The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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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