The Keeper of the Kumm

Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind

Award-winning journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven tells the story of her life and how it's been turned upside down by an Ancestor: //Kabbo, a Bushman storyteller and revolutionary. She writes of being "too black" for her coloured school mates, working as one of the early female journalists in the misogynistic '70s and of the constant struggle to find an identity that fits. Finally, she unearths a history that speaks to her: first in the language of a long, nameless illness without conventional cure, and then in the Calling of her Ancestors.