Exploring the Kalahari Kruipers

Marie Claire Smith

PATRICIA Glyn’s novel, What Dawid Knew, recounts the secrets that she discovered from Dawid Kruiper, an old Bushman from the Kalahari.

Kruiper had kept the secret in his family for over a century.

He wanted to pass it on to his children before he died, but he did not have the means to take his children back to the place where his grandfather had witnessed the horror that silenced him.

So Dawid asked Patricia Glyn to help him mount the great, and final, odyssey of his life.

For two months in 2011, three generations of the Kruiper family, Patricia and her expedition crew travelled through the Kalahari, visiting and documenting places where Dawid and his forebears had roamed in the centuries before outsiders arrived in their homelands.

This is the story of how Patricia’s assumptions about and relationships with the Kruiper family were tested to the limit before they trusted her with their knowledge, stories and eventually the secret that they had kept for so long.

Patricia slowly gains an understanding of the depth of the Kruiper’s pain after centuries of genocide, prejudice and dispossession and she describes what she learned from the family about humankind’s original relationship with the wilderness and the natural world.

This is an adventure with a difference.

What David Knew explores the personal history and heritage of a remarkable family and what the Bushmen have to teach us about respect for, and responsible management of, our natural resources.