An extraordinary exercise in interdisciplinary scholarship, this book was a tough read. This is strange because the writing is lucid and the themes add new perspective on how the state took land and resources from blacks and gave them to whites. You can open the book anywhere and be drawn – for a page or more – into wonderment at a text that weaves together facts from so many, diverse sources. The subject is a remote, water-stressed and harshly hot region of SA – Kuruman. The sweep of the narrative encompasses missionaries, tribes (BaThlaro and BaThlaping), colonial impositions, asbestos, apartheid and agriculture over a 200 year period. This is a history where things were happening all the time – but where ultimately nothing happened at all. Except that black people had all the land, minerals and water at the start and whites had taken all the best bits by the end. The book has an amazing range of sources, which explains the weak index. Missionary Roget Price is mentioned on page 108 but is not in the index. (Price first came to Kuruman in 1859 and was buried in the Kuruman graveyard in 1900.) ( )