The heartland is really two landscapes joined by ancestry. To the south stretch the semi-arid plains of the Upper Karoo; to the north, the sandy red dunes of the southern Kalahari. The ǀXam belonged to the Karoo, the ǂKhomani — more properly the Nǁnǂe — to the Kalahari. They were linguistically kin, their tongues both part of the ǃKwi language group, both shaped by the demands of survival in country where water is scarce and knowledge of the land is the difference between life and death. For thousands of years San people read these deserts the way others read books, tracking game, finding hidden water, and timing their movements to seasons written in the sand.

The southern hills hold a record older than any colony. The rocky outcrops of the Karoo — a region the ǀXam called *ǀXam-ka ǃxau*, "home of the ǀXam" — are dense with rock art, chiefly engravings pecked into stone over the long span of the Later Stone Age. These are not idle decorations. They are traces of a worldview, of ritual and belief and the close bond between people and the animals they hunted and honored. In the sandy north, the desert floor will not hold such art, but the ǂKhomani carry their heritage differently: through a cultural mapping project that records places, names, and traditions, kindling new interest among the young in what their grandparents knew.

The reason a dead language could become a living motto lies in an archive. In the 1870s, two researchers — Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd — sat with ǀXam men, several of them prisoners, and patiently transcribed their words, their stories, and their beliefs across thousands of pages. The speakers told of the stars, of the rain, of the eland and the mantis and the order of their world. Those notebooks became one of the richest records ever made of a San language and worldview, and it was from this archive that South Africa later drew the phrase on its coat of arms. The ǀXam who spoke those words could not have known that their language, dying even as it was written down, would one day speak for a whole nation.

In 1931, the South African government proclaimed the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park across the ǂKhomani's ancestral ground. The park drew its boundaries for animals, and the people inside them — most of the ǂKhomani, along with the Mier community who shared that country — were forced to leave. It is a familiar pattern in the history of conservation: land set aside for wildlife by removing the humans who had lived in balance with it for generations. For the ǂKhomani, the loss was not only of territory but of the daily practice of being themselves on their own ground. Decades later, after the end of apartheid, a land restitution claim finally began to return some of what had been taken.

The world has come to recognize what was nearly erased. Placed on UNESCO's tentative list in 2004, the area was formally inscribed as the ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape — a World Heritage Site — on 8 July 2017, honoring both the deep evidence of human life across the Stone Age and the living culture of the ǂKhomani San. Today most descendants of the ǀXam and Nǁnǂe are Afrikaans-speaking people on the farms and in the towns of the region. The ǀXam language is gone entirely; Nǁng survives in the memory of only a handful of elders. That a country builds its motto from words it nearly let die is either a tribute or a reckoning. Standing on this land, it feels like both.