Home
Kuruman, the Northern Cape, and a ground that was trying to kill him.
The yard is the memoir's fixed coordinate: thirty-seven steps from the kitchen's screen door to the well, counted because counting was the only cartography available. Every later room — Nairobi, Johannesburg, the hotels of a professional life — is measured against it.
Home is also a legal fact. A land act passed in 1913 sits under the whole book as background radiation: not always audible, always shaping the silence around it.
From the text
“Thirty-seven — I counted because counting was the only cartography available to me then.”
Prologue