Fading Footprints — ancient South African culture found hiding in plain sight

The book Fading Footprints: In Search of South Africa’s First People begins with a death notice from 1913 – a woman called Meitjie Streep, described as “Bushman”, dying of “senile decay” in Kenhardt – and ends with the discovery that her people, thought long vanished, have been speaking all along in the accents and rhythms of the Karoo.

José Manuel de Prada-Samper’s book is both detective story and love letter: a pursuit of voices erased from history and a celebration of their persistence in the words, stories and silences of South Africa’s interior.

At its heart lies a simple but extraordinary idea: that the “lost world” of the |xam, the hunter-gatherers who once called the Upper Karoo home, never truly disappeared. Their stories survived – in fragments of memory, in place names, in Afrikaans folktales told by people who have long since stopped knowing who they are descended from. 

De Prada-Samper, a Spanish folklorist who first stumbled upon Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a Cambridge bookshop in the 1980s, spends the rest of his life following that trail of words back to the veld. 

Fading Footprints is the culmination of decades of listening: to the Bleek and Lloyd manuscripts in the University of Cape Town Archives, to rock engravings, to the wind moving over dolerite stones and to living storytellers whose voices still carry an ancient timbre.

The book is built around the intertwined stories of the past and the present. One thread follows Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, the extraordinary 19th-century linguists who recorded thousands of pages of |xam stories from a handful of exiled Bushman prisoners in Mowbray, Cape Town. 

The other thread is De Prada-Samper’s own, tracing his long pursuit of those same voices – from the haunted bookshop of his student days to the archives of Cape Town and the arid plains of Bushmanland. 

The result is neither pure history nor travelogue but something richer: a conversation across centuries, full of sympathy and wonder.

What gives Fading Footprints its energy is the author’s realisation, slowly unfolding through fieldwork, that the |xam have not vanished. They have merged invisibly into the communities that now populate the Karoo – farmworkers, storytellers, families who call themselves Coloured but whose folktales, gestures and idioms carry the imprint of older ways. 

The book becomes a story of return: the recognition that a culture thought extinct has simply gone underground, surviving through adaptation and forgetting.

De Prada-Samper writes with warmth and humility. His scholarship is formidable, but he wears it lightly, always grounding the reader in vivid detail – the crunch of stone underfoot, the feel of wind against a face, the awkward kindness of people encountered in remote farmhouses. 

He lets chance guide him, following echoes rather than arguments. Each chapter opens like a door: The Haunted Bookshop, The Living Landscape, The Bureaucrat and the Foragers. Their titles hint at how deftly he moves between worlds – the archive, the veld, the colonial record and the present-day kitchen table where stories are still told.

The book’s preface sets its tone beautifully. “The stones, stories and silences present in this book are all emblems of discontinuity and absence,” he writes, yet what emerges from that absence is not despair but renewal. 

The stones of the Karoo – those shiny dolerite boulders glinting like bronze – become another kind of archive, covered with the delicate engravings of people who once read the land like a book. The stories, preserved by Bleek and Lloyd, form a bridge between that vanished world and the living one. And the silences – the long historical erasures, the official forgetting – give the words their resonance.

De Prada-Samper’s own journey is moving because it begins in pure curiosity. As a young man in Cambridge, drawn by Elias Canetti’s remark that the oral traditions of “primitive peoples” were an “inexhaustible spiritual legacy”, he buys Specimens of Bushman Folklore almost on a whim. That decision, made in a narrow alley behind King’s Parade, alters the course of his life. 

The strange literal English translations, the mysterious symbols marking the clicks of the |xam language, the haunting photograph of ||kabbo – the old storyteller who said that a story “is the wind; it comes from a far-off quarter and we feel it” – all lodge in his imagination. The book becomes his compass.

Years later, standing in the Karoo dust, De Prada-Samper realises that ||kabbo’s wind is still blowing. The very people among whom he gathers stories speak in rhythms and images that match those in the Bleek Collection, though they only vaguely remember their lineage. 

The implication is astonishing: the |xam world was not destroyed, only disguised. Their cosmology – the mantis trickster and the talking animals – persists in local folktales retold in Afrikaans, in idioms that echo the old syntax, in a worldview that still sees the veld as animate and conversational.

What keeps the book buoyant is its faith in connection. De Prada-Samper writes not as a saviour of a dying tradition but as a listener discovering that the tradition has been quietly saving itself. His affection for the people he meets – farmers, storytellers, the elderly custodians of half-remembered tales – gives Fading Footprints its warmth. There’s melancholy in the losses he records, but there’s also laughter and resilience. “The |xam have not disappeared,” he insists by implication; “they have simply changed their name.”

The landscapes themselves become characters: the dolerite ridges where millions of stone tools lie scattered; the dry pans and koppies whose names still bear the marks of |xam words. 

Through maps drawn by archaeologist Janette Deacon and the author’s own journeys, the reader sees how myth and topography overlap – how a place like Gifvlei or Boesmanskop can still hold the echo of an ancient story. 

The physical journey mirrors the imaginative one: a movement from academic curiosity to belonging, from absence to presence.

What lingers after reading is not tragedy but gratitude, for the endurance of human imagination. De Prada-Samper shows that stories are not relics but living organisms, capable of hiding, adapting and resurfacing when someone listens hard enough. 

His own persistence – years of research, travel, translation and patience – becomes a metaphor for cultural memory itself: slow, stubborn, faithful to the faintest trace. This is a generous, radiant book. It reminds us that history is never finished and that the voices of those written out of it can still be heard if one learns to listen differently. 

In De Prada-Samper’s hands, scholarship becomes an act of devotion and the Karoo – harsh, ravaged, luminous – becomes a place of resurrection. 

Fading Footprints is ultimately about recognition: the moment when the author, and we with him, realise that the “lost people” were never lost at all. They have been speaking all along, hiding in plain sight in stories that travel like the wind, finding their way back home. DM

Fading Footprints: In Search of South Africa’s First People by José Manuel de Prada-Samper is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2025. It is available to purchase from local bookstores and online.