Ancient echoes of the |xam live on in the modern people of the Karoo

Forgotten but not gone, the hunter-gatherers never truly disappeared. They went underground, and their stories survive. By Don Pinnock

- By Don Pinnock

Forgotten but not gone, the hunter-gatherers never truly disappeared. They went underground, and their stories survive.

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.