This academic article explores how the Karoo region of the Eastern Cape—a distinctive semi-desert cultural and geographic space in South Africa—is constructed and represented in texts through a materialist lens. Rather than seeing the Karoo as a simple natural landscape, the author investigates how historical, social, economic, and cultural forces shape knowledge, narratives, and meanings about the place. It examines the discourses and texts that have “made” the Karoo in literature, history, and cultural imagination to reveal power relations, labor histories, and ideological processes embedded in how the region is depicted and understood.