By Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit
When Julienne and I were invited to showcase the Karoo at the 2025 University of Cape Town (UCT) Summer School some years back, we had no idea of what to expect from the experience.
Just getting off the backroads of our beloved Karoo and braving the busy highways of the Mother City were challenges enough for country mice like us.
The prospect of standing in front of a rather learned bunch in a university auditorium rattled our cages slightly. What if we bombed? Would we slink out of Cape Town in the bakkie and never return? How were we going to structure our presentation to prevent that?
In the end, we compiled a simple slide show based on nearly two decades of Karoo road trips, highlighting the people and places of a region we promote, defend and ultimately enjoy travelling in, more than anywhere else in the world.
A Fortnight of Knowledge
The UCT Summer School happens every January over two weeks and is ardently supported by the public. Going through the annual programmes is like being presented with a long-table feast of knowledge. There’s something for everyone here.
The programme is packed with panel discussions, lectures, campus tours, workshops, recitals and performances from a raft of scholars, researchers, artists and even travel writers like us.
To quote from the UCT website, it’s “a celebration of ideas, discovery and lifelong learning”.
It continues:
“But Summer School is about much more than the programme. It is about community: our alumni, students, staff, friends of UCT, and members of the wider public, coming together to exchange ideas, discover new interests, encounter different perspectives and connect with one another.”
Good Digs, Good Lecture Hall
So we pitched up, thanks to the British lady’s stern voice on Google Maps, and were shown to our flat at the All Africa House, a couple of footsteps away from the Summer School action in the Kramer Law Building on Middle Campus.
The organisers told us they had upgraded our talk to a larger lecture hall because of a flood of bookings, which cheered us immensely and then gave us pause for nervous contemplation.
This was not the regular crowd of 30 friendlies at the annual Schreiner Karoo Writers’ Festival in our hometown of Cradock (Nxuba). This was something far bigger, and we’d have to gear up and give our best show ever.
On the day, the auditorium filled with more than 300 people, the tech set-up was superb, with excellent microphone sound and a huge screen for the slide show.
Jules and I began to relax when we looked at the faces in the crowd, some of them familiar ones from years gone by. A newspaper buddy here, an old varsity mate there, someone who had bought our books in the past and a bunch of people who just loved travelling through the Karoo.
More to Come
It was a great experience, made so by the audience reaction, as we took the crowd on a long, looping journey through the South African heartland. The organisers booked us for two separate performances in 2026, and that, too, went down a treat.
So now we’re back for the 2027 UCT Summer School, and it’s two slide shows and a week-long set of workshops on travel writing.
Thursday, January 21 (3pm): Back Road Karoo Ramblings: An immersive journey through the vast and evocative Karoo;
Friday, January 22 (3pm): Saving a Small Town: Lessons from the Karoo.
The week-long workshop (10am-12pm, Monday 18-Friday 22 January) is titled: Retro Travel Writing: Mining a Lifetime of Journeys.
We will show you how to use the photographs, notes and collected souvenirs from your favourite past trip to produce an illustrated journal that you will treasure for years to come.
The course is limited to the first 20 participants, so book early if you’re keen to enhance your past and future journeys anywhere in the world.
Programme: 2027-uct-ssbrochure-dv1.pdf
Our Karoo books are available HERE or you can buy the Karoo Heritage Collection at UCT outside the lecture hall in January 2027.
