The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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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.’
This was how the land claim had been conceived: the Xhomani were to demand the restoration of their hunting and gathering rights inside the park, as well as the right to visit ancestral graves there. In addition, they demanded that they be given land outside the park that they could live on. But then the problems started: not just opposition from the park, and from the local Mier farmers. The Xhomani were also having trouble being recognised as Bushmen. When they had been kicked out of the park back in the 1970s, Cait explained, they had had to obtain Pass Books – identification documents that defined people by race (all non-whites were required to have these). When the race officials in Upington, the nearest administration centre, had asked them what race they were, the Xhomani had said ‘Bushman’. Not possible, the officials had replied; there were no Bushmen left in South Africa. ‘So, they had to register as coloured, and it’s haunted them ever since. It’s one of the justifications that the parks people use for not letting them back in – they say that they aren’t real Bushmen and that therefore their claim can’t be legal.’
There was a further irony to this. By being registered as coloured the Xhomani had been lumped in with the Mier, the group that represented the largest obstacle to the Xhomani’s land claim after the National Parks Board. The Mier leader, said Cait, was a guy called Piet Smith, who was also the Nationalist Party MP for the region. According to Cait, he had stated that Bushmen would receive Mier land only over his dead body.
While Cait had been speaking, a young woman had come and joined our circle. A friend of Andrew’s, Belinda, we had met her briefly the night before, as we were driving in: Andrew had stopped the vehicle and introduced us. She had been on her way back from a visit to the Bushmen, she had told us, shaking hands through the car window. Andrew had told us a little about her, that she was the first coloured manager that the park had ever employed – an attempt by the Afrikaner parks management to embrace the New South Africa.
She took a seat next to me and I asked her if she had been spending much time with the Bushmen.
‘Not really, no. I only met them for the first time a few days ago. But what about you? What are you doing in the Kalahari?’
Taking a deep breath I told her. By the time I’d finished my story it was after midnight and Cait, Andrew and Chris had all sought their tents. Belinda stood up to go. ‘These Bushmen,’ she said, stretching. ‘I don’t know what it is. I came here for peace and quiet, and already I can see how political the whole thing is. Well, goodnight. Come and say howzit to me tomorrow when you’re back from the Bushmen – my house is just through the gate beyond the administration building. Anyone can show you the way. I’d like to know how it went.’
Next day we awoke to an oven-hot dawn, too stifling to linger in the tent or sleeping bag for more than a few moments. Outside, a white-hot sky presaged a day of pounding discomfort: perhaps building up for a rain.
Before driving out of the park to visit the Bushmen again, we took a pass along one of the dry riverbeds inside the National Park, the old Xhomani hunting ground. Now, at the parched, dead end of the dry season, only the drought-proof creatures were in evidence. Springbok – slender gazelles with short, lyre-shaped horns, a red-brown stripe on their flanks and huge, liquid eyes fringed with luxuriant black lashes that seemed heavily daubed with mascara – drifted along the roadside. From afar, their colours and delicate shapes blended perfectly with the yellow grasses and shimmering haze above the sand. Seen closer to they seemed to glide across the land, so fluid was their gait. Every now and then one of them would leap six feet into the air, arch its back so that the white hairs along its spine raised themselves like a crest, and touch all four hooves together before landing back on the ground. Known as ‘pronking’, this was apparently a response to predators – though we could not see any.
Alongside the springbok were smaller groups of more massive gemsbok, inelegant, gawky blue-black wildebeest and large, reddish-coloured hartebeest, all goggling brown eyes and crumpled, strangely foreshortened horns. They stood still in the heat, seemingly stunned by the hammering sun, not even foraging for the patches of yellow grass that stood here and there along the riverbeds. As we neared the park gate, we came upon a lone male wildebeest standing stock still at the edge of a flat, white piece of bare ground surrounding a small waterhole. Only his tail moved, flicking at the flies that buzzed around its hindquarters. Three lions lay at the waterhole – two lionesses and a young male just entering his prime. All three had coats bleached almost white by the fierce sun. Their eyes were fixed on the wildebeest, and his on them. The lions looked relaxed, but ready to spring into lethal action at any moment. The wildebeest could not move forward towards the water he needed, nor could he turn and go, in case the big cats pursued him; in his weakened, dehydrated