The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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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.
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