The drama was adapted from a novel published nearly a century ago, Margaret Harding, by Perceval Gibbon, who came to South Africa as a Boer War journalist and later wrote this work.
[1] An historical romance set in the Karoo in 1913, Land of Thirst is an extraordinary love story about two people far ahead of their time, caught in the cross-currents of emergent South Africa.
Margaret leaves England and moves to Africa for the treatment of her tuberculosis in the dry air of the Karoo, while Khanyiso goes there to search for his African roots.
Khanyiso is the son of a Xhosa chief executed by the British twenty years earlier who was taken to London as a child, raised as an English gentleman and given a medical training.
The decrepit sanatorium where Margaret is being treated is run by an alcoholic doctor and his mean-spirited wife, while Khanyiso must stay in a brothel after being shunned by the racist proprietors of every guesthouse in town.