The author
Grant A. Poulton
I grew up on the land I write about: in the bush, on its rivers, across South Africa and its neighbours. Somewhere along the way a history teacher made me want to describe this country to a stranger who could not smell it, could not feel the heat come off the ground, could not hear what the silence in the veld is actually full of.
My father’s line runs back to John Poulton, a shoemaker who crossed to the Eastern Cape frontier with the 1820 Settlers. On every side, my roots are the same: settler and Boer, English and Afrikaner, twined across generations. The stories came down with the blood, and stories, like breadcrumbs picked up along the way, are folded and massaged into timeless tales, destined to be forever lost unless someone sets them down for our future generations to see, hear and feel the world that was left behind. That is what I am doing here.
Heated, hammered, folded and quenched. This is the fire the people here endure to call this continent home.