SKELMKOPPIES

The story of Skelmkoppies was told to me by Mr Hennie Coetzee, curator of the museum in Middelburg and a lifelong resident of the region. It is a place bound to a deeply painful history of conflict between San people and Dutch settlers in the Karoo.

The San had long lived across this landscape as hunters and gatherers. With the arrival of settlers in the late seventeenth century, conflict intensified over land, wildlife and survival. According to local telling, the koppies later called Skelmkoppies, “Thieves’ Hills”, became linked to one of the most brutal episodes in that history, followed by cycles of vengeance that ended in massacre and entombment.

The photograph is made from a viewpoint chosen deliberately. The distance between camera and koppies is where I imagined the Venter family standing when they heard the cries of their children. The height of the camera was also considered, set roughly to the average height of a person in the mid-seventeenth century, so that the landscape might be seen as closely as possible from within that remembered human experience.