ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the local and specific, and I have chosen a group of people who are indisputably indigenous in any sense of the term - the San of southern Africa, specifically the /Xam of the northern Cape in the late 19th century. A people who lost their independent and environmentally sustainable way of life, as well as their language and identity, in the second half of the 19th century. The chapter draws on concepts from the /Xam language or set of languages and employs these in a metonymic manner to point beyond the /Xam to other San groups, the contemporary San of the Drakensberg in particular, and also to other cultures in southern Africa. To give an idea of the inexhaustible richness of the environmental location of only one African people will point to the richness of the whole.
