THE Great Karoo is a vast semi desert covering the interior of the Cape Province, a third of South Africa's total land area. It is hauntingly beautiful, a region of big skies, wide horizons and dramatic granite outcrops, visible across great distances in the clear desert air.
But it is also harsh winter frosts drop below minus 10 C and summer temperatures often exceed 40 C. Annual rainfall is less than 15 inches, and only scrub grass and succulent bushes and flowers can survive in the dry plains.
This desolation is the home of the poorest and most marginalised people in South Africa, the karretjie-mense or "cart people". Descendants of the Cape's original, nomadic inhabitants - the San "Bushmen and Khoi-Khoi "Hottentots" (see panel) - the karretjie-mense derive their name from the donkey carts in which they traverse the Karoo, looking for work as itinerant sheep shearers and farm workers.
It is only in recent years that anthropologists identified the karretjie-mense as a distinct itinerant population group, like the gypsies of Europe or the Irish travellers. Under apartheid they were simply classified as "Coloureds", like three million other mixed-race, Afrikaans-speaking people in the Cape province.
Having been classified, the karretjie-mense are about to become extinct. In less that ten years from now, says professor of anthropology Mike de Jongh, their travelling way of life will have vanished. Unable to adapt to a changing world, the remaining few thousand karretjie-mense are selling their carts and donkeys and moving into Coloured squatter camps on the edge of towns.
By the beginning of the next century, in other words, the last wandering descendants of the Bushmen will have vanished from the Karoo. To Westerners this passing may seem sad. But sitting in the dried mud of an onion field outside Colesberg, topping onions for a white farmer for one Rand (16p) a sackful, Francina Booysens takes a different view.
"We would not choose to live like this if we could," she said, keeping one eye on the baby playing in the dirt at her feet. "We would like to have a nice work and a proper house. We don't find this kind of life comfortable at all."
Francina and her partner, David Steenbok, are the eldest of five couples in a 27 strong band of karretjie-mense based in the New Hantam district, about an hour's drive east of Colesberg along a deserted dirt road. They still live the traditional shearer life, camping on the side of the road in small tin shelters patched up with rags and old coats.
Shearing, when it is available, pays one Rand (16p) a sheep, so at 30 sheep a day the fastest shearer can only make about £5 a day from his highly skilled, back breaking labour.
"They could shear for two or three weeks, seven or eight of them, and from day one they are buying `on the book' from the farmer's store," says Professor de Jongh of the University of South Africa, who has studied the cart people for the past five years. "They buy tobacco and over weekends they buy drink, and often at the end of three weeks they might walk away with as little as 100 Rand."
The women work too, clearing weeds or picking vegetables for around 10 Rand (£1.60) a day. The staple diet is mealie pap or maize-meal porridge - thick in shearing season, thin and watery when times are hard. Protein comes from the occasional sheep earned through shearing - one for every thousand sheared or from poaching small game on the veld. Sometimes they even collect dead animals found by the roadside, killed by passing traffic.
Survival for them is a finely balanced business. Three winters ago Lesley Osler, a white community activist in New Hantam, was passing the outspan or camping area used by the Steenbok band each winter. She stopped to talk to them and discovered that the people had not eaten for several days. With no prospect of work, the whole group was in imminent danger of starving or freezing to death. They were saved by a desperate request to the provincial government for emergency food aid.
In this bleak existence the karretjie-mense's main joy is alcohol, purchased from farmers or brewed from maize meal. It is, says Mrs Osler, very difficult to find a sober karretjie person anytime between Friday evening and Monday afternoon. Alcoholism is, not surprisingly, a major problem, and occasionally leads to violence within bands.
Totally unable to accumulate wealth, the karretjie-mense are dimly aware of the 20th century economy grinding slowly down on them. Falling wool prices have persuaded many Karoo farmers to switch from the traditional Merino breed, strong on wool but weak on mutton, to crossbreeds more prized for their meat.
Merino sheep have wrinkly skin and are best fleeced with the traditional hand shears used by the karretjie-mense. The newer breeds are smoother and can be sheared more economically at a rate of up to 60 a day - twice the karretjies' rate - by professional teams using electric shears.
Born and brought up on his New Hantam farm, Mr Ockert Oosthuizen recalls with a shake of his head how the last "wild" Bushmen in the area were hunted to death at the turn of the century, only a few kilometres away from his farm at Bushman's Pass. Standing in his onion field, where Francina and her fellow karretjie women are snagging the leaves from hiss crop, he now contemplates - a little sadly it seems - the passing of their descendants.
"You people have really found something here," he says with a touch of irony. "I hear there are maybe 100 species, insects and animals, disappearing every day. You must take your pictures quickly, because maybe these people will not be here for so long."
ALREADY the karretjie-mense are becoming dependent on odd jobs and shearing work from those farmers who still prefer - often for reasons of sentiment as much as convenience - to stick with their old shearers. In hard times many families are forced to sell their donkeys and carts and are then stranded, says Professor de Jongh.
Without transport they can still find work but are entirely dependent on the farmers to fetch them. He believes that the shearers will merge gradually into the Coloured township populations. The karretjie identity can survive a sedentary lifestyle, he says, but not for long.
"Unfortunately, their children experience incredible discrimination, because they are regarded as backward and sheep shearers and so on.
One of the saddest aspects of the karreijie-mense is the eagerness with which they would embrace their doom. Sitting around a fire in the mosquito-ridden dusk, drinking chicory rich coffee and smoking cheap tobacco rolled in newspaper, the people of David Steenbok's outspan say they would like nothing better than to settle down among the Coloured farm labourers, who still live like feudal serfs on the white farms.
"I want to find some work on a farm and to never shear again," says Jan Steenbok, to general approval. The ideal, they say, would be for everyone to split up and find work on different farms, but somehow keep in touch.
It's very difficult to get work," explains David Steenbok. "We just get told by the white man that we are full, we don't need anyone.
Given any choice they do not want to live in the town - "people fight and steal from each other there" - and they never want to give up their carts.
"It's our independence. If somebody is sick we can take them to the doctor. We can visit friends," says David Steenbok. "With carts we are our own bosses," says Dirk Hermanus.
The new South Africa of Nelson Mandela and freedom for all means little to them. They are mistrustful of "blacks", and in the 1994 elections the farmers had little difficulty in persuading the Steenbok band to cast their first ever votes in favour of the National Party.
"It is De Klerk's people who look after us, explains Jan Steenbok. "The white people provide for us. They give us work and food, whereas the black people are still struggling for themselves. They can't look after us.
Believing that the travelling life is passing, Professor de Jongh is now trying to educate the karretjie mense to cope in the modern world. With the aid of local farmers he has begun literacy classes for the adults, while many of the children are now being sent to board during the week at a local "farm school".
"When we started working there three or four years ago not one of the karretjie-mense was literate," he said. "Now I think 90 per cent of the children are going to school . . . I don't think many of them will aspire to become shearers."