The broken string

"The first people of South Africa, Stone-Age hunters and gatherers from the mountains and the arid flats of the interior, did not survive the arrival of settlers from Europe. Within decades an ancient world of sorcerers, hunters and artists was lost for ever, along with the stories they told." "We would know next to nothing of their myths, their beliefs or the rituals that governed their lives if it were not for six bushmen, five of whom had been sentenced to hard labour in a Cape Town prison in 1869. Released into the country home of a Prussian linguist called Wilhelm Bleek and his…