Out on the pans of Bushmanland, where the ground is white and flat and the sky at night is the biggest thing you have ever seen, the moon comes up red. Then it climbs, and it goes pale and cold. The ǀXam people who lived here had an explanation for both, and it starts with an insect.

ǀKaggen is the name (the first sound is a click, tongue off the front teeth), and in the stories he is most often a praying mantis. He is not quite a god, though he made things, and not quite a man, though he has a wife and sons and a temper. He is a trickster, foolish and clever in turns, who dies and comes back. He can become an eland, a louse, a snake, a hare. His wife is the dassie, the rock hyrax. His adopted daughter is a porcupine. The ichneumon, a mongoose, is his grandson and spends most of the stories telling him he is being a fool.

The moon story goes like this. ǀKaggen had made an eland, his first and best creation, and loved it, and fed it honey in secret. His sons found it while he was away and killed it. He came home to the blood and the butchery and, in his grief, pierced the eland’s gall bladder, which burst and covered the world in darkness. Blind in it, he felt about for something to wipe his eyes. In one telling he pulled off his shoe and hurled it into the sky and told it to become the moon, so that he could see to get home. In another it was an ostrich feather. The shoe version explains more: the moon is red when it rises because the shoe was red with the dust of Bushmanland, and it is cold because it is only leather. From the eland’s blood and fat, churned and scattered, he made all the eland that came afterwards.

We know this because of two people in a house in Mowbray, Cape Town. In the early 1870s the linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd persuaded the colonial authorities to release a handful of ǀXam prisoners from the Breakwater convict station into their care. The men, ǁKabbo and Diaǃkwain among them, came from the country around Kenhardt, the Strandberg and the great pans, and they spent months, in some cases years, dictating the stories of their people while Bleek and Lloyd wrote them down word by word. Bleek published a first account in 1875, and the notebooks were finally printed as Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911. That is why this entry sits at 1875 on the timeline: the stories are as old as anyone can measure, but that is when they were first written down.

It is also why this entry sits in the Northern Cape and not, as the mantis is sometimes filed, in the Kalahari proper. The San peoples of Botswana and Namibia have their own tricksters and their own moon. ǀKaggen belongs to the ǀXam, and the ǀXam belonged to Bushmanland.

There are no ǀXam speakers left. The language died in the twentieth century, and the pans they came from are now sheep farms and, on the biggest of them, Verneukpan, a track for land-speed records. The notebooks survive at the University of Cape Town, some twelve thousand pages, and the motto on the South African coat of arms is in ǀXam. The moon still comes up red over Verneukpan. Nobody has found the other shoe.