This artist publication is part of a body of work based on narratives told in the Southern African San languages |xam and !xun that form part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. A testament to the lives and cultural practices of |xam and !xun people, the archive also provides a unique and rare insight into the impact of the Dutch colonization of South Africa. It is a collection of 13.000 pages of stories and interviews in notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !xun people, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1870s and 1880s. Folklore and personal accounts were told to them in |xam by several men called |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ≠kasin, Dia!kwain and |han≠kass’o, as well as a woman called !kweiten ta ||ken, and in !xun by four young boys called !nanni, Tamme, |úma and Da.

The publication offers a selection of ten first-person accounts, told by |xam and !xun people to Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1870s and 1880s. In their own words and in their own languages the narrators describe how they perceived and encountered the Dutch colonists (the Boers). The narratives present a rare perspective on Dutch colonialism in South Africa, and also offer a glimpse of the unique way in which the narrators saw the world.