2 Lessons in Reality

      It was the African winter: dry, cool, dusty. As the plane touched down in Harare, Zimbabwe, in June 1985, I saw that the grass by the runway was yellow-brown and burnt in places, the trees bare and parched-looking. Walking to the customs building, the early morning air was chilly despite the cloudless blue sky. A faint smell of wood smoke, dust and cow dung was borne in on the bone-dry breeze.

      I made my way westward across the grassy Zimbabwe Midlands and into the dry, wooded country of southeastern Botswana, hitchhiking and taking buses and trains. On the third day in the freezing dawn I arrived at Gaborone, Botswana’s dusty, sleepy capital. Cousin Frank Taylor picked me up and drove me out to his place in the red ironstone hills west of town, weaving his beat-up car between teams of donkey-drawn carts made from pick-up trucks sawn in half, driven Ben Hur-style by young BaTswana men. Once out of town, the landscape was barren; red, dry and sandy without a single blade of grass (this was in the height of the terrible droughts that afflicted southern Africa from the 1980s right into the mid ’90s) and the tree branches bare of leaves. I had never seen a landscape so desolate and unforgiving. I sneaked a look at cousin Frank. He matched the landscape: tall, spare, with the capable, practical air of a man used to fixing things himself. Sitting in the passenger seat next to him I felt soft and frivolous and stupid.

I had come to expect that all white Africans lived in big houses surrounded by manicured gardens, where soft-footed black servants produced tea and biscuits punctually at eleven, discreetly rang little bells to call one to lunch, and generally devoted all their energy and ingenuity to surrounding one with understated luxury. Frank Taylor’s house – built with his own hands on a stretch of rocky hillside granted him by the local kgotla^* – was austere: one long room like a dusty Viking’s hall, little furniture and no water, unless you drove down to a communal tap in the village below.

      Frank, his wife Margaret and his three sons were all fervent Christians. That evening, the initial exchanges of family news done, Frank fixed his grey seer’s gaze on me and asked: ‘So, at what stage of your spiritual odyssey are you?’

      I did not know how to answer, but hid my discomfort behind a façade of chatty, light-hearted banter. Later, not knowing quite what to do with me, Frank enlisted my help in the new house he was building down on the valley floor. I was not handy with tools, knew nothing about mixing cement, dropping plumb lines, fixing car engines, laying pipes, nor even how to change a flat tyre. I began to realise how unrealistic I had been to dream of just floating into the Kalahari of my childhood stories.

      Frank had been in Botswana just over twenty years, having left a prosperous family farm in South Africa to come – missionary-like – and devote himself to improving the lot of Botswana’s rural poor. Foremost among these were the country’s Bushmen, most of whom, I learned, had lately been reduced to pauperdom through a sudden upsurge in cattle ranching. During the 1970s, Frank told me, foreign aid money had come pouring into Botswana, and the cattle-owning elite of the ruling BaTswana tribe had used it to carve roads into previously unreachable areas, and to put up wire fences and sink boreholes. The result, for the Bushmen, was disastrous. The game on which they had traditionally relied was killed if it approached the new boreholes, and prevented by the new fences from following the rains. The animals died along the wire in their hundreds of thousands. With the exception of a few clans still living outside the grasp of the ranchers, most of the Bushmen had found themselves, within a few years, enclosed by wire, their age-old food source gone, reduced to serfs looking after other people’s cattle on land that had once been their own.

      In the first few years after his arrival in Botswana, Frank had set up several non-profit-making businesses: textile printing, handicrafts, small-scale poultry farms and the like. But these had been mere preliminaries to his real mission. It seemed to him that for the Remote Area Dwellers (as the Botswana government called the Kalahari peoples, Bushman or otherwise), the real way out of destitution lay not in learning to be Westerners, but in marketing the wild foods and medicines that they had been gathering in the bush since time immemorial. It seems a simple enough idea – agroforestry – but back then it was revolutionary. At that time, most NGOs (non-governmental organisations) were trying to turn indigenous people into farmers or small businessmen. The eco-terms that we now take for granted had yet to be coined. Frank was ahead of his time.

      Frank borrowed money and established a small nursery of wild, fruit or medicine-producing shrubs and trees beside his house. He had found that these indigenous plants bore fruit even in drought years, and did not exhaust the dry Botswana soil if planted and harvested year to year, as maize and livestock did. He was convinced that the Kalahari peoples could take these traditional plants beyond mere subsistence, that they could be cultivated for both survival and cash, and that there might even be a market abroad for them. The problem was funding.

      Listening to Frank explaining all this convinced me that he was the man to take me into the Kalahari. I tried a tactful approach – perhaps I could accompany him on one of his forays into the heartland? But no, came the answer, he was too busy for the next month or two to take any trips into the interior. However, one night his two elder boys (Michael and Peter, already experienced and bushwise at ten and twelve years old) took me up to sleep out on the wild ridge top. Sitting around the fire – which they could kindle, and I could not – they told me stories about the journeys they had made with their father into that interior. I listened intrigued, intimidated and envious that these boys, not yet in their teens, should have experienced so much of what I longed to experience. At dawn, I got up and went by myself to look out over the vast, wild flat lands that yawned away below – the emptiness, the reds and browns and angry dark burnt umber of the rocks and bare trees. I raised my arms in greeting to that harsh land – the land of my fathers.

      I bid the Taylors goodbye and went back eastward into Zimbabwe, where my grandfather had arranged for me to stay on a ranch some hours north of Harare. There I was in heaven: I rode horses, handled guns, shot and killed an antelope and felt a surge of genuine bloodlust as I did so. I swam and fished, drank beer and laughed at jokes about blacks and women. I began to understand how my forebears had reinvented themselves, from Litvak Jew to rich auctioneer, from Somerset peasant to empire builder. Then, one hot morning while I was in the swimming pool, reality returned with a bump. Hearing shouting, I surfaced just in time to see my white rancher host land first one fist, then another, in the face of one of his Shona farmworkers who, it turned out, had been AWOL on a drunken binge and had now shown up for work again, useless and reeking.

      Later, the ranch’s black foreman and I were sent to round up a steer for slaughter. We cut a half-grown calf out of the herd and drove it into a corral, where a ring of farmworkers lined the outside of the fence, waiting to see the baas make the kill. The big red-faced man wandered into the corral with a rifle and took aim, pointing the barrel at the flat space between the steer’s eyes. What would happen, I wondered, if the bullet missed and hit one of the farmworkers? But his aim was true. He fired, and a fountain of bright blood erupted from the beast’s head. It did not fall down however; instead it stood, staring through the crimson blood that now pumped from the round hole between its eyes. The rancher shot again, still the steer stood there. He shot a third time. Again the beast did not fall, but kept its feet, swaying, its face a stunned mask of gore. Quickly the foreman reappeared, ducked through the bars of the corral with a huge butcher’s knife in his hand, walked briskly up to the dazed, wounded