Sylvia Vollenhoven: The Keeper of the Kumm. Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind

HUMA Book Lunch

Author: Sylvia Vollenhoven (University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

Introduction: 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 schoolmates, 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 a conventional cure and then in the Calling of her Ancestors.

See the book: The Keeper of the Kumm: Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind (Tafelberg, 2016).