In this book, Russel Viljoen has once again demonstrated the power of microhistory for the understanding of the colonial past of the Khoikhoi. On the basis of meticulous archival research, he has reconstructed the lives, or at any rate the most dramatic parts of the lives, of a number of the Khoikhoi individuals living in Swellendam district. He has done it with verve, and most importantly he has shown how an individual's experience becomes intermeshed with that of others to create the wider story of Cape Colonial history.

Robert Ross, professor emeritus, University of Leiden

'Big history often blurs the pain of ordinary lives under oppression. Instead, Russel Viljoen, in his latest volume, finds intricate and intimate details in the colonial record and indigenous sources to give vivid and shocking detail to the lived experience of Khoikhoi labourers, cooks and wagon drivers in the far-reaches of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cape society. The trauma of criminality and racism, mixed with lost love and religion, are empathetically clustered in micro-histories, producing a sharper narrative of the struggle to save a semblance of pre-colonial freedom.

Greg Cuthbertson, University of South Africa