Location Sutherland, South Africa
Disaster Southern Africa drought, 2015-2023
Isabella Visagie, known to everyone in her life as Sybil, is a 57-year-old sheep farmer, wife and mother from the Karoo, in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. In 2015 a drought began that would bring the community in which she lived to its knees. The province has been locked in a drought since then. The climate crisis intensified flash droughts across southern Africa in 2015-16, increased the probability of the 2015-17 drought in the south-west of neighbouring Western Cape, and is increasing temperatures in the Northern Cape, as well as decreasing rainfall in parts of that province.
I grew up on Rooipoort farm in the Karoo. This is where I am. It is where I was born, and where my character was formed. Let me start there. We grew up as four girls and one boy in the house. We had a lot of freedom. We roamed around the farm. We could walk as far and as wide as we wanted to.
