Gate

About the book

Land has profound significance for South Africans. Inscribed on their home soil and seared into popular memory are tales of fierce clashes over rights to ownership, of victory, heroic deeds and the anguish of loss. A turbulent past has given rise to contrasting concepts of territory, and a complex set of relationships between people and the spaces they occupy. Even so, the desire to imbue the landscape with symbolic meaning is evident everywhere, and nowhere more so than in rural South Africa, where the most common expression of attachment to a place is found in the names farmers have assigned to their properties and, by extension, the farm gates they have built and embellished to serve as the portals to their land. Gate looks at the diversity of names that have been given to...