The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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again, and a flurry of children broke upon the camp in a small, joyous wave. Their parents followed, led by old man /Kaece: about twenty adults in all, the men mostly in ragged shop-bought clothes, the women more traditional and neater in a mixture of skins, head scarves and Western dresses with Bushman touches; a fringe of coloured beads tagged onto the hem, or necklaces of ostrich eggshell, black porcupine quills or red wood draped round their necks and hanging over their printed cotton dresses. Most had babies, either slung around their back in a hide sling or a piece of old cloth, or else balanced at the hip, the nipple of a free-hanging breast plugged firmly in their mouths. The children flew back from us in a little flock, and formed a bright-eyed phalanx in the twilight under the great tree.
Using gestures, old man /Kaece told us that we should build another fire to the right of the tree, where the clearing was wider. We did so, lit the wood and sat down with the people in a circle, the adults talking casually among themselves, pulling out little pipes made of bone or hollowed-out rifle bullets. After first asking us through sign language if we had any tobacco, they disappointedly stuffed the pipes from their own small hoards, before relaxing again, laughing and joking. The children snuggled in close to their parents, staring in silence at the rising flames, whose heat, on that summer evening, was enough to raise a sweat even from several yards away.
Old man /Kaece’s wife began to sing. Her first, quavering alto note pierced the air above the fire’s crackle and silenced the happy chatter. She began to clap, alone at first, then slowly being joined by the other women around the fire. One moment there was a sporadic melody, a few hand-claps among the general talk, the next the night was alive with rhythm and song, the fire roofed with sound. As the song swelled, old man /Kaece rose stiffly to his feet and, in the flickering circle between the singers and the fire began, slowly, to dance. A shuffling forward step, a stamp, a pause, a sudden crouch, knees bent, like a hunter surprised by the sudden sight of his quarry. And then, through subtle shifts of posture and expression, he became the quarry. Tossing his head, stamping a foot that, through movement and shadow-light, was transformed into a hoof. Snorting once, twice, as if blowing flies away from his nose, /Kaece was – in that flickering firelight – unmistakably a gemsbok.* A dignified, powerful bull, wary yet confident of his physical power, veteran of fights against other bulls and against those predators unwise enough to try and hunt him. One by one, the other men rose and followed /Kaece’s circular progress, each man becoming beast as the dance took him.
As the song changed, the men transformed themselves into other creatures – ostriches, giraffes, lions. Sometimes /Kaece or one of the other men sat down to rest while the others danced on. Sometimes the children would rise and try a few steps or the youngest women would lay their infants aside and dance opposite each other, bobbing their bodies, dipping their heads, rolling their eyes and looking at each other sideways on – like doves courting on the ground. Hours passed, until our palms became sore from clapping and, on a final downbeat everyone brought their hands spontaneously together, and the dance was done.
‘Ah, so you’ve been at Makuri?’, asked Nigel, the white ranger in charge of Tsumkwe’s Nature Conservation Department office, when we dropped in there on our way back to civilisation. Thin, sunburnt, and gnarled by the harsh Namibian climate, his gruff exterior was belied by the kindly twinkle to his eye. In his shorts he looked like a lanky, overgrown schoolboy.
‘How’s /Kaece doing, the old skelm [rascal]? Did he get all your money? Benjamin took you hunting, eh? Now that’s a treat, man. Real bow and arrow stuff, eh? Jasus, I wish I got time to do that.’
I told him about the tourism plan Benjamin and I had dreamt up. Would he – or at least, his department – support such a venture?
‘Eco-tourism with the Bushmen, eh? You won’t be the first to try it, I’m telling you. Bet Benjamin didn’t tell you that, did he? Well, good luck to you. Something has to work, eh? Ja,’ he grinned, ‘I can see you’ve got the Bushman bug. You can always tell when the Bushies have got hold of someone. You’re finished, man. Toast. Done. Hey, do you like painting?’
To our surprise he took us home to his shabby government-issue house, gave us cups of tea and showed us a collection of surprisingly good, if unfinished, wildlife paintings: a hook-beaked, grey-feathered goshawk; a brooding, hungry leopard; sketches of a spiral-horned kudu. ‘Ja, once the Bushmen get into you man, that’s it. I should know. Spend half my time trying to keep them out of jail. Maybe I should give you some background. Do you like Baroque music?’
So, as Vivaldi’s lute and mandolin concertos poured out of his dusty stereo speakers, and the Namibian sun beat down outside, Nigel filled us in. The situation with the Ju’/Hoansi was complicated. Their area – officially known as Eastern Bushmanland – was the last place in Namibia where Bushmen could hunt and gather at will. But as Benjamin had told us, an aggressive cattle-owning tribe called the Herero was moving in. They were not Namibian Hereros, as most people in that tribe were, but had arrived a few years back from Botswana. They were the descendants of warriors who had fought the Germans back in the 1900s, when Namibia was still a fledgling colony, and who had, after their inevitable defeat, been driven out into the waterless Kalahari to die. A small number had made it to the natural springs near Ghanzi in Botswana and established a Herero population there. The present German government, anxious to atone for its century-old war crime, had now repatriated five thousand of these Botswana Herero in Namibia.
But, said Nigel, slurping his tea, they had not been welcomed by their fellow tribespeople, whose grazing was already over-stretched and who felt they could not accommodate the cattle that the newcomers had brought with them over the border. So the Botswana lot had been placed in a refugee camp at Gam, south of Bushmanland, there to wait while the Namibian government decided what to do with them. It was from Gam that the Herero families were filtering into the Ju’/Hoansi territory. ‘You can hardly blame them,’ admitted Nigel; ‘They’re desperate for land, poor sods. But they kill all the game as they come and they treat the Bushmen like shit. No, man, it’s a bad scene. You get your tourism thing working if you can. The Bushmen need all the help they can get. And not just here – it’s the same story right across the Kalahari.’
Back in Windhoek we found that, by some fortuitous coincidence, Charles Norwood, one of the Safari Drive owners, had flown in unexpectedly on business. We went straight down to his hotel, told him all that had happened and he, infected by our excitement, accompanied us next day to a meeting at the Footprints office, and from there to the Nyae Nyae Foundation (the headquarters, despite its confusingly different name, of the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-op, for whom Benjamin worked). Hearing our proposal, Wendy Viall, the good-hearted South African lady in charge, agreed, in principle, to the plan. We would come back the following year, to make the prototype trip. Footprints would act as the local operator and, assuming the idea caught on, they would then continue to bring clients in, giving /Kaece and his people at Makuri a proper profit-share. Allan, the Footprints guy, talked about giving them as much as 60 per cent.
The following year, I found myself and a friend, Tom, driving hard for two days to rendezvous with Benjamin at Baraka, the Windhoek office of the Nyae Nyae Foundation having radioed him to say that we were coming. When we arrived at the remote, dusty field headquarters, a collection of outsize rondavels and workshops surrounded by an endlessness of dry wilderness, Benjamin seemed impressed that we had made it, and happy to see me. Sadly, he could not get away from his work in order to accompany us, as he had hoped, but he had arranged for three of Makuri’s best hunters to take us out: Bo, a fiftyish, stick-thin man; another in his mid-thirties called Fanzi; and Xau, a lad of eighteen or so who Bo was training as a hunter. Bo, said Benjamin, was known as the finest hunter in the whole district and Fanzi was not far off in skill. There would be a language barrier but, as Benjamin reassured us: ‘They will make sure you don’t die. Just follow them and you’ll be OK.’
It was the dry season again, and the bush was parched and waterless. Elephants had moved into the area, and were hanging around the waterholes that the villagers used. We had encountered a small group of them a quarter-mile or so from the big baobab when we bumped in down the slow dirt track.