MAEDER OSLER writes: Readers will know that we’re fascinated by maps, particularly of the Karoo. Among the maps we have previously published are those generated by the multidisciplinary ‘Cosmopolitan Karoo’ research programme in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, previously headed by our friend Prof Cherryl Walker. Below we feature an article by an honours student in the department, Hannah Hall, that has appeared on the Cosmopolitan Karoo website, in which she further explores the notion of the Karoo as a map that has been drawn, erased, and redrawn across the centuries.
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The Karoo has always been more than a place. It is a map that has been sketched, erased, and redrawn across centuries, each set of lines telling us less about the land itself and more about who claimed the authority to chart it. One undisputable truth about a map, in any form, is its centrality around a specific focal point. Another indisputable truth is the resulting distancing effect. The intimacies and intricacies discovered by those who have ‘walked’ the map are left concealed behind its explicit portrayals.
Yet both within and around the representation lie a multitude of ‘implicits’ that are left to exist as afterthoughts. Whether as a space of communal livelihood, colonial conquest, capitalist exploitation or scientific development – the Karoo has been contorted to fit into a single picture for its intended audience.
Today, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) arrives with new instruments and promises, holding yet another pen over the drylands. The question is whether these maps will trace inclusion and upliftment, or simply overlay new borders of exclusion.
When provided with the stimulus ‘map’, you may imagine a yellowed page with frayed edges with identifiable landmarks and a pronounced ‘X marks the spot’. You may imagine a digital depiction with your path highlighted in blue and your intended destination and estimated time of arrival included. I implore you to extend your immediate cognitive response. The identifiable landmarks and path forward still exist, but may exist in a different form.
Family is mapped across a tree. History is mapped along a timeline. Mathematics is mapped through equations. Communication is mapped through language, as are stories through books. The national plan of a government becomes a map of state goals in their given timeframe. The SKA project too, is a map; and every map is biased towards what is made explicit.
The SKA becomes the poster child for a series of benefits that will ‘revolutionize’ what South Africa can accomplish. It is often celebrated as a cutting-edge project that will map the universe with unprecedented precision, yet its pursuit of “mapping the skies” has also redrawn the ground beneath it.
To protect radio silence, stretches of the Karoo have been re-mapped as restricted scientific territory; entire farms have been acquired and depopulated, communities disrupted, and new restrictions imposed on daily life, all to make way for the demands made by the authority of global science.
As J.B. Harley (2001) reminds us, maps are never neutral, they are instruments of power that authorize certain ways of seeing while silencing others. In this sense, the SKA does more than chart distant galaxies as a marker of (inter)national scientific progress; it overwrites local geographies of existence and belonging.
Too often, maps of ‘development’ flatten the textures of local life. Communities are rendered as coordinates, their needs distilled into data points – if included in the mapping at all. For |Xam descendants, whose histories in the Karoo have already been fragmented by colonial dispossession and apartheid subjugation, the radio telescope compounds a longer story of erasure.
As Parkington, Morris, and de Prada-Samper (2019) argue, the scientific gaze risks obscuring living heritage and cultural claims, turning the Karoo into a “sacrifice zone” for global knowledge. Ironically, while the SKA seeks to situate South Africa on the cosmic map, it risks unmapping the very communities and identities rooted in the Karoo itself.
The SKA, just like a map, has prioritised certain truths over others. It becomes a lens through which to view the ‘identifiable landmarks’ on the ‘path’ to progress that undeniably acts to erase in its simplification. What is erased is the unequal distribution of its fruits. In this sense, the SKA risks reproducing the same logic of designation and ownership that has long defined the Karoo’s history – whether through wool, minerals, megawatts, and now, stars.
To the astronomer, it is a zone of radio silence but to the people who live there, it is home – complex, layered, and alive with histories that resist easy erasure. The SKA may win South Africa prestige on the world stage, but it should not leave Karoo residents feeling sidelined in their own communities.
Perhaps the Karoo requires a ‘constellation’ redrawing of inclusivity. In this case, new maps must look different from those of conquest, enclosure and ownership – they should be ‘revolutionary’ by way of creativity and subversion. Just as I implored you to think beyond the map as a mere object, there must be counter-maps; more messy, more abstract, more alive, and drawn by those who exist in the ‘terra nullius’ of the maps drawn before. Such a collection of maps would not be neat, but would indeed be telling.
Ultimately, the Karoo is a mirror of South Africa itself: a place of contested futures, where inequality and imagination collide. The beauty of the Karoo is that it resists easy inscription. The Karoo is not a grid but a palimpsest. Its maps must allow for overlay and contradiction, for the possibility that multiple truths can occupy the same space. Conservation and community. Science and livelihood. Development and dignity. The Karoo deserves more than to be imagined as empty space waiting to be filled. It deserves a future where its people are not simply bystanders to progress, but its cartographers.
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Hannah Hall is an Honours student in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. Her current research revolves around the dissemination of culture through digital media. She hopes to further her range of study across the South African landscape, engaging the shifting terrains of identity, discourse and representation that shape how people understand themselves, one another and the environments they inhabit. This op-ed was written in fulfilment of an Honours elective titled ‘Nature-Cultures in Times of Planetary Crisis’. Used with permission.
FEATURED IMAGE Square Kilometre Array site, north of Carnarvon, Northern Cape. Mike Peel / Wikimedia Commons.