Childhood: an Anthropological study of itinerancy and domestic fluidity amongst the Karretjie people of the South African Karoo.

Abstract

The Karretjie People, or Cart People are a peripatetic community and are descendants of the KhoeKhoen and San, the earliest inhabitants of the Karoo region in South Africa. As a landless and disempowered community they are dependent upon others for food and other basic necessities specifically, and other resources generally. Compared to children in South Africa generally, the Karretjie children are in every sense of the most severely deprived. Their fathers are by and large sheep-shearers, often their only specialised skill, and which is primarily required only on demand and on an irregular and/or seasonal basis. The children’s mothers as keepers of the karretjie (cart) overnight shack, with other adult caretakers, are without predictable income for most of the year. The service that the adult men deliver to the farming community necessitates continuous spatial mobility and is made possible by a cart and donkeys, which also enable them to adapt to changing circumstances. High levels of spatial mobility as well as economic demands on individual domestic units result in inventive utilisation of scarce resources and entails, amongst others, in children oscillating between different karretjie (cart) units.