The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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objects from the vast southern sub-continent. Little Bushman hand-axes adorned our walls; skin blankets, called karosses and made from the pelts of rock hyraxes,* hung over the sofa; Bushman thumb pianos, made from soft, incense-scented wood, with metal keys that went ‘plink’ when you pressed down and then released them, sat on the bookshelves next to my mother’s endless volumes of Africana. There were paintings by my maternal grandmother Barbara: South African village scenes of round thatched huts where black men robed in blankets stood about like Greek heroes. Next to them hung pictures by my own mother, of black children playing in dusty mission schoolyards, of yellow grass and thorn trees. In my earliest memory, these objects and my mother’s stories forged a strong connection in my mind between our London family and the immense African landscapes the family had left behind.
I remember my mother playing an ancient, cracked recording of a Zulu massed choir and trying to show me how they danced. ‘Like this, Rupert,’ she said, lifting one leg in the air and stamping it on the floor several times in quick succession. ‘They spin as they jump, so it looks as if they’re hanging in the air for a second before they come down, like this, watch.’ She and I would stamp, wheel and jump, a small blonde woman and a smaller blond boy trying to imitate the lithe warriors of her memory.
When I was about five or six years old, my cousin Harold, a tall, bearded, Namibian-born contemporary of my father’s who had settled in London as a doctor, gave me a small grey stone scraper – a sharply whittled tool that sat comfortably in my child’s hand. It had been found in a cave in the Namib Desert. ‘This’, he told me, ‘might have been made thousands of years ago. But it could also be just a few hundred years old, or perhaps even more recent than that; there are Stone Age people living in Africa right now who still use tools like this.’ I closed my hand around the scraper, marvelling at its smooth, cool surface. ‘Is it worth a lot of money?’ I asked. The big man laughed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but maybe it’s more valuable even than money.’
He showed me a glossy coffee-table book, illustrated with colour photographs of Bushmen. They were small and slender, naked but for skin loincloths, and carried bows, chasing antelope and giraffes across a flat landscape covered with waist-high grass. They had slanted, Oriental-looking eyes, and whip-thin bodies the colour of ochre. The women, bare-breasted, wore bright, beaded headbands and necklaces of intricate geometric patterns. According to my cousin, they were a people who lived at peace with nature and each other, whose hunting and tracking skills were legendary and who survived in the driest parts of the desert.
I put the scraper among my treasures – a fox’s skull, a dried lizard, the companies of little lead soldiers, a display of pinned butterflies. Occasionally, in quiet moments, I would take it out, hold it and imagine scraping the fat from a newly flayed animal skin.
I remember, too, my mother reciting this hymn, written down in the nineteenth century, recorded from Bushmen on the banks of South Africa’s Orange River. ‘Xkoagu’, my mother read, pronouncing the ‘Xk’ as a soft click:
Xkoagu, hunting star,
Blind with your light the springbok’s eyes
Give me your right arm
and take my arm from me
The arm that does not kill
I am hungry
My mother knew the power of language and made sure that, though we lived in England and knew and loved its knights and castles, green woods and Robin Hoods, we also felt her birthplace moving in us just as she did.
Around this time another cousin came to stay, Frank Taylor, a childhood playmate of my mother’s. He lived, she told us, on the edge of the great Kalahari, where the Bushmen lived. He had brought a small bow and arrow, which I was encouraged to try. I set one of the pointed shafts to the taut sinew of the bowstring and, at a nod from the grown-ups, let fly at the stairs. The arrow stuck, quivering in the wood. With my head full of longbows and Agincourts, I was impressed by its potentially lethal power. But this bow and arrow, said my mother, was not a weapon of war. It was for hunting the great herds of antelope that thronged the Kalahari grasslands.
Kalahari – what a beautiful word. It rolled off the tongue with satisfying ease, seeming to imply distance. A great wilderness of waving grasses, humming with grasshopper song under a hot wind and a sky of vibrant blue.
My father was less reverent about Africa than my mother. Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he had been an asthmatic Jewish intellectual growing up among tough, bellicose Anglo and Afrikaans boys. He had been bullied right through his childhood, and had quit Africa for Europe at the first opportunity. He would imitate, for our amusement, the buttock-swinging swagger of his old school’s rugby First Fifteen as they marched out onto the field, arranging his moustachioed, black-eyebrows-and-spectacles face into a parody of their arrogant insouciance. All his stories tended to the ridiculous. There was the MaShona foreman of the night-soil collectors, who came round each day on a horse and cart to empty the thunder-boxes of the wealthy whites and called himself ‘Boss Boy Shit’; the adolescent house-boy whose balls and penis used to hang, fruit-like, from a hole in his ragged shorts and who, when asked by my father what the fruit was for, demonstrated by upending the bemused house cat and attempting to jam his penis into its impossibly small anus. The cat had twisted and sunk in its claws: deep, causing the house-boy to run off howling.
My father’s tales, like my mother’s myths, contrasted tantalisingly with the overwhelming ordinariness of our London life. My sister and I, avid listeners, tried to learn the Afrikaans rugger songs like ‘Bobbejaan klim die Berg’ (‘The Baboon climbed up the mountain’), which we quickly corrupted into ‘Old baba kindi bear’. The song’s chorus – ‘Vant die Stellenbos se boois kom weer’ (‘the boys of Stellenbosch will come back again’ – a reference to the Boer War) became ‘for the smelly, bossy boys, come here’. Who, we wondered, were these smelly, bossy boys? What was a kindi bear? How strange and mysterious was this land that our parents came from.
At Christmas my father’s father, Robbie, would visit from Rhodesia where he ranched cattle and farmed tobacco – a feudal baron in a still feudal world. He brought us small gifts – leopards and spiral-horned kudus carved from red African hardwoods. My grandfather presented Africa as somewhere real, a place where actual lives were lived. I would listen to him and my parents argue across the dinner table, bringing the continent into sharper focus. The talk, back then, was mostly of the war of independence then raging in Rhodesia; my grandfather told how the Munts* had attacked his farm and shot his farm manager, burning crops, rustling cattle into the night. When he spoke, Africa came across as a hard, violent place and, with his stern voice, lined face and disapproving stare, he seemed to carry something of this with him as he moved about our London house.
An endless succession of white Africans passed through our lives. They talked incessantly of the land of their birth. There were stories about the barren, blasted Karoo, where only dry shrubs grew, stunted by summer drought and bone-cracking winter frost. And the jungly, mosquito-ridden forests of the Zambezi River where lions and buffaloes, hippos and elephants, crocodiles and poisonous snakes lurked around every corner. Up in the high, cold mountains of Lesotho, the landscape resembled Scotland and was inhabited by proud people who wore conical straw hats, robed themselves in bright, patterned blankets and rode horses between their stony, cliff-top villages. I learned of the rolling grasslands around Johannesburg, known as the ‘highveld’, which stretched to a sudden escarpment that fell away to the game-rich thorn-scrub, the ‘lowveld’ or ‘bushveld’. Long before I ever went to southern Africa, its names and regions had been described to me so many times that I could picture them in my mind’s eye, the landscapes flowing one into the other across the great sub-continent, each more beautiful than the last.
I later came to realise that these eulogies to Africa’s natural beauty arose partly from guilt: the speakers came from families whose forebears had, almost without exception, carved out their wealth in blood. Many of these educated