.

Jostling among them, the thorn bushes are murderous. You’d be mad, heroic or both to farm here, but our hosts do, grazing sheep over their thousands of hectares watered only by a couple of wind-pumps with drinking troughs. Scorched by day, frozen by night, to make your life here you’d need either to believe in Destiny with a capital D, or to have no choice. Both are true of our Afrikaner hosts: on their shelves are devotional paperbacks and a game called Bible Charades; above my bed a sweet farmyard painting illustrating Psalm 23, though its owners have hardly been led beside the still waters. Their church, I assume, will be South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC).

Touring this part of Africa on both sides of the great Orange River (Namibia on the north bank), we have met many such white families, all Afrikaners, all making their living in the toughest of environments, none of them less than devoted to this continent of their birth – and parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ birth – but few of them (were they to think about it, which perhaps they don’t) with anywhere else to go.