The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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the steer letting out a long death-bellow as the life drained out of the jagged cut. It remained standing until the blood stopped flowing, then crashed onto its side, dead at last.
Realising that I was too squeamish for life on an African farm, I left the guns in their locked cabinet and took long walks with the farm boys, who would show me animals and birds and tell me their names in Shona.
The following year, I travelled to Africa again, and this time went ranging over the great sub-continent, visiting all the places of the family stories, before taking a truck up into East Africa to witness the great wildebeest migration of the Serengeti.
But then I left Africa alone for a while, spending a couple of years adventuring in North America and then trying to establish myself as a freelance journalist in London. The need to identify with the land of my fathers seemed to diminish, become less pressing. A constant presence, but no longer an urgent one.
Then one day, out of the blue, a distant Loxton cousin from Australia wrote to my mother, saying that he had spent ten years researching the family and now wanted to put all the clan back in touch with each other. Among his researches, he had traced the Baster Loxtons, the coloured branch of the family, to a wine farm outside a small town called Keimos, at the southern edge of the Kalahari.
It seemed that they had prospered, and had, against the odds, managed to hold onto their land all through the apartheid years despite several attempts by the white government to dispossess them. Their farm, Loxtonvale, extended along several islands of the great river, where the original Baster kapteins had established their stationary pirate strongholds. Gert and Cynthia Loxton had transformed the islands into vineyards and orchards where they produced Chardonnay and sultana grapes and fruit. They also had a cattle ranch up in the southern fringe of the Kalahari.
My mother got the necessary addresses and flew out that year. When she returned, the link between the two sides of the family had been restored. And between these coloured Loxtons and the Taylors (my mother also visited Frank Taylor on that trip and reported that his Veld Products Research organisation was thriving), it seemed that the door to the Kalahari had finally opened a crack.
In 1992, I returned once more, having landed a contract to write a guidebook to South Africa. During my first week back in the country, I visited the Cultural History Museum in Cape Town, where eerie life-like casts of Bushmen (taken from real people, said the plaque) stood on display behind glass as if living people had been frozen in time. As I travelled I read, learning for the first time the proper history of these, the first people of southern Africa, whom academics called ‘KhoiSan’, but whom others called ‘Hottentots’ or ‘Bushmen’.
Many geneticists and anthropologists, I learned, considered the KhoiSan to be the oldest human culture on earth, possibly ancestors to us all. What was certain was that for thirty thousand years, perhaps longer, they had populated the whole sub-continent, pursuing a lifestyle that included hunting, gathering, painting, dancing, but not, it seemed, war (no warrior folk-tales, weaponry or battle sites exist from this time). Then, sometime around the first century AD, the warriors had arrived – black Africans, whom the academics called ‘Bantu peoples’ – migrating down from west and central Africa with livestock acquired, it is thought, from Arab traders in the Horn and the north of Africa. By the Middle Ages these ancestors of the modern nations of MaShona, Zulu, Ndebele, Xhosa, BaTswana and Sotho had pushed the Bushmen out of most of southern Africa’s lushest areas – what is now Zimbabwe and eastern South Africa. They kept Bushman girls as concubines and adopted some of the distinctive clicks that punctuated the KhoiSan languages. Rainmaking ceremonies and healing practices were also absorbed into the new dominant culture. By the time the first whites settled the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century, the Bushmen had vanished from almost everywhere except for the more rugged mountain ranges and the dry Karoo and Kalahari regions.
Some Bushmen clans, however, took on the culture of the invaders, adopting warrior traditions alongside the herds of cattle and fat-tailed sheep. These peoples – the Khoi or Hottentots – first traded with, then fought, the white settlers, confining the colony to a small settled area around modern-day Cape Town for a generation until successive waves of smallpox in the early eighteenth century so reduced the Khoi that they became absorbed into a general mixed-race underclass known today as ‘coloureds’. Only one group of Khoi survived into modern times – the Nama of northwestern South Africa and southern Namibia.
Having colonised the Cape, the white settlers began pushing north into the Karoo. Extermination and genocide followed, until by the twentieth century Bushmen survived only in the Kalahari. Now even these remote people, as I already knew from Frank, were under threat from the steady encroachment of black cattle ranchers.
As the year drew to a close, I travelled up to the southernmost edge of the Kalahari, where it reaches down into South Africa in a dunescape of red sands tufted with golden grass, and dry riverbeds shaded by tall camel-thorn trees. Even here, I was told, no Bushmen had been seen since the 1960s, maybe earlier. The crisply khakied reception staff at the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park – a narrow tongue of South Africa that makes a wedge between Namibia and Botswana – pointed vaguely northwards into the shimmering, heat-stricken immensity beyond the reception building and told me that I would have to go ‘deep Kalahari’, beyond the park even, if I wanted to see Bushmen.
Once again, it seemed, the gentle hunters of my childhood stories were going to remain just that – fictional characters. Instead, Africa had another kind of experience lined up for me. The year from 1992 to 1993 saw the lead-up to the elections that would change South Africa for ever. Anger that had been seething for generations was starting to erupt. I was researching the Transkei region, down in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, at this time still one of the ‘tribal homelands’, a region set aside for rural blacks – in this case the Xhosa – to live their traditional lives far away from white eyes. Overcrowding, overgrazing and therefore poverty were the predominant facts of life. Resentment was rife everywhere, but especially so in the Transkei: between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the Xhosa people fought and lost no fewer than nine consecutive wars against the Dutch and the British, forfeiting almost their entire territory in the process. Finally, in despair, all but three clans of the great tribe slaughtered their herds and destroyed their stores of grain, hoping that by this sacrifice their warrior ancestors would rise from the grave and drive the hated white men into the sea. But the ancestors did not come.
This humiliation only whetted the Xhosa’s determination to ultimately win out and beat the white man at his own game – politics. Many black South African leaders, including Nelson Mandela, came from the Transkei. During that pre-election year the region became a focus of anti-white feeling. One night, while in a beach-side rondavel* down on the ‘Wild Coast’, Transkei’s two hundred kilometres of beautiful, sparsely inhabited strands, I woke with a start to see a man coming through the window holding a large kitchen knife. As if in a dream, almost without registering that I was doing it, I was out of my sleeping bag and pushing the intruder backwards, so that he fell the few feet to the ground outside with a muffled thud. Still in my dreamlike state, I put my head out of the window to see what was happening. There was a flicker of movement from the left – I jerked back just in time. His friend, who had been pressed against the wall, swung a knobkerrie, missing my head but hitting my shoulder hard. In an instant the mattress was off the bunk and pressed against the window, and the bunk frame was against the door. The bandits thumped and stabbed at both, but there was no way they could get in.
A few days after the attack, I headed back to the Transkei capital, Umtata. Coming out of the store, both hands laden down with shopping bags, I found my way blocked by a large crowd. It was the end of the day and the city’s workers were thronging the main streets, waiting for the minibus taxis that would take them home to their houses on the edge of town. While I was walking through the mass of people, a man approached me, asking the time and, before I could react, had me around the neck while several other hands grabbed me from behind. It was a nasty mugging, the frightened onlookers standing by, pretending nothing was happening, while the fists bloodied my face and mouth and the attackers shouted ‘White shit!’
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