The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey

It was a long walk, and hot. The hunters stopped often to ease their shoulders from the weight and their faces from the flies that buzzed incessantly around the bloody loads. Tom and I offered tobacco and water around until both ran out. At the next stop Fanzi, pointing to a small, leafless twig poking up from the cracked earth, began hacking at the soil with his digging stick. A minute later he had unearthed a large, round tuber which, when cut, revealed white flesh dripping with water.

As we sat there, eating the succulent tuber, letting the moisture drip down our throats, there came a sharp, shrill cry from above. We looked up: two eagles were chasing a white goshawk out of their section of sky. Lighter and more agile, the goshawk spiralled up and out of reach into the dazzling blue, the heavier eagles flapping below in slow but unrelenting pursuit. We watched, silent, until all three had dwindled to mere dots, their fading, high-pitched cries floating down to where we sat on the dry earth. Bo, hefting his heavy, fly-blown load once more, creaked to his feet, and caught my eye. He smiled – his mouth turned down ironically at the corners – and pointed to himself, ‘Boesman,’ he said in Afrikaans, and shook his head, laughing.

That night, and the two that followed, the village feasted but still there was plenty of meat left over. The hunters, having provided food for the month, rested. We spent the remaining days playing with the children who turned up shyly each morning beneath our tree, or going out with the women to forage for wild foods. They showed us how well-stocked the Kalahari is with edibles, even in the parched dry season, leading us through the seemingly barren bush, and stooping every few minutes to pluck, dig, pick up foods until their skin aprons and ragged cotton skirts were filled with sweet moretlwa berries, tart, lemony baobab fruit, wild onions, tubers that looked like sweet potatoes, even nuts encased in dried piles of last year’s elephant dung. Sometimes they would make Tom and I climb on each other’s shoulders to pick caramel-tasting acacia gum from where it had bubbled out and dried between the forked branches of the thorn trees.

Back home, I published a piece on the trip in the Daily Telegraph, but the anticipated reaction did not come. No tourists rang up, anxious to book their own Bushman adventure. In fact, over the course of that year, 1996, things became decidedly worse for Bushmen right across the Kalahari. The Herero cattle herders trickled steadily into Nyae Nyae unopposed, slowly dispossessing the Ju’/Hoansi as they came. In Botswana, the government began a campaign of forcibly removing Bushmen from the vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve – an area the size of Switzerland that had been set aside specifically for the Bushmen in the early 1960s – and herding them into permanent settlements outside the reserve’s borders. Meanwhile, in central northern Namibia, the Hai//om Bushmen, who had been ejected from the vast Etosha National Park back in the 1970s, became so desperate at their landless state that they staged a demonstration outside the gates of the national park and were tear-gassed and put in jail.

A fledgling Bushman political organisation – called, aptly enough, First People of the Kalahari – emerged in Botswana and began attracting some press attention that year. But after a brief flare of publicity, the leader, John Hardbattle (the mixed-race son of a Nharo Bushman woman and an English rancher), died suddenly from stomach cancer, leaving the organisation leaderless and floundering. I had, it seemed, satisfied my childhood desire to meet and hunt with the Bushmen of my mother’s stories just as they were about to cease to exist.

That year I moved to the USA. While there I stumbled across a recent National Geographic which had a picture of two leopards on the cover and the title ‘A Place for Parks in the New South Africa’. Inside was a picture that stopped me in my tracks. It showed two Bushmen kneeling in the red sand beside the recumbent body of their father, an ancient man, toothless and obviously dying. According to the caption this was Regopstaan, patriarch of South Africa’s Xhomani Bushmen, the last remaining clan of traditionally living Bushmen left in the whole country. This clan, the caption explained, had lodged a land claim with the South African government, both for access to their old hunting grounds in that country’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, and to receive compensatory ground to live on outside the park fence.

I recalled how, three years before, I had driven to the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, hoping to find Bushmen, and had been told by the park staff that no Bushmen had existed in the region for decades. Now, looking at this picture in the National Geographic, I realised I had been misled. Not only had there been Bushmen in the region, but they had been ejected from the very park whose staff had denied their existence to me. Moreover, concluded the photograph’s caption, the park’s authorities were resisting the Bushman land claim. I rang the magazine’s editorial offices, and was put in touch with Roger Chennels, the South African human rights lawyer who had taken on the case. And he in his turn put me in touch with a woman called Cait Andrew in Cape Town who was the person who had first alerted him to the Xhomani cause. She confirmed that the staff at the park had indeed misled me. Bushmen had always lived in the area. In fact the official literature that accompanied the park’s declaration, back in the 1930s, had stated that its main aim was to protect the Bushman way of life as well as the game on which they relied – in fact classifying the Bushmen as game to be protected along with the rest of the wildlife. But that, she said, had changed with apartheid, which had reclassified the Bushmen as human (but the wrong kind of human) and had evicted them from the park in the 1970s. Under apartheid national parks were for whites only.

So the Xhomani had been surviving in the dunes outside the fence ever since, living in a state of near beggary, suffering every form of abuse, and falling victim to the inevitable by-products of despair, alcoholism and violence, as well as an almost complete breakdown of their culture. No longer able to forage at will, they lived by making crafts for tourists whose cars they waved down as they drove along the road to the park. Half the clan had gone to live in a private game reserve far to the south, where they existed as inmates in a human zoo, posing in their skins for tourists’ cameras. They had even lost their language and only a few of the older generation were still able to remember the Xhomani tongue. The rest spoke mostly in Nama or Afrikaans, the language of those who had dispossessed them.

Under Mandela’s New South Africa, the clan had at last come above ground, and had been persuaded to file this new land claim. For the first time, they were being taken seriously by a government. Old ‘Madiba’ (the popular name for Mandela) had even invited Dawid Kruiper, the leader of the Xhomani since old Regopstaan had died, to present his case personally over tea at the presidential residence in Cape Town. Theoretically, there was every chance that they might win. But there was stiff opposition from the old order, in the person of the park’s chief warden and the National Parks Board as a whole (which was, Cait Andrew confided, still an enclave of entrenched Afrikanerdom). On top of this, the Xhomani land claim was being opposed from another quarter, entirely unconnected with the national park. A group of local coloured farmers, known as the Mier, were claiming that, back in the 1960s, a large tract of their traditional land had been appropriated by the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. If the Xhomani had a land claim, they said, then so had they. To complicate matters further, it seemed that much of the land which the lawyers said should be given to the Xhomani in compensation for what they had lost to the park, actually belonged to these Mier farmers, and stood to be forcibly purchased from them should the Bushmen win the claim. Land is everything in South Africa: the thought of giving up land to Bushmen, even with due compensation, was, said Cait, pure anathema to the Mier. They had resolved to fight the Xhomani land claim to the last.

But should the Xhomani win, however long that took to happen, they would set a political precedent for the other countries of the Kalahari, where Bushmen were still being dispossessed on a grand scale. She and the lawyer Roger Chennels were part of a growing movement to reverse this. That year for example, a new, Namibian-based Bushman NGO called WIMSA* had been formed with German and Scandinavian donor money. This organisation was paying the legal fees for the Xhomani land claim and financing a smaller NGO called SASI (South African San Institute) which now represented the Bushmen in South Africa. WIMSA had also announced its intention to campaign on behalf of Bushmen everywhere – South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, even Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. But it was the Xhomani land claim that needed to be won in order to set the necessary precedent. The tide of history – the centuries of dispossession and oppression – was finally turning. If ever there was a time to be chronicling events on the Kalahari, Cait assured me, it was now.

* Scarf.

* A big antelope of the Kalahari – also known as the South African oryx.

* Bushmen use slow-acting poisons, made from certain roots mixed with a crushed beetle larva, to bring down big animals. The lethal poison can take up to twenty-four hours to finally kill, during which time the hunter must either track it or make sure that he can return next day and find the carcass. The poison is rendered harmless when the flesh is cooked.

* Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa.

PART TWO THE MANTIS, THE MOUSE AND THE BIRD

4 Regopstaan’s Prophecy

Late the following year – October 1997 – I arrived at the Red House, or Rooi Huis as the Xhomani called it, with notebook, camera and recording equipment, accompanied by Cait Andrew, Chris, a film-maker friend who wanted to make a documentary about the land claim, and a truck full of gifts with which to buy goodwill. We even had a driver – Andrew, a tall, bearded white South African, to pitch our tents, cook our food and ferry us around while we conducted our research among the Xhomani, who lived on the outskirts of Welkom, a bedraggled settlement of poor coloured farming folk some ten kilometres south of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. ‘We’re here,’ said Cait, as we pulled up outside a red-daubed, open-fronted shack – the Red House. A barrage of yelling, runny-nosed, grinning children, some naked, some in ragged shorts, ran up shouting and laughing, as we got out, stiff from the long drive, and began to look about us. Chris went to the back of the Toyota to fetch his camera. Cait and I looked down at the kids. A small, greying man with a squashed nose and eyes lost behind deep, mischievous wrinkles, came hobbling over from the house with a spryness that seemed at odds with his pronounced limp. He wore a bizarre mixture of clothing: a blue jacket striped with spangly gold lamé, above a xai, or loincloth of animal skin, his legs, chest and stomach all bare. ‘This,’ announced Cait, ‘is Dawid Kruiper, head of the Xhomani clan.’ He shook my hand and hers, squinting ingratiatingly, and said, ‘Ja, Ja Mama’.

Some ten or so adults pushed through the staring wall of children, also proffering hands. Cait made the introductions. There was Jakob, a handsome man with a beard and slightly dreadlocked hair, clad only in a xai, his lined face betraying an age of perhaps fifty, though his body was that of a twenty-year-old. Leana, his wife, had obviously been a beauty with features as regular as a model’s under a cream-coloured scarf wrapped stylishly around her head. Her skin, darker than her husband’s, glowed, despite its scars and stretch marks. A tiny, slender and very pretty girl with the widest cheekbones I had ever seen, and a gap where her two front teeth should have been, turned out to be Oulet, Dawid’s daughter. Next to her stood her husband Rikki, dressed in torn old jeans, and a stained black T-shirt with ‘Chicago Bulls’ printed on it in red. Lean, wiry, his eyes deep-set and staring, he radiated a mad, haunted strength which contrasted directly with the gentle, good-looking slender youth standing next to him, whom Cait called Vetkat (‘fat cat’).

Cait took charge, detailing the men to unload the goods we had brought. Sacks of mealie meal (maize flour), boxes of rough tobacco, fresh red meat in bags of ice, boxes of tinned vegetables and, on Cait’s advice, a sizeable bag of dagga (marijuana): we had not come empty-handed. As the supplies were being stacked in a corner of the Red House, Dawid led us into its shady interior and motioned for us to sit around the cooled ashes of the central hearth. Here sat two others: Sanna, Dawid’s wife, whose face was a stiller, older version of the young woman Oulet’s, and Bukse, Dawid’s younger brother, who was small but very muscular, with a quick-looking, snub-nosed face. The rest of the clan followed us in and squatted around us in a circle, looking on with detached, polite interest, waiting for us to say why we had come.

Cait explained in Afrikaans. Chris and I were journalists, she said, her tone portentous, come to tell the world that the Bushmen were at last going to fight for what was theirs. As she spoke, Dawid looked at the ground, stealing occasional glances – at once shrewd and polite – at Chris and I. We were by no means the first journalists he had met. Many had come, asked questions, taken photographs, scribbled notes and pushed microphones and camera lenses into his tired old face. Yet here Dawid and his people still sat, landless squatters on the edge of a poor coloured village, most of whose inhabitants, though little more than paupers themselves, looked down on their Bushmen neighbours and regarded them as little better than dogs.

And what difference did I think I could make? I now had a commission, having managed to persuade a publisher to let me write a book on the Xhomani land claim and the plight of the other groups across the Kalahari. But it would be years in the writing, and even when it was published, it might not be of any help to them. In the meantime, there was no guarantee that any articles I wrote would see the light of day, let alone provoke some action. It seemed to me that Dawid, this shrewd, tough old Bushman who sat watching us, could sense all this, yet he said nothing, only nodded as Cait spoke, gazing at the ashes in the hearth while the other members of the clan looked on in silence. Feeling a fraud, I looked away from him and let my eyes wander around the interior of the hut, to a long shelf which ran along the smoke-blackened back wall. A number of objects were stored on it: folded animal hides, a row of battered, blackened pots, a pile of long, straight gemsbok horns and a large, framed photograph from the National Geographic, the picture which had brought me here to the Red House at the edge of the dunes. I now recognised the figures tending the ancient, ailing man – they were Dawid and his brother Bukse.

As Cait finished her speech, Dawid said something to Sanna, his wife. She got up and went into one of the shadowed corners, returning with a small skin pouch. Dawid reached in, pulled out a pinch of rough tobacco, a dried bud of marijuana, some torn newspaper, and rolled a joint. Lighting it, he passed it around once so that we all had a hit, then rose and asked us to stand at the entrance to the Red House, where it looked out over the dunes, northwards towards the park. In the middle distance stood a tall camel-thorn tree, its great tap-root presumably stretching deep down through the sand and rock below to some deep, underground water source. The feathered green of its leaves shone bright against the orange-red dune. ‘There is buried old Regopstaan,’ said Dawid, ‘where he can look one way and see us, and the other way to see our land, the park.’

In Afrikaans the word ‘Regopstaan’ means ‘stand up straight’. It is also a name for the meerkat, or suricate, a kind of small mongoose that lives in colonies and packs up together to fight off predators. An appropriate name for the old leader. During the drive Cait had told me that, shortly before his death, Regopstaan had bequeathed a prophecy to his people: ‘When the strangers come, then will come the big rains. And the Little People will dance. And when the Little People in the Kalahari dance, then the Little People around the world shall dance too.’

Cait, Dawid, Chris and Andrew sat silent and awkward in the dark interior of the Red House. Most of the people that had followed us in – Jakob, Leana, Rikki, Vetkat and the rest – began to drift away, back to their own huts. I got up to clear my head and walked outside, around the Red House’s crimson-coloured walls. In two places the red mud-daub was disrupted by the sculpted heads of gemsbok, painted – as in real life – with white faces striped black from eyes to muzzle and topped by long, rapier-like horns. One of the heads was life-size and had real horns. The other was a giant, the head alone measuring about three feet long and the horns made of wooden poles that stuck up towards the roof. It jutted out from the red wall like a buttress. Benjamin had told me that the gemsbok was a symbol of strength for the Bushmen. Perfectly adapted to desert life, they can go a month without water. They could also be vicious when provoked; safari guides are full of stories of gemsbok killing predators, and sometimes even people. Once, in the Etosha National Park in Namibia (which, like South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, had been a Bushman hunting ground until the 1970s), I saw a game warden try to rescue a gemsbok that had become stuck in the deep mud around a waterhole. Whenever he approached, the animal swiped its long horns in challenge, never letting him get closer than a few feet. After a few minutes it became so incensed by the warden’s presence that it heaved itself bodily from the mud and chased the man back into the cab of the truck, which it then raked and slashed with its horns. It seemed fitting that gemsbok heads should be mounted on the Red House – a symbol of the Bushmen’s defiance and endurance.

From one of the further shacks came the sound of quiet singing. An elderly woman, wearing only a skin kilt, was weaving her thin, ancient body to and fro in a dance. She swayed past me, dry aged breasts flapping against her bony chest, and stepped into the sheltered entrance of the Red House, whose roof was supported on wooden poles, like the extended front of a marquee. ‘Cait,’ she said quietly, ‘my mother.’ Cait looked up from the fire where she had been talking with Dawid and Chris: ‘Antas!’ she said, smiling, and got up. ‘My mother,’ repeated the old lady, though she must have been at least thirty years Cait’s senior. She took Cait’s hand and, still dancing and quietly singing, led her outside, to sit down on the sand. She then pushed the thin white woman gently back, until she lay stretched out, and began to move her hands in a circular motion in the air an inch above Cait’s lower belly. For perhaps ten minutes, Antas moved her hands above Cait’s stomach, singing all the while, then abruptly she stood up, ceased her song, and motioned for Cait to rise. When she was back on her feet, Antas hugged her around her middle, repeating the words ‘My mother, my mother’ and swayed off in the direction from which she had come. Cait looked over at me: ‘Time to go, I think.’

We made our good-byes. Dawid looked at Chris and I and made the gesture of a film camera in motion, holding one hand in front of his eyes to suggest the lens and rotating the other, before erupting into gently mocking, violently coughing mirth. We started up the Toyota and headed back out to the main dirt road that led to the national park, where we were camping.

‘What was that old woman doing, making you lie down and singing like that?’ I asked Cait.

Cait said nothing for a while. Then, as if having made a decision, told us quietly: ‘Just before you came out,’ she said, ‘I went to the doctor to see about some pains in my stomach. It turns out I’ve got a cancer. Nothing serious yet, but cancer all the same. You’re the first one outside the family I’ve told.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘So that old woman, Antas, I mean, nobody could have told her about it before she came over and did that thing on you, right?’

‘No,’ replied Cait, staring back at the road. ‘Nobody told her.’

We drove on in silence. I had heard before of the Bushmen’s reputation as great healers. Until now, this had not fascinated me as much as their wildness, their elusiveness.

Arriving back at our camp site, we found that ground squirrels had broken into our tents, and devoured the extra sacks of mealie meal that we were saving to give away on our departure. As we unzipped the tent and looked in, one of the creatures paddled its little legs through the white drifts of spilled meal and flopped through the hole it had made, so distended it could barely move. As we cleaned up the mess and the sun finally set, Andrew got a fire going, and the sickle moon rose over four steaks, grilling nicely.

We opened a bottle of wine and Cait took up the conversation we had let lapse in the car: ‘You just have to get used to strange things happening when you’re around Bushmen. When Regopstaan was alive, for instance, he used to tell me to watch out for praying mantises in my house down in Cape Town. If one appeared – and they didn’t very often – then I’d know he wanted to talk to me. I’d ring the national park office or the Kagga Kama reception – that’s the reserve half of them live on now – and someone would send a message down to him. When he eventually came on the line he’d say “What took you so long? I’ve been trying to get your attention for days.”’ Even the way she had stumbled into the story had been strange, Cait went on. She had been told all her life that there were no Bushmen left in South Africa. She had only found out about the Xhomani back in 1990 when the clan had ended up in court after being lured onto a ranch by a local entrepreneur called Lockie Henning, who had intended to set up a private game reserve and display the Xhomani as ‘show Bushmen’. The venture had failed and the entrepreneur had done a runner, leaving the Bushmen liable for the rent. The magistrate had let them off, seeing that they had been swindled themselves, but a news crew had then got hold of the story and driven up to interview the Xhomani. The resulting short documentary – which Cait had seen only by chance – had detailed their plight, how they had been expelled from the park that had once been their home and were now destitute, but had left it at that.

Another white farmer, Pieter de Waal, a wealthy wine grower from the vineyards near Cape Town – had also seen the documentary, and had been similarly inspired by the idea of creating a Bushman reserve. De Waal contacted the Xhomani and offered them jobs on a game farm he owned down in the mountains of the Karoo, midway between Cape Town and the Kalahari. There were old Bushman paintings in a cave on the property, he told Regopstaan, then still alive. It would be like a homecoming, Bushmen reclaiming an area from which their ancestors had disappeared. Feeling that any opportunity was better than none, the Xhomani had agreed, arranging to go there in shifts; half their number staying up in the Kalahari, the rest going down to Kagga Kama, and swapping over every few months, with De Waal providing the transport.

Cait went on. ‘By the time I managed to make contact with the Xhomani, most of them had already moved down to Kagga Kama. So I went there, met Regospstaan – who was very old by then, and Dawid, who wasn’t yet the leader – and asked if I could at least record their language, which I understood was dying out. I hoped that I could archive it for posterity.’ Cait paused, took a sip of wine. ‘Regopstaan told me to ask Dawid for a decision – as he was close to death and his son would soon be the leader. I did as he asked, and Dawid said yes, that would be fine, but I must do something in return. He said he wanted “a school, a lawyer, and a land to walk around in”. Just that. So that’s what’s been done. I organised the school with Pieter de Waal – though I hear it’s not functioning right now. The lawyer was less of a problem; I already knew Roger Chennels – who’s now representing their land claim – from way back, from the days of the Struggle. He agreed to take it on, as you know. And now we’re working on the “land to walk around in” part.’