Output details

Salt and Honey

This is a revised edition with new copyright material of a novel first published with Legend Press (2006), but not previously submitted in RAE2008 (Miller was not entered). The new material relates to character/plot expansion, precipitated by Salt and Honey (2011) being reconceived as a prequel. Miller elaborated formerly minor characters (e.g. Andre, Lettie, Du Pree, Venter, and Twi) for their expanded future roles; additions and alterations occur in every chapter, including an extensive flashback (171-192) which reconfigures Andre from opportunistic rapist to a man with a specific fetish, prefiguring but contrasting with the almost routine rape Koba endures in Kalahari Passage, while in police custody. Miller also made over 20 changes related to political, ethnographic, anthropological, and linguistic information, gleaning additional detail while doing fieldwork with anthropologist, Dr Megan Biesele, in 2010.

The novel as a whole is also informed by works of other anthropologists and archaeologists, such as Lorna Marshall, Robert Hitchcock, Alan Barnard, David Lewis-Williams, Richard Lee, and Mathias Guenther. It uses the adventure story form to convey ethnographic information about a race experts believe have inhabited Africa for more than 40,000 years. Miller took this narrative risk in the hope of bringing to wider attention the unique culture and on-going dispossession of southern Africa’s aboriginal people, the San (‘Bushmen’). The novel is based upon 20 years of research, which includes field trips during which she lived with bands of former hunter-gatherers. The book explores the racial prejudices of both black and white colonizers of traditional San land and the particular tensions in the region during the Apartheid years. It contains a glossary, background notes contextualizing the San, and a guide to the orthographic representation of this recently literate language, Ju/’hoansi.