THE HEALING LAND
A KALAHARI JOURNEY
Rupert Isaacson

Copyright

This edition first published in 2002

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by

Fourth Estate

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Rupert Isaacson 2001

The right of Rupert Isaacson to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

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Dedication

For the Ancestors

Epigraph

Circling, circling …

I have entered the airy, dancing lightness of love.

Rumi

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Part One: Ancestral Voices

1 Stories and Myths

2 Lessons in Reality

3 Under the Big Tree

Part Two: The Mantis, The Mouse and The Bird

4 Regopstaan’s Prophecy

5 A Human Zoo

6 Old Magic, New Beliefs

7 Trance Dance at Buitsevango

8 Into the Central Kalahari

Part Three: The Good Little Donkeys

9 Revelations at the Red House

10 The Same Blood

11 Dream and Disillusion

12 The Leopard Man

13 Dawid Makes a Request

14 Bushman Politics

15 Off to See a Wizard

16 The River of Spirits

17 What Happened After

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Map

PART ONE ANCESTRAL VOICES

1 Stories and Myths

In the beginning, so my mother told me, were the Bushmen – peaceful, golden-skinned hunters whom people also called KhoiSan or San. They had lived in Africa longer than anyone else. Africa was also where we were from; my South African mother and Rhodesian father were always clear on that. Though we lived in London, my sister Hannah and I inhabited a childhood world filled with images and 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 descendants of the colonial pioneers were haunted by the feeling that their ancestors should somehow have known better. Yet they also feared the black peoples whose freedom they so longed for, whose oppression by their own kind caused them such shame. They knew that black resentment of white drew little distinction. They were all too familiar with the violent warrior traditions endemic to most black African cultures, and lived in terror of the great uprisings that must one day inevitably come. For them, the myth of a pure, uncomplicated Africa contrasted favourably with the Africa they actually knew. It was a sense of this that they, no doubt unconsciously, imparted to us as wide-eyed London children, and which resonated deeply in my magic-starved mind. Only years later did I realise that, with the exception of cousin Frank, most of these white African visitors knew little or nothing of the bush, let alone the Bushmen. For the most part, they were urbanites much more at home in European cities than out on the dry, primordial veld.

When I was eight and Hannah eleven, our parents took us to Rhodesia to visit my grandfather Robbie. From the moment we stepped off the plane I found the place as seductively, intensely exciting as all the stories had led me to expect. ‘Take off your shoes,’ my mother said, as we pulled up at Robbie’s house, set in a landscaped garden in a white suburb of the capital Salisbury (now Harare). ‘You’re in Africa now and kids go barefoot.’ Hannah and I did as she bid, despite a dubious look at the green, irrigated lawn, which was crawling with insect life. When my grandfather’s manservant, Lucius, opened the front door, a small, cream-coloured scorpion dropped from the lintel. Lucius whipped off his shoe and killed it, then presented me with the corpse as a trophy. I was thrilled. That night the chorus of frogs in the garden was deafening. My father took us out into the darkness with a torch and at the edge of one of my grandfather’s ornamental ponds showed us frogs the size of kittens.

The war for independence was still being fought at that time. Out at Robbie’s farm a high-security fence ran all the way around the homestead, and the white men carried handguns on their hips (things were later to get so bad that my grandfather hired AK-47-wielding guards and an armoured car to patrol his vast territory). We saw his herds of black Brangus cattle, his tobacco fields and drying houses. At night the drums in the farmworkers’ compound thundered till dawn, while my sister and I lay in our beds and tried not to think about the big spiders that sat on the walls above our sleepless heads.

On a bright, hot morning, after a particularly loud night of drumming, two ingangas (witch doctors) performed a ceremony in the compound. Despite having been born in Africa, none of my family could tell us quite what was going on, but there was frightening power in the singing of the assembled black crowd, in the maniacal dancing of the ingangas, whose faces were hidden by fearsome, nightmare masks. It made me shiver.

At a game reserve near the ruins of Great Zimbabwe,* we visited a friend of the family, a zoologist studying crocodiles in the Kyle River. He had caught four big specimens – between twelve and fifteen feet long – and had penned them in a special enclosure built out into the muddy river. Having asked if we’d like to see them, he guided us into the pen, telling us to stay close to the fence and not approach the great, murderous lizards where they lay half in, half out of the shallows.

For some reason I did not listen and, as the man was explaining something about crocodile behaviour to my parents, I walked towards the beasts for a closer look. There was a quick, low movement from the water and suddenly I was being dragged backwards by my shirt collar, loud shouting all around. ‘He almost got you!’ panted the zoologist, who had saved me by a whisker. Forever afterwards, my mother would tell the story of how she almost lost her son to a crocodile.

Sometime towards the end of that month-long trip, we went to look at a cave whose walls were painted with faded animals and men – exquisitely executed in red, cream and ochre-coloured silhouettes. The animal forms were instantly recognisable, perfectly representing the creatures we had just seen in great numbers in the game reserves. Standing there in the cool gloom, I picked out lyre-horned impala, jumping high in front of little stickmen with bows and arrows, kudu with great spiralled horns and striped flanks, giraffes cantering on legs so long they had seemed – when we had seen them in real life – to gallop in slow motion. Paintings like these, my mother told us, could be found in caves all over southern Africa. Some were tens of thousands years old. Others were painted as recently as a hundred years ago. But no one, she said, painted any more.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because the people were all killed,’ answered my mother. ‘And those not killed fled into the Kalahari Desert.’

She told us how, sometime in the middle of the last century, a party of white farmers in the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa had gone to hunt down the last group of Bushmen living in their area. Having seen all the game on which they had traditionally relied shot out, the Bushmen had resorted to hunting cattle and the farmers had organised a commando, or punitive raid against them. After the inevitable massacre up in the high passes, a body was found with several hollowed-out springbok horns full of pigment strapped to a belt around his waist. ‘He was the last Bushman painter,’ said my mother.

Laurens van der Post, whose writings in the 1950s established him as a Bushman guru, included this poignant story in his Lost World of the Kalahari. In his version it is one of his own forebears who went out on a similar raid, sometime in the late nineteenth century, in the ‘hills of the Great River’. Someone in his own grandfather’s family (van der Post’s words), having taken part in the massacre, discovers the body of the dead artist. Over the years I have encountered this story again and again, from the mouths of liberal-minded whites and in books, each time with a different location and twist. Perhaps all of them are true. Like so much that concerns the Bushmen and the great, wide land that used to be theirs, the story has become myth – intangible, impossible to pin down. Irresistible to a small boy of eight.

Back in the grey, drearily ordinary city of my birth, I found that the bright continent had worked its magic on me. I became more curious about our origins, about the dynastic lines going down the generations, and began to quizz my parents on more detail.

Though from vastly different origins and cultures, both sides of the family had gone at the great continent like terriers; yapping, biting and worrying away at it until they had established themselves and become white Africans. On my father’s side were the Isaacsons and Schapiros, poverty-stricken Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated from the small villages of Pojnewitz and Dochschitz (pronounced Dog-Shits) in the early 1900s. They had gone first to Germany, then to the emerging colony of German Southwest Africa, now Namibia, where my grandfather Robbie had been born in 1908. He grew up poor; his father worked at a low-paying job as a fitter on the railways while his mother kept a boarding house in the small capital Windhoek (though one family rumour has it that she was sometimes a little more than a landlady to her male guests).

The German colony was too rigidly anti-Semitic to allow Jews to make easy fortunes. So, on reaching his twenties, my grandfather crossed the great Kalahari, travelling through British Bechuanaland (now Botswana) to Rhodesia, where, after a brief spell selling shoes, he managed to land a job as a trainee auctioneer in a firm owned by another Litvak Jew – one Herschel (known as Harry) Schapiro. There followed a machiavellian rise to fortune: my grandfather courted and married Freda, daughter of this man Schapiro, became head auctioneer, began slowly buying up farms that came to the company cheap and, eventually, took over the firm.

Harry Schapiro himself had a more romantic story. While still a young man in Lithuania he had abandoned his wife Minnie (a notoriously difficult woman, according to my father) and set off into the world to make his fortune. He took a ship to England, intending to go from there to America, but – owing to his lack of English – got on the wrong boat and ended up in Port Elizabeth, just as the Boer War broke out.* With characteristic opportunism, he enlisted in the Johannesburg Mounted Infantry believing that once the war was over they would be demobbed in the Transvaal – where the gold mines were. Harry spent three years tramping up and down central South Africa without seeing a shot fired. Then, when the Armistice came, the regiment was demobbed not in the mine fields as promised, but back in Port Elizabeth where Harry had started from.

Undaunted, he set out for the Transvaal anyway, only to end up, not a mining magnate as he had hoped, but a butcher in the mine kitchens, where his wife Minnie managed to track him down, having travelled all the way from Lithuania to do so. Harry stayed with her just long enough to sire Freda (Robbie’s wife and my father’s mother, who died from Alzheimer’s while my sister and I were still small), before running away again, this time to Rhodesia, where he graduated from butcher to cattle trader to wealthy owner of a livestock auctioneering house. Minnie, no less resourceful, tracked him down a second time, whereupon he capitulated, though she of course never forgave him.

My father remembered Minnie – by then an old woman – drinking champagne by the gallon and forcing Harry to buy her a neverending stream of expensive gifts – Persian rugs, Chinese vases and the like – which she would then sell, banking the money. Because, she claimed, she never knew when her husband might take it into his head to disappear again. During these latter years she developed delusions of grandeur and used to tell my father that she had married beneath her, having spent her girlhood in a Lithuanian palace. ‘Rubbish, Minnie,’ Harry would harrumph from his armchair, ‘you were born in a hovel.’

My father’s side was successful financially, my mother’s side less so. But the Loxtons were made of epic stuff. My mother’s father Allen, for example, after spending an idyllic boyhood riding his horse Starlight across the rolling green hills of Natal, became a journalist, then a tank soldier in the 8th Army during the war in North Africa. He escaped his burning tank at Tobruk and jumped onto an abandoned motorbike just as the Afrika Korps came running over the dunes. On his return from the war, Allen resumed his career as a journalist, roving all over southern Africa as a feature writer for the Sunday Times and Johannesburg Star. My mother showed us great fat binders full of his cuttings – stories of travels with crocodile hunters, with witch doctors, with Bushmen; the black and white pictures and Boys’ Own language (at which he excelled) conjuring a world of adventure that stood out in stark contrast to the world I knew in London.

No less intrepid, his wife – my grandmother Barbara – also went to the war, putting my mother (then aged three) and aunt (aged five) into a children’s home and roaming the Western Front as a freelance war artist for the South African papers. As with Allen’s cuttings, my mother would show us Barbara’s paintings, which were kept in a big leather trunk in our sitting room. Barbara had painted everything she saw: London families sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz; the Battle of the Bulge, with the American dead lying in the snow of the Ardennes, cut down like wheat by the German Tiger tanks; the blood-spattered agony of the military hospitals; civilians starving on the streets of the Hague. Shortly after Berlin fell, she and a group of other journalists were allowed into Hitler’s eyrie, high in the Bavarian Alps, literally days after the great dictator and his mistress Eva Braun had committed suicide. Barbara rifled the desk drawers and brought back a few of Hitler’s personal effects – minor things like photographs, an Iron Cross or two, and some official documents – to pass on to the children. My sister and I felt proud that my mother’s parents had taken part in this great story.

But the Loxtons paid for their adventurous spirit by being heavy drinkers, prone to irrational rages, and subsequent wallowing remorse. Allen was no exception, and drove Barbara to leave him a few years after their return from the war. The effect on my mother and her sister Lindsay was far-reaching. Once she left Allen, Barbara (who seems to have been kind, but emotionally cool) never had her children to live with her again. Having been put into boarding schools as near infants while their parents went adventuring, they experienced but a brief couple of years of family life before being shunted off once more, to grow up in institutions until they reached university age.

My petite, blonde, bespectacled mother grew up a true Loxton, becoming involved, while at university, in anti-apartheid campaigns. Her old photograph albums show pictures of the time: my mother (a platinum perm atop a Jane Mansfield bust) and a black male student symbolically burning the government’s separate education Bill; my mother speaking on podiums; brawls between Afrikaans students loyal to the system and my mother’s leftist crowd; pictures of more serious attacks by policemen. One in particular stands out: a march by black domestic maids, protesting for better working conditions, charged with batons and dogs. In the foreground, a woman is on the ground, a police-dog savaging her abdomen, the handler’s truncheon raised high, about to deliver a skull-cracking blow to the woman’s head.

By this time Barbara had remarried, and she and her new husband (a politically active, left-wing lawyer named George Findlay) decided it would be best if my mother left the country before the inevitable arrest that must follow such activities. She was glad to get out and go adventuring in the world as her parents had and took the boat to England along with her sister, Lindsay. In England my mother flirted with the ANC, but became diverted – by art school, by meeting my father, himself an African émigré – and settled down to produce my sister and I while embarking on a career as a sculptor and artist. But when I was eighteen months old, and my sister four, my mother took us back to Africa and presented us to Barbara and Allen (who, though as much of an alcoholic as ever, had moved to Johannesburg and started another family).

A year later, both Allen and Barbara were dead. And in a sad postscript to their failed relationship, though they lived at opposite ends of the country they died within hours of each other. One day while at work in the Sunday Times office, Allen collapsed from emphysema (he had been a heavy smoker), and never regained consciousness. A telegram was sent to Barbara. According to her husband, she went quiet, and retired to have a think and be alone with her memories. When he knocked at the door a short time later to see if she was all right, there was no response. He opened the door and found her lying dead from a stroke.

My mother went almost mad with grief. She had at last begun to know her parents, and now suddenly they had been snatched away. Throughout our childhood, she would be prone to periodic depressions, and the sense of being an exile never left her. Unlike my father, who fitted happily into London (he later told me that even in his Rhodesian childhood he had longed for cities: ‘The first time I went to Johannesburg and smelled the car fumes and saw all that concrete around me, I felt an almost sensual thrill of excitement and pleasure’), my mother missed Africa keenly. She expressed it in her sculpture, her painting, almost all of which featured African people, African scenes.

It was perhaps to make up for the loss of her parents, and of all that she had hoped we children would have learned from them, that she became such a willing story-teller. She told us of the four Loxton brothers – Jesse, Samuel, Jasper and Henry – who in 1830 had come to South Africa from the Somerset village of Loxton and immediately dispersed into the wide spaces of the dry north, the area known as the Great Karoo.

Like all the other early Karoo settlers, the Loxtons lived, at first, by pastoral nomadism learned from the Khoi, a people who looked like Bushmen and spoke a similar clicking language, but who lived by herding rather than hunting. Having shown the whites how to follow the rains and where to find water in this unendingly arid land, the Khoi soon found themselves dispossessed, along with the local Bushman clans. By the time the Loxton brothers arrived, the Khoi had been reduced to working for the whites, and the last remaining Karoo Bushman had retreated to mountain strongholds, from where they watched the white men carve out farms by the land’s few natural springs and kill off the game.

For the whites, it was a slow, monotonous existence, enlivened only by hunting, mostly for wild animals, but sometimes also for Bushmen, who would, as their situation became more and more desperate, occasionally materialise from nowhere to raid livestock. For many Karoo settlers, hunting Bushmen became a well-known, if little talked about, sport. I can only speculate that my family must have done as others did.

Eventually, the Loxton brothers bought land and settled down. Henry, the youngest (my great-great-grandfather) trekked over the Drakensberg mountains into Natal – Zulu Country – where he ended up a wagon-maker, wedded to an Afrikaner woman named Agathe-Celeste (my great-great-grandmother), who had been abandoned as an infant in the court of the Zulu king Mpande by her ivory-hunting father. She had spent her girlhood there, re-entering white society only when she became a young woman and married my great-great-grandfather.

There are many stories about Agathe-Celeste. The best was included in a book of African reminiscences (Thirty Years in Africa), written by a bluff old Africa hand called Major Tudor Trevor, who knew my great-great-grandparents well. It concerned her two pet lions – Saul and Deborah. According to the major, these two lions, which Henry Loxton had given to his wife as cubs, had a game. They would wait at the garden hedge, which ran along the pavement and around the street corner, until someone came walking by. When the walker was halfway along the hedge, one of the cubs would slip through the foliage, drop onto the pavement and silently trail the unwitting pedestrian until he or she turned the corner. There the other cub, who had previously slipped through the hedge on that side, would be waiting. It would let out a kittenish roar in the face of the astonished walker, who would then turn and find the other cub behind, roaring too. While the cubs were still small, and could be run off with a shout, the burghers of the town tolerated their game as a charming, harmless local eccentricity.

Around the time that Saul and Deborah were half-grown (‘as big as mastiffs’, wrote Trevor Tudor), a new predikant, or Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, arrived in town. One Sunday after church, while sitting on the porch with the Loxtons, the major saw this new priest coming up the road, formally turned out in frock coat, black topper and gloves, with a Bible under his arm. ‘At that moment,’ he wrote, ‘out from behind sprang Deborah. She crouched low. The parson heard the thud of her landing and turned round as if to greet a parishioner … then we heard a kind of drawn out sob, his hat fell off, his Bible dropped, and in a flash he turned and ran off down the street …’

Deborah caught up with him in a few easy bounds and, first with one swipe, then another, ripped off his flying coat tails. The predikant put on a spurt, rounded the corner at a gallop, whereupon out jumped Saul, roaring. With a squeal like the air being squeezed from a bagpipe, the predikant crumpled to the ground. Saul climbed onto his chest and began licking his face, intermittently snarling at Deborah to leave off what he considered his kill. The major, meanwhile, was running to the rescue. Coming up on Saul where he lay, pinning the priest to the road, he fetched the half-grown lion a vicious kick in the ribs. But instead of backing off as expected, Saul turned, slashed at the major’s leg and made ready to spring. It was my great-great-grandmother who saved the day, arriving seconds later with a heavy sjambok (giraffe- or hippo-hide whip), ‘at the first stroke of which’, wrote Trevor Tudor, ‘and a stream of abuse in Dutch, the cubs went flying.’ The major remained, ever after, in awe of my great-great-grandmother, referring to her always as ‘that magnificent woman’.

But Henry Loxton could match his wife’s legendary feats. Fording the Komaati River on his horse one night (the river lies at the southern end of what is now the Kruger National Park), he was attacked by a large crocodile but, so the story goes, managed to beat it off with his stirrup iron. Arriving at the little town on the other side, he stamped angrily into the bar of its one, small hotel, and demanded to know what the devil they meant by allowing such a dangerous beast to infest the ford. For answer the barman told him, apologetically, that nobody in town had a rifle of sufficient calibre to tackle the croc. The only big gun was owned by a German tailor who was short-sighted, could barely shoot, and was holding the weapon as a debt for unpaid services. Hearing this, Henry Loxton rushed over to the tailor’s house and demanded that he accompany him to the river.

Once at the ford, Henry got straight down to business: ‘I’ll go and stand in the middle, and when the croc comes I want you to shoot it.’

‘But I can’t shoot,’ protested the unfortunate tailor. ‘What if I hit you? What if I miss?’

Henry considered a moment, then took the man by the shoulders and frog-marched him into the water. ‘Stay there,’ he said menacingly: ‘If you move before the croc comes I’ll shoot you.’ So the tailor waited, trembling, until sure enough, the croc came gliding silently out from the shore. The gun went off, the croc reared up, then collapsed back into the water with an almighty splash, and the tailor sprinted, howling, for the bank. The great reptile was dead. Thanking his reluctant assistant, Henry Loxton gave him back the rifle and continued on his way. Legend has it that, next morning, the tailor’s hair turned white.

Henry and Agathe-Celeste had four sons, all of whom grew up to fight on opposite sides of the Anglo-Boer War (one of them even mustered his own irregular cavalry unit, known as Loxton’s Horse). And it was into this line that Allen, my mother’s father, was born in 1906.

Before the war however, Jesse, one of Henry and Agathe-Celeste’s elder sons, had gone back to the Karoo and founded a small, dusty town which, predictably, he had named Loxton. He married and had a son, Frederick, who, being a chip off the old block, resolved to mark out a private domain for himself, just as his father had done. Frederick set off first for the Eastern Cape, where he married, had children, and tried to settle. But the lure of the wild, empty north where he had been born proved too strong. Soon enough, he abandoned his young family and rode away to the Orange River country, southernmost border of the Kalahari, then the absolute frontier of civilisation.

But even then, in the 1880s, this part of South Africa (still known today as Bushmanland) was fast being tamed, not by whites but by people of mixed white and Khoi blood – the Griqua, Koranna and Baster* – who had trekked away from their white masters some decades earlier. Skilled riders and marksmen, these coloured pioneers had claimed the river’s fertile flood-plain, a corridor of green winding through the vast dryness on either side, making fortresses of the many river islands, from which they raided each other’s camps and enslaved the local Bushmen, occasionally attacking the Dutch and British settlements to the south. By the time Frederick Loxton arrived mission stations had been set up and the old raiding culture was giving way to a more settled farm life. But for a white man with a little money, a good horse and a repeating rifle, there remained a free, frontier possibility to the Orange River country. Ignoring the fact that he already had a family back in the Cape, he met and fell in love with Anna Booysens, the striking daughter of one of the Baster kapteins (leaders). When, some years later, news came of the first wife’s death, Frederick married this woman, and was given a dowry of flood-plain land near the present-day town of Keimoes.

On his death in 1894, Frederick left his farms to his three Baster children and they, when they died, left them to theirs. ‘We have coloured cousins?’ I remembered asking my mother. Indeed we did. But where they were now no one in the family knew. Through the decades that preceded and paved the way for apartheid, the white and the coloured Loxtons had drifted irrevocably apart. Cousins with KhoiSan blood. Almost Bushmen. I pictured them as lean, wild-looking people in a barren landscape of red and brown rock cut through by an immense, muddy river.

As childhood turned to adolescence, it became less comfortable to be caught between cultures, to be part English, part African. The stories, artifacts, white African friends and relatives that constituted my life at home began to clash more and more with the reality of living and going to school in England. I didn’t fit in. Was our family English or African, I would be asked? Neither and both, it seemed.

I was restless in London, and began to long for the open air. We had a great-aunt with a farm in Leicestershire, a horsewoman, who spotted the horse gene in me and taught me to hunt and ride across the Midlands turf on an old thoroughbred that she let me keep there.

Though I made friends with some of the other Pony Club children, I continued to feel like an outsider. Still, it was oddly consoling to think of that great network of ancestors and relatives. Somehow the Kalahari, the dry heart of the sub-continent, seemed central to that inheritance and identity that I was – however unconsciously – trying to find.

So, when I was nineteen, I told my grandfather Robbie over Christmas lunch that I wanted to go to Africa again. The following summer, he sent me a plane ticket.

* Also known as rock rabbits, they are small creatures similar in appearance to the guinea pig. Curiously, their closest known relative is the elephant.

* A corruption of the Shona word muntu, meaning ‘people’.

* A walled city, dating from the thirteenth century, founded by the ancestors of today’s MaShona people.

* The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) resulted in the British annexation of the whole of South Africa outside the Cape colony. The first war, won by the Boers, was in 1880.

* ‘Baster’ means ‘bastard’ literally; a term used for people of mixed race.

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 beast and slit its throat. Blood poured out as if emptied from a bucket, 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!’

A week after that, in Pietermaritzburg, Natal – a small, handsome city of red-brick and wrought-iron colonial buildings – I found myself in the midst of a riot. Chris Hani, the head of the South African Communist Party, which had strong links to the ANC, had been shot dead a few days before by a white supremacist. A nationwide series of ‘mourning and protest marches’ was planned and, though I had seen the warnings on television, I forgot and ended up driving downtown on the scheduled day, intent on picking up my poste restante mail. The streets, usually jammed with commuter traffic, were strangely empty. Turning into Longmarket Street, I felt a little glow of satisfaction at being able to park directly outside the ornate, pedimented entrance to the post office. I stopped the car and got out, slamming the door. Then I heard it. ‘HAAAA!’

I looked around and saw, some two hundred yards up the wide street, a wall of armed Zulu youth approaching at a run. Smoke and licks of flame billowed out from the buildings as they came. ‘HAAAA!’, the shout went up again, and in a flash I remembered the news warning. How could I have been so stupid? I had about thirty seconds in which to make a decision. The car, as bad luck would have it, was having battery problems, so I set off down the street at a sprint, but after just a few paces a door opened on my right and a hand beckoned. It was a bakery-cum-takeaway-shop whose staff had for some reason decided to ignore the news warning and open for business. There was no time for explanations, only to duck down with my saviours behind the counter. The first wave of the crowd swept by, roaring. I risked a look over the top of the counter, just in time to see the shop’s large, plate-glass window explode inwards. Shattered glass, stones, bricks and broken wood flew everywhere. Something sharp hit me on the shoulder, tearing my shirt and leaving a light gash on the skin. I ducked down again, then thought of the car with my laptop in the boot. I got up tentatively from behind the counter and walked out into the crowd of young men, all in their late teens and early twenties, who were milling about, as if deciding what to do. This was the second wave; few of them were armed, as the first, most destructive rank of rioters had been. These second-rankers were less angry, more bent on mischief. It showed in their smiles and the alert, slow-walking set of their bodies. A small group of young men with more initiative than the rest were looting a clothing store on the other side of the street, and that drew most of the crowd’s attention. However, standing around my car was a small knot of youths. Walking up to them I had the odd sensation of watching myself from outside my own body. ‘Morning, morning,’ I said, cheerily, stepping between two gangly teenagers dressed in expensive-looking sweatshirts. They did nothing, merely stood by as I unlocked the door, got in and fired up the engine first time. Waving jauntily, I slipped the clutch, rolled slowly forward and – to my amazement, and probably theirs – the youths stepped aside to let me go.

The volume of people, however, forced me to follow the direction of the crowd. After a couple of minutes, I was back among the first wave of rioters. Here, the street was in mayhem. Most of the youths were brandishing spears, ox-hide shields and kerries and shouting and smashing shop windows – some of them were throwing molotovs into the interiors. I was noticed almost immediately. A tall youth, holding a large rock in both hands, was staring around, looking for something to do with it. When he heard the car engine and turned to see a whitey sitting right in front of him in a car, his eyes opened wide and he made ready to smash the rock through the windscreen on top of me. I looked up at him, making pleading gestures with my hands. The car was still. We locked eyes for a couple of seconds, then abruptly he lowered the rock and gestured with his thumb down the street, shouting ‘Go!’

I sped off, a couple of rocks bouncing loudly but harmlessly off the car roof, but the end of the street was blocked by a wall of young men, making a human chain, presumably waiting for the riot police (and news cameras) to arrive. A shower of rocks greeted my approach, though only one connected, hitting the car bonnet and rolling off. I slowed down, searched for someone to make eye contact with, found a gaze in the human chain and held it with my own, taking my hands off the wheel and making the same pleading gestures as before. It worked. After a moment’s hesitation, in which another two rocks hit the car, the man – who was older than the others, perhaps in his mid-thirties – slipped his arm from the man next to him, made a space in the line and gestured for me to go through. I saw him mouth the words, ‘Quickly, quickly’. The ranks behind grudgingly made way, striking the car with hands, weapons and shouting ‘Kill the Boer! One Settler One Bullet!’ But they let me through. Once on the other side I floored it until I was out of the town centre and making for the suburb where I was staying, listening to the noise of police sirens and helicopters heading back towards the trouble. Later that day, I learned that several people had been killed by the mob.

So many violent incidents followed that year of 1993 that they began to blur into one another. By the time my year was up I had not only failed, for the third time now, to get to the Kalahari, I had not even managed to make contact with my coloured Loxton relatives. Instead, I returned home to London exhausted, feeling that I had run out of luck, doubtful if I would ever return to the land of my fathers.

Eighteen months later, however, I was back, this time to write a guidebook covering the three countries just to the north of South Africa: Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. By then, 1995, the memory of those violent times in South Africa had faded a little, and my determination to find the Bushmen had reasserted itself. After all, the three countries I had to cover encompassed most of the Kalahari.

This time I was not travelling alone, but with my girlfriend, Kristin, a Californian. By a happy accident we managed to borrow a Land-Rover, the vehicle necessary for penetrating Bushman country. There were to be no detours this time. We picked up the vehicle in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, just around the corner from the Ausspanplatz, the town square where, as a boy, my grandfather Robbie had earned pennies by holding the horses of the farmers when they came to town. Two sweaty driving days later, we arrived at the tiny outpost town of Tsumkwe in Eastern Bushmanland, gateway to the ‘deep Kalahari’.

I had been told, during that previous trip to South Africa, that if you drove about fifteen kilometres from Tsumkwe, you would see some big baobabs rising above the thorns to the south. A track would then appear, leading off towards them. And somewhere at the end of that track were villages of the Ju’/Hoansi Bushmen, who still lived almost entirely the traditional way, by hunting and gathering. We drove through Tsumkwe and out to the east, following these instructions. Sure enough, after twenty minutes or so, several great baobabs rose above the bush away to the right; vast, grey, building-sized trees topped with strangely foreshortened branches. The track appeared. We turned down it. The bush crowded in on either side of the vehicle, wild and lushly green from a season of good rain, swallowing us instantaneously.

We made camp under the largest of the great baobabs, an obese monster almost a hundred feet high, got a fire going and put some water on to boil. Looking around at the surrounding bush, which hereabouts was open woodland, we saw the grass standing tall and green in the little glades and clearings. Everything was in leaf, in flower. Fleshy blooms drifted down from the stunted branches of the baobab, making a faint plop as they landed on the sandy ground below. The blossoms had a strong scent, like over-ripe melon. And then there was a crunch of feet on dead leaves. We turned. Two Bushmen had walked into the clearing.

* Village council.

* Traditional African round, thatched hut.

3 Under the Big Tree

In front walked a lean young man, wearing jeans and a torn white T-shirt, and whose sharp, finely drawn features made one think of a little hawk. Behind him came a shorter, grizzle-headed grandfather with a small, patchy goatee, dressed only in a skin loincloth. Above this curved a rounded belly – though not of fat. Rather it was as if the stomach, under its hard abdominal wall, had been stretched and trained to accommodate great feasts when times were good, as they seemed to be now, with the bush green and abundant with wild fruits. Both men had the golden, honey-coloured skin of full-blooded Bushmen. They stood facing us under the vast tree, silent, as if waiting for us to acknowledge their arrival. ‘Hi,’ I said. Kristin smiled.

Smiling shyly, the younger man stepped closer, into conversational range, and said in slow, perfect English: ‘I am Benjamin. And this is /Kaece [he pronounced it ‘Kashay’], the leader of Makuri village. You are welcome here.’

I had assumed that I would have to get by with signs and gesticulation, so it was startling to be addressed in my own language. Kristin and I got up, told the man Benjamin our names and offered him and /Kaece some coffee, which they accepted. Benjamin squatted down by our fire, while the older man took a seat on a buttress-like bit of baobab trunk, which jutted out from the main body of the tree like a small, solid table, and watched with frank, open curiosity, his eyes round like an owl’s.

‘Where did you learn English?’ I asked, trying to open a conversation, and hoping it wouldn’t sound rude, too direct.

‘Mission School,’ answered Benjamin, holding his coffee cup in both hands and sipping gently. ‘In Botswana,’ and he gestured to the east.

‘Perhaps you have some sugar?’ he added. ‘We like our coffee sweet.’ He smiled. Only when four spoonfuls had been deposited into each mug did he give a thumbs-up sign, turn to me again and repeat: ‘So, you are welcome.’

I looked at this young, articulate man with his perfect English and his good, if slightly frayed, clothes. I noticed that he was wearing Reeboks. ‘Are you from Makuri too?’ I said, gesturing back towards where he and the old man had come from.

‘No,’ said Benjamin. ‘I live at Baraka.’

‘Baraka?’

‘Yes. The field headquarters for the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-operative.’ He pronounced the official-sounding words slowly, as if they did not sit easily on his tongue, using the monotone of one who must mentally translate the words before speaking. ‘Maybe twenty kilometres from here … I am a field officer, an interpreter.’

‘The Nyae Nyae what? What’s that?’ I asked, never having heard of it before.

‘An organisation, you know, an NGO, non-government organisation, aid and development.’ His voice was sleepy, hypnotic. ‘But it’s a problem there. Many problems. Sometimes these people say they want us to be farmers. Then another one comes and says no, we should be hunters. Too many foreign people always telling, telling, telling … They don’t ask us what we want.’ Benjamin’s tone became more vehement: ‘We the Ju’/Hoansi’; pronouncing the name ‘jun-kwasi’, with a loud wet click on the ‘k’.

‘The people round here,’ I ventured, ‘are they farmers then? Do they still hunt?’

‘Oh yes, they are hunting. There is a lot of game here – kudus, you know, wildebeests, gemsboks, everything …’ He took a sip of coffee. Dusk was falling and the birds had ceased their song. He was waiting for me to speak again.

‘Do you still have those skills? I mean, do you still hunt?’ I eyed his Western clothes apprehensively.

Benjamin smiled, inclined his head. ‘Yes, even me, I still have the skills.’

‘Tomorrow …’ I said, suddenly emboldened. ‘Would you take us hunting?’

Benjamin smiled again, a smile that seemed to say he knew that this question had been coming. Perhaps I wasn’t the first to ask. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow at dawn we will come for you. We will walk far. Do you have water bottles?’

I looked over at Kristin, whose slim, black-eyed face, tanned dark beneath her freckles, was as excited as my own. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Yes, we’ll bring everything we need …’

Ten minutes later the two men had walked off into the dusk, the low murmur of their voices carried back to us on the breeze.

It was a hot night, full of flying insects. Small beetles, whirring into the firelight, committed suicide in our cooking pot. Occasionally, while eating our rice stew, we would crunch down on a hard-boiled wing-case. We didn’t care, so elated were we, but turned in early so as to be up before dawn, ready for the hunt. Hunting with the Bushmen. It was finally going to happen.

In the dim pre-dawn the bush came alive with the rustlings of small animals and strange chirruping sounds. The earth smelled greenly alive. It was just cool enough to raise a faint gooseflesh on the arms – a luxury when one thought of the heat to come. We made up the fire and brewed coffee, nursing our excitement, and listening to the chatter and whistle of the waking bush.

Imperceptibly, the blue darkness paled, and there came a lull in the birdsong. The pale light in the clearing blushed slowly from blue to rose, from rose to pink, with here and there a wisp of shining, gilded cloud, reflecting the still unrisen sun. Then, with sudden, astonishing speed, the sky became a vast roof of hammered gold and the sun itself came rising above the black boughs of the eastern bush.

But no one appeared in the clearing. We got the fire going again, made more coffee. Still no one came. Half an hour later, buzzing with the strong camp-brew, we could contain ourselves no longer, but picked up our day-packs, water bottles and cameras and went to find the nyore (village), which we knew lay a half-mile or so through the thick scrub.

We found Makuri village still sleeping. As we entered the circle of tiny, beehive huts, only the nyore’s pack of weaselly, starveling dogs were up to greet our arrival. They rushed towards us, barking. But despite the noise, no one appeared from the huts. We stood sheepishly in the centre of the village, throwing small stones at the dogs to keep them off. It was long past dawn now. The first heat was in the sun. Already some animals would be slinking into shady cover for the day. Were we too late? Had the hunters forgotten us and left already?

The rib-thin dogs began to fight among themselves – one had found a bloody section of tortoise-shell and the others wanted it. They chased and fought around the huts, yapping louder and louder until at last a flap in the low doorway of one of the little huts opened, and a wrinkled face appeared. Old man /Kaece crawled out, straightened stiffly, shouted at the animals to shut up and threw a tin mug at the nearest. He stretched luxuriously, raising his hands above his head, sticking out his hard belly and closing his eyes with the bliss of it. He yawned, then looked our way and, as if noticing us for the first time, nodded to us while energetically scratching his balls inside his xai and hawking up a great gob of phlegm. He spat it out, leant forward to examine the colour, and nodded, as if pleased with what he saw. Then, his morning ritual done, he shuffled over to the next-door hut and banged on the side.

There was a muffled noise from within and Benjamin’s head appeared, his sharp, handsome features bleared with sleep and, I realised later when near enough to smell his breath, with liquor. He crawled out, his good, store-bought clothes rumpled from being slept in. He yawned, looked at us vaguely, as if surprised to find us there. Then a pretty young woman with seductive almond eyes, and an ostrich-eggshell necklace draped over her breasts, ducked out of the opening in the beehive hut behind him, saw us, giggled, and darted away out of sight. Benjamin watched her go, stretching his lower back and obviously making an effort to collect his thoughts.

He nodded at us, looking irritated: ‘OK, yes. I’ll be with you now, now.’ He went to a tree at the edge of the huts and hidden by the thick trunk, urinated in a loud, splashing stream before returning and ducking back inside the hut’s low doorway to reappear a few moments later with his hunting kit. A bow of light-coloured wood, a quiver of arrows made from a hollowed-out root, a digging stick and a short spear, all hanging conveniently over his right shoulder in a bag made from a whole steenbok skin. He went over to another hut, banged on it, and roused a smaller, even slighter-built young man, similarly bleary and clad in T-shirt, jeans and running shoes. This, said Benjamin, was his co-hunter Xau; he turned to the smaller man and said something in Ju/’Hoansi, then looked back at us: ‘Let’s go.’

A moment later we were trotting awkwardly behind the two fit, fleet men, out of the village and into the tall grasses. Despite having just been roused from drunken sleep, they moved fast and fluidly, in deceptively small steps, seeming almost to glide above the ground, so smooth was their stride. Benjamin and Xau cast what seemed only the most cursory glances at the ground as they walked. Every few yards we would come upon a narrow track of red or yellow dust criss-crossed with hoof and paw prints. ‘See,’ Benjamin stopped and pointed. ‘That steenbok, we want him.’ Following his gaze I nodded sagely, though I couldn’t distinguish one track from the next. ‘This morning,’ I said hesitatingly, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to take you away from your wife. I know you’ve been away in Baraka …’

Benjamin looked at me blankly, then away, stifling a grin. ‘That’, he said, ‘was not my wife.’ He turned quickly and walked on.

A moment later he stopped short, crouched and turned his head, motioning for us to get down too. ‘See’, he whispered, pointing ahead. Through a gap in the thicket I saw a small antelope head turn in our direction for a brief second – all flickering ears, limpid, deep brown eyes and little, straight horns – then, reassured that there was no danger, it dipped to graze again. It was a steenbok, a notoriously shy, alert, nervous antelope and we were very close, not twenty yards away.

Xau crept noiselessly up to Benjamin and, using a fluent, silent language of the hands, enquired what he should do. Benjamin replied in the same way, the fingers of one hand making precise gestures against the palm of the other, and Xau crawled off to the left, making a slight noise that caused the antelope to look his way – away from us.

Slowly, so slowly it almost hurt to watch, Benjamin reached back into his shoulder bag for the bow and quiver. Unscrewing the quiver’s cap of stiffened hide he noiselessly shook out an arrow – sticky and dark below its small steel tip with a poison made from mashed beetle larvae mixed with saliva. He fitted the arrow to his bow string and rose to a half-standing position. One swift movement lifted the bow and poised the arrow to eye level. Leaning forward from the hips, Benjamin looked directly down the shaft at the antelope, who still grazed blithe and unaware. Up arced the arrow, soundlessly covering the intervening yards between us and the steenbok to hiss into the grass behind it. The head and neck flew up, making – for a brief second – a frozen, alarmed silhouette. Then it took off, disappearing into the trees in three great bounds. Benjamin shrugged, smiling a little sheepishly, and went to retrieve his arrow.

Much later, as the morning heated up towards humid noon, we sighted a group of red hartebeest in a glade of sour plum trees. Large, the size of horses, they are one of Africa’s oddest-looking antelope. Their extremely narrow faces taper to barely two inches across at the muzzle. Their eyes stick out and their short horns jut forward in a strange, double-kink. At Benjamin’s whispered order, we crouched down a second time. ‘They’ll come this way. We must wait.’ Next to us, a large, talcum-powder white mushroom was growing from a red termite mound. Benjamin reached out and picked it, breaking the white flesh into long sections which he silently offered us. They tasted of lightly smoked cheese, and we munched for a minute or two in happy silence. Then the hunters’ faces registered sudden alarm, and with curt gestures they told us to lie flat. Hoofbeats, growing louder. I raised my head and saw the heads and horns of two hartebeest rising and dipping at a canter straight down the trail on which we were crouched.

The first animal burst through the grasses right on top of us and, seeing us, plunged to a halt and reared. Benjamin leapt to his feet and let fly his arrow. There was a blur of hooves, red-coloured hide and dust; the beasts wheeled and were gone. ‘Did you hit it?’ I was shouting with excitement. Benjamin leant down in the grass and came up with the arrow in his hand. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. Xau let fly a torrent of abuse. Laughing, Benjamin translated: ‘He says I am shit!’

By now the heat was mounting – the animals would start lying up in the shade. To continue hunting would probably be fruitless. Benjamin turned us north, back to Makuri. After a few minutes, I asked, ‘So how often do you manage a kill?’

He sighed. ‘A big animal, with bows and arrows like this? Maybe one time in a month.’

‘So what do you live on the rest of the time?’

‘Roots, berries, wild fruits …’ Benjamin’s voice trailed off, then became suddenly vehement. ‘We need money – not just for food. There are many problems here, man, many. There are cattle herders from Botswana – the Herero – coming in here, and nothing to stop them because we have no power, no money. And the young people going to the town to drink and not learning the skills because they say that this life is finished. Yes, we need money.’ He paused. ‘Maybe people like you – tourists – might come here and see our life. There is money in this, I think?’

So, as we walked, we hatched a plan. When I returned to Windhoek and after that to London, I would try to find a safari company that would be prepared to work with the Ju’/Hoansi, bringing clients to experience what we had just experienced – but who would offer the Bushmen a share of the profits rather than just pay them to work as trackers and guides. I knew a company called Footprints, in Windhoek, who sometimes took people up to this region – Benjamin had himself mentioned them earlier, as if planting the seed in my mind. When I got back to the city I would go and talk to them, I promised. Then, for the contact in Britain, I thought of Safari Drive, the company who had lent us the vehicle. They had the contacts, moved in the circles that could attract moneyed clients, and were good people. Walking back along the trail I agreed with Benjamin that next summer – the Namibian winter – we would try and set up a prototype trip, get Safari Drive to organise some clients from England, and together we concocted a happy future.

Back at Makuri, we found a big white Toyota Land Cruiser parked outside the circle of huts. Three white people – a young, dark-haired man and two women in their later thirties – stood talking to old man /Kaece. They looked irritated. As we walked up the narrow trail in the now stifling late-morning heat, the young white man turned, saw us and said half-angrily, half-jokingly, in an accent that sounded American or Canadian: ‘Benjamin! Where the fuck have you been? We’ve been looking for you for hours. Get in the car!’

Without a word Benjamin left us, went off to his hut, came out with a small holdall, and got into the car where the three whites were now waiting, gunning the engine impatiently. They hadn’t introduced themselves, but I guessed that they must be from Baraka – the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-operative field headquarters where Benjamin had told us he worked. A few minutes later they were gone, Benjamin giving us a quick wave from the back seat as the Land Cruiser disappeared round a bend in the rutted track.

Immediately old man /Kaece and young Xau turned on us and began demanding money, thrusting out their hands and jutting their chins aggressively. The two men – one old, one young – shared a clear family resemblance: the same sharp neat nose, the same eyes that were half mischievous, half soulful. Benjamin, though taller, had also shared this look. Were they all related? I reached into the pocket of my shorts, took out some notes and counted out into the old man’s hand the price I had agreed with Benjamin the evening before – ten Namibian dollars for the night’s camping, ten for Xau and ten for Benjamin. I hoped Xau would give Benjamin his share.

Placated, the younger man drifted back to his hut, but /Kaece took my arm and led me to his hut where his wife sat, scraping the flesh from the inside of a tortoise shell. Seeing us, she rose, a tiny frail figure, with an old duk* round her head, several strings of white ostrich-eggshell beads around her wattled old neck, and a beaded steenbok skin knotted at one shoulder. A small dark nipple peeked cheekily out of a tear in the hide. She took off one of the necklaces and offered it to Kristin, while /Kaece said ‘Twenty, twenty’, in Afrikaans. A few minutes later we had bought not only the necklace, but the tortoise shell, a beautiful hunting bow with a set of poison arrows in a quiver, a digging stick, a skin bag to put game in, two sticks for making fire, and a short stabbing spear. A small crowd gathered, each with something to sell. Unable to resist, we saw our roll of notes shrink and vanish. When there was no money left, the people lost interest and melted away among the huts again, leaving us alone.

Standing there with all our newly-bought artifacts, Kristin and I felt suddenly self-conscious, glutted, almost ashamed. We turned and began the walk back to camp. The hunt had been the true fulfilment of a dream. Benjamin had made us feel accepted, respected, welcome. Yet his sudden disappearance and our subsequent fleecing had revealed, with brutal honesty, what we actually represented here: money.

We lay the rest of the day under the great baobab, watching the heavy, sweet-smelling blossoms glide earthward from the high, misshapen branches, plotting how to carry out the promise I had made. As evening fell we heard voices again, and a flurry of children broke upon the camp in a small, joyous wave. Their parents followed, led by old man /Kaece: about twenty adults in all, the men mostly in ragged shop-bought clothes, the women more traditional and neater in a mixture of skins, head scarves and Western dresses with Bushman touches; a fringe of coloured beads tagged onto the hem, or necklaces of ostrich eggshell, black porcupine quills or red wood draped round their necks and hanging over their printed cotton dresses. Most had babies, either slung around their back in a hide sling or a piece of old cloth, or else balanced at the hip, the nipple of a free-hanging breast plugged firmly in their mouths. The children flew back from us in a little flock, and formed a bright-eyed phalanx in the twilight under the great tree.

Using gestures, old man /Kaece told us that we should build another fire to the right of the tree, where the clearing was wider. We did so, lit the wood and sat down with the people in a circle, the adults talking casually among themselves, pulling out little pipes made of bone or hollowed-out rifle bullets. After first asking us through sign language if we had any tobacco, they disappointedly stuffed the pipes from their own small hoards, before relaxing again, laughing and joking. The children snuggled in close to their parents, staring in silence at the rising flames, whose heat, on that summer evening, was enough to raise a sweat even from several yards away.

Old man /Kaece’s wife began to sing. Her first, quavering alto note pierced the air above the fire’s crackle and silenced the happy chatter. She began to clap, alone at first, then slowly being joined by the other women around the fire. One moment there was a sporadic melody, a few hand-claps among the general talk, the next the night was alive with rhythm and song, the fire roofed with sound. As the song swelled, old man /Kaece rose stiffly to his feet and, in the flickering circle between the singers and the fire began, slowly, to dance. A shuffling forward step, a stamp, a pause, a sudden crouch, knees bent, like a hunter surprised by the sudden sight of his quarry. And then, through subtle shifts of posture and expression, he became the quarry. Tossing his head, stamping a foot that, through movement and shadow-light, was transformed into a hoof. Snorting once, twice, as if blowing flies away from his nose, /Kaece was – in that flickering firelight – unmistakably a gemsbok.* A dignified, powerful bull, wary yet confident of his physical power, veteran of fights against other bulls and against those predators unwise enough to try and hunt him. One by one, the other men rose and followed /Kaece’s circular progress, each man becoming beast as the dance took him.

As the song changed, the men transformed themselves into other creatures – ostriches, giraffes, lions. Sometimes /Kaece or one of the other men sat down to rest while the others danced on. Sometimes the children would rise and try a few steps or the youngest women would lay their infants aside and dance opposite each other, bobbing their bodies, dipping their heads, rolling their eyes and looking at each other sideways on – like doves courting on the ground. Hours passed, until our palms became sore from clapping and, on a final downbeat everyone brought their hands spontaneously together, and the dance was done.

‘Ah, so you’ve been at Makuri?’, asked Nigel, the white ranger in charge of Tsumkwe’s Nature Conservation Department office, when we dropped in there on our way back to civilisation. Thin, sunburnt, and gnarled by the harsh Namibian climate, his gruff exterior was belied by the kindly twinkle to his eye. In his shorts he looked like a lanky, overgrown schoolboy.

‘How’s /Kaece doing, the old skelm [rascal]? Did he get all your money? Benjamin took you hunting, eh? Now that’s a treat, man. Real bow and arrow stuff, eh? Jasus, I wish I got time to do that.’

I told him about the tourism plan Benjamin and I had dreamt up. Would he – or at least, his department – support such a venture?

‘Eco-tourism with the Bushmen, eh? You won’t be the first to try it, I’m telling you. Bet Benjamin didn’t tell you that, did he? Well, good luck to you. Something has to work, eh? Ja,’ he grinned, ‘I can see you’ve got the Bushman bug. You can always tell when the Bushies have got hold of someone. You’re finished, man. Toast. Done. Hey, do you like painting?’

To our surprise he took us home to his shabby government-issue house, gave us cups of tea and showed us a collection of surprisingly good, if unfinished, wildlife paintings: a hook-beaked, grey-feathered goshawk; a brooding, hungry leopard; sketches of a spiral-horned kudu. ‘Ja, once the Bushmen get into you man, that’s it. I should know. Spend half my time trying to keep them out of jail. Maybe I should give you some background. Do you like Baroque music?’

So, as Vivaldi’s lute and mandolin concertos poured out of his dusty stereo speakers, and the Namibian sun beat down outside, Nigel filled us in. The situation with the Ju’/Hoansi was complicated. Their area – officially known as Eastern Bushmanland – was the last place in Namibia where Bushmen could hunt and gather at will. But as Benjamin had told us, an aggressive cattle-owning tribe called the Herero was moving in. They were not Namibian Hereros, as most people in that tribe were, but had arrived a few years back from Botswana. They were the descendants of warriors who had fought the Germans back in the 1900s, when Namibia was still a fledgling colony, and who had, after their inevitable defeat, been driven out into the waterless Kalahari to die. A small number had made it to the natural springs near Ghanzi in Botswana and established a Herero population there. The present German government, anxious to atone for its century-old war crime, had now repatriated five thousand of these Botswana Herero in Namibia.

But, said Nigel, slurping his tea, they had not been welcomed by their fellow tribespeople, whose grazing was already over-stretched and who felt they could not accommodate the cattle that the newcomers had brought with them over the border. So the Botswana lot had been placed in a refugee camp at Gam, south of Bushmanland, there to wait while the Namibian government decided what to do with them. It was from Gam that the Herero families were filtering into the Ju’/Hoansi territory. ‘You can hardly blame them,’ admitted Nigel; ‘They’re desperate for land, poor sods. But they kill all the game as they come and they treat the Bushmen like shit. No, man, it’s a bad scene. You get your tourism thing working if you can. The Bushmen need all the help they can get. And not just here – it’s the same story right across the Kalahari.’

Back in Windhoek we found that, by some fortuitous coincidence, Charles Norwood, one of the Safari Drive owners, had flown in unexpectedly on business. We went straight down to his hotel, told him all that had happened and he, infected by our excitement, accompanied us next day to a meeting at the Footprints office, and from there to the Nyae Nyae Foundation (the headquarters, despite its confusingly different name, of the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-op, for whom Benjamin worked). Hearing our proposal, Wendy Viall, the good-hearted South African lady in charge, agreed, in principle, to the plan. We would come back the following year, to make the prototype trip. Footprints would act as the local operator and, assuming the idea caught on, they would then continue to bring clients in, giving /Kaece and his people at Makuri a proper profit-share. Allan, the Footprints guy, talked about giving them as much as 60 per cent.

The following year, I found myself and a friend, Tom, driving hard for two days to rendezvous with Benjamin at Baraka, the Windhoek office of the Nyae Nyae Foundation having radioed him to say that we were coming. When we arrived at the remote, dusty field headquarters, a collection of outsize rondavels and workshops surrounded by an endlessness of dry wilderness, Benjamin seemed impressed that we had made it, and happy to see me. Sadly, he could not get away from his work in order to accompany us, as he had hoped, but he had arranged for three of Makuri’s best hunters to take us out: Bo, a fiftyish, stick-thin man; another in his mid-thirties called Fanzi; and Xau, a lad of eighteen or so who Bo was training as a hunter. Bo, said Benjamin, was known as the finest hunter in the whole district and Fanzi was not far off in skill. There would be a language barrier but, as Benjamin reassured us: ‘They will make sure you don’t die. Just follow them and you’ll be OK.’

It was the dry season again, and the bush was parched and waterless. Elephants had moved into the area, and were hanging around the waterholes that the villagers used. We had encountered a small group of them a quarter-mile or so from the big baobab when we bumped in down the slow dirt track. Elephant spoor was all round the house-sized tree. For this reason, as the stars came out and the temperature began to plummet towards zero, the three hunters told Benjamin that it would be best to hunt eastward, away from the waterholes. It was too dangerous to risk an encounter with the elephants on foot. As Benjamin translated this to me, a question formed in my mind. What about other dangerous game like lions? The previous year, Nigel, the wildlife officer in Tsumkwe, had told me that there were several prides in the area. How did the hunters propose to make sure we avoided them, and what should we do if we ran into one by chance?

‘You won’t,’ said Benjamin.

‘How do you know?’

‘The healers, doctors in the village, ask the lions where they are and then they tell the hunters not to go that way.’

‘What do you mean they ask the lions? How can they ask the lions?’

Benjamin looked down, appearing not to want to answer. Tom stirred the pot full of pasta and soya mince, looking on. At last Benjamin spoke, sounding uncomfortable. ‘Sometimes they can ask the lions.’

With that he turned back to the three hunters, veering the conversation away to talk about a number of kudu that had moved into the area between Makuri and Baraka. But the enigmatic words lingered, tantalisingly, in the night air. Healers that talked to lions.

The next day we followed the three hard, athletic men as they made several unsuccessful stalks at the kudu herd that were – just as they had predicted – browsing the bush east of Makuri. Then they abruptly changed spoor, and brought us, after another long walk, upon the corpse of a wildebeest. How had they known it was there? Had this been what we had been searching for all along – maybe a beast they had shot with a poison arrow the day before*?

Fanzi, Bo and Xau walked straight up to the swollen, cow-sized carcass and, grabbing it by the horns and tail, wrestled its stiff, bloated form out into the open and onto its back. They stripped to the waist and produced small, home-made knives from their game bags. With a surgeon’s precision, Bo slit the belly, releasing a belch of rotting gas that made Tom and I gag even where we sat a few yards off. Out spilled yellow-white, reeking intestines heavy with dung, which Fanzi rolled away to one side. Then, using his knife, Bo severed the great muscles, tendons and ligaments of haunch and shoulder, rotating the four great joints so that they dislocated neatly and easily from their bright, white sockets. Fanzi, meanwhile, squeezed the dung from the intestines, and placed these, along with the large, feathery tripes, on the lower branches of a sapling, where they hung like a line of soiled laundry drying in the sun. Xau, equally busy, hefted the heavy joints away and placed them on the lower branches of a sturdy thorn, so that they should not be dirtied with sand.

Next came the liver. As soon as it had been cut out, the three men stopped work, made a quick fire by rubbing two sticks together on a wad of dry grass and, grinning and chatting happily, ate this, the hunter’s portion. Then, the liver consumed, the three hunters produced their hollowed-out bone and old rifle-shell pipes and we all settled down to a serious smoke.

Our small gift of tobacco had closed the gap between us a little. Until now the hunters had communicated with us only insofar as to occasionally look back and check we were still with them. At no point had any of them looked us in the eye. Now, after that first smoke, every few minutes, one of the three hunters would glance up from his bloody work and give us a shy smile. After half an hour, Xau looked up enquiringly and ran a reddened finger along the blade of his knife, followed by a dismissive gesture. Tom, quick to understand, grabbed his bag, rooted inside for a moment and handed over his own pen-knife. Snapping it open, Xau began to cut the flesh, hanging it next to the other meat on the branches in long, festive-looking red strips, letting them dry in the desiccated air. They blackened, shrivelled and shrank with incredible speed, the moisture in them evaporating almost as one watched.

The wildebeest had long ceased to be recognisable as an animal. Even the horned head, split open with little hand-axes like the ones that had adorned the walls of my parents’ London house, now lay in pieces, the brains and the tongue drying alongside the shredded muscles and organs. The hide had been left lying in the sun, little pools of blood in its folds attracting dainty blue butterflies who drifted down to drink. They flew upwards in a cloud as the three men grabbed the hide and cut it into strips and sections and fashioned it, ingeniously, into three knapsacks, sewn together with the stripped fibres of a dry, green reed-like plant (sansevieria) that grew nearby. The half-dried, much-reduced, meat strips were then stuffed into the newly made bags – the wildebeest would be taken back to Makuri in its own hide.

The haunches and forequarters, too heavy to carry back this time, were stashed in the spiky branches of a thorn tree, out of reach of predators and scavengers, to be collected later. Then Bo squatted down and made a small depression in the sand, filling it with two inches of water from my canteen. He washed the knives in it quickly, handing Tom’s back cleaner than it had been before. And after a quick rub-down with sand, the three men, up to their elbows in blood and dung for the past two hours, had shed all trace of their work. Shouldering the hide knapsacks and impaling the racks of ribs on their digging sticks, they set off, single file, on the trek home, leaving only a pile of dung, already drying into fibres, where the wildebeest had lain.

It was a long walk, and hot. The hunters stopped often to ease their shoulders from the weight and their faces from the flies that buzzed incessantly around the bloody loads. Tom and I offered tobacco and water around until both ran out. At the next stop Fanzi, pointing to a small, leafless twig poking up from the cracked earth, began hacking at the soil with his digging stick. A minute later he had unearthed a large, round tuber which, when cut, revealed white flesh dripping with water.

As we sat there, eating the succulent tuber, letting the moisture drip down our throats, there came a sharp, shrill cry from above. We looked up: two eagles were chasing a white goshawk out of their section of sky. Lighter and more agile, the goshawk spiralled up and out of reach into the dazzling blue, the heavier eagles flapping below in slow but unrelenting pursuit. We watched, silent, until all three had dwindled to mere dots, their fading, high-pitched cries floating down to where we sat on the dry earth. Bo, hefting his heavy, fly-blown load once more, creaked to his feet, and caught my eye. He smiled – his mouth turned down ironically at the corners – and pointed to himself, ‘Boesman,’ he said in Afrikaans, and shook his head, laughing.

That night, and the two that followed, the village feasted but still there was plenty of meat left over. The hunters, having provided food for the month, rested. We spent the remaining days playing with the children who turned up shyly each morning beneath our tree, or going out with the women to forage for wild foods. They showed us how well-stocked the Kalahari is with edibles, even in the parched dry season, leading us through the seemingly barren bush, and stooping every few minutes to pluck, dig, pick up foods until their skin aprons and ragged cotton skirts were filled with sweet moretlwa berries, tart, lemony baobab fruit, wild onions, tubers that looked like sweet potatoes, even nuts encased in dried piles of last year’s elephant dung. Sometimes they would make Tom and I climb on each other’s shoulders to pick caramel-tasting acacia gum from where it had bubbled out and dried between the forked branches of the thorn trees.

Back home, I published a piece on the trip in the Daily Telegraph, but the anticipated reaction did not come. No tourists rang up, anxious to book their own Bushman adventure. In fact, over the course of that year, 1996, things became decidedly worse for Bushmen right across the Kalahari. The Herero cattle herders trickled steadily into Nyae Nyae unopposed, slowly dispossessing the Ju’/Hoansi as they came. In Botswana, the government began a campaign of forcibly removing Bushmen from the vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve – an area the size of Switzerland that had been set aside specifically for the Bushmen in the early 1960s – and herding them into permanent settlements outside the reserve’s borders. Meanwhile, in central northern Namibia, the Hai//om Bushmen, who had been ejected from the vast Etosha National Park back in the 1970s, became so desperate at their landless state that they staged a demonstration outside the gates of the national park and were tear-gassed and put in jail.

A fledgling Bushman political organisation – called, aptly enough, First People of the Kalahari – emerged in Botswana and began attracting some press attention that year. But after a brief flare of publicity, the leader, John Hardbattle (the mixed-race son of a Nharo Bushman woman and an English rancher), died suddenly from stomach cancer, leaving the organisation leaderless and floundering. I had, it seemed, satisfied my childhood desire to meet and hunt with the Bushmen of my mother’s stories just as they were about to cease to exist.

That year I moved to the USA. While there I stumbled across a recent National Geographic which had a picture of two leopards on the cover and the title ‘A Place for Parks in the New South Africa’. Inside was a picture that stopped me in my tracks. It showed two Bushmen kneeling in the red sand beside the recumbent body of their father, an ancient man, toothless and obviously dying. According to the caption this was Regopstaan, patriarch of South Africa’s Xhomani Bushmen, the last remaining clan of traditionally living Bushmen left in the whole country. This clan, the caption explained, had lodged a land claim with the South African government, both for access to their old hunting grounds in that country’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, and to receive compensatory ground to live on outside the park fence.

I recalled how, three years before, I had driven to the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, hoping to find Bushmen, and had been told by the park staff that no Bushmen had existed in the region for decades. Now, looking at this picture in the National Geographic, I realised I had been misled. Not only had there been Bushmen in the region, but they had been ejected from the very park whose staff had denied their existence to me. Moreover, concluded the photograph’s caption, the park’s authorities were resisting the Bushman land claim. I rang the magazine’s editorial offices, and was put in touch with Roger Chennels, the South African human rights lawyer who had taken on the case. And he in his turn put me in touch with a woman called Cait Andrew in Cape Town who was the person who had first alerted him to the Xhomani cause. She confirmed that the staff at the park had indeed misled me. Bushmen had always lived in the area. In fact the official literature that accompanied the park’s declaration, back in the 1930s, had stated that its main aim was to protect the Bushman way of life as well as the game on which they relied – in fact classifying the Bushmen as game to be protected along with the rest of the wildlife. But that, she said, had changed with apartheid, which had reclassified the Bushmen as human (but the wrong kind of human) and had evicted them from the park in the 1970s. Under apartheid national parks were for whites only.

So the Xhomani had been surviving in the dunes outside the fence ever since, living in a state of near beggary, suffering every form of abuse, and falling victim to the inevitable by-products of despair, alcoholism and violence, as well as an almost complete breakdown of their culture. No longer able to forage at will, they lived by making crafts for tourists whose cars they waved down as they drove along the road to the park. Half the clan had gone to live in a private game reserve far to the south, where they existed as inmates in a human zoo, posing in their skins for tourists’ cameras. They had even lost their language and only a few of the older generation were still able to remember the Xhomani tongue. The rest spoke mostly in Nama or Afrikaans, the language of those who had dispossessed them.

Under Mandela’s New South Africa, the clan had at last come above ground, and had been persuaded to file this new land claim. For the first time, they were being taken seriously by a government. Old ‘Madiba’ (the popular name for Mandela) had even invited Dawid Kruiper, the leader of the Xhomani since old Regopstaan had died, to present his case personally over tea at the presidential residence in Cape Town. Theoretically, there was every chance that they might win. But there was stiff opposition from the old order, in the person of the park’s chief warden and the National Parks Board as a whole (which was, Cait Andrew confided, still an enclave of entrenched Afrikanerdom). On top of this, the Xhomani land claim was being opposed from another quarter, entirely unconnected with the national park. A group of local coloured farmers, known as the Mier, were claiming that, back in the 1960s, a large tract of their traditional land had been appropriated by the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. If the Xhomani had a land claim, they said, then so had they. To complicate matters further, it seemed that much of the land which the lawyers said should be given to the Xhomani in compensation for what they had lost to the park, actually belonged to these Mier farmers, and stood to be forcibly purchased from them should the Bushmen win the claim. Land is everything in South Africa: the thought of giving up land to Bushmen, even with due compensation, was, said Cait, pure anathema to the Mier. They had resolved to fight the Xhomani land claim to the last.

But should the Xhomani win, however long that took to happen, they would set a political precedent for the other countries of the Kalahari, where Bushmen were still being dispossessed on a grand scale. She and the lawyer Roger Chennels were part of a growing movement to reverse this. That year for example, a new, Namibian-based Bushman NGO called WIMSA* had been formed with German and Scandinavian donor money. This organisation was paying the legal fees for the Xhomani land claim and financing a smaller NGO called SASI (South African San Institute) which now represented the Bushmen in South Africa. WIMSA had also announced its intention to campaign on behalf of Bushmen everywhere – South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, even Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. But it was the Xhomani land claim that needed to be won in order to set the necessary precedent. The tide of history – the centuries of dispossession and oppression – was finally turning. If ever there was a time to be chronicling events on the Kalahari, Cait assured me, it was now.

* Scarf.

* A big antelope of the Kalahari – also known as the South African oryx.

* Bushmen use slow-acting poisons, made from certain roots mixed with a crushed beetle larva, to bring down big animals. The lethal poison can take up to twenty-four hours to finally kill, during which time the hunter must either track it or make sure that he can return next day and find the carcass. The poison is rendered harmless when the flesh is cooked.

* Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa.

PART TWO THE MANTIS, THE MOUSE AND THE BIRD

4 Regopstaan’s Prophecy

Late the following year – October 1997 – I arrived at the Red House, or Rooi Huis as the Xhomani called it, with notebook, camera and recording equipment, accompanied by Cait Andrew, Chris, a film-maker friend who wanted to make a documentary about the land claim, and a truck full of gifts with which to buy goodwill. We even had a driver – Andrew, a tall, bearded white South African, to pitch our tents, cook our food and ferry us around while we conducted our research among the Xhomani, who lived on the outskirts of Welkom, a bedraggled settlement of poor coloured farming folk some ten kilometres south of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. ‘We’re here,’ said Cait, as we pulled up outside a red-daubed, open-fronted shack – the Red House. A barrage of yelling, runny-nosed, grinning children, some naked, some in ragged shorts, ran up shouting and laughing, as we got out, stiff from the long drive, and began to look about us. Chris went to the back of the Toyota to fetch his camera. Cait and I looked down at the kids. A small, greying man with a squashed nose and eyes lost behind deep, mischievous wrinkles, came hobbling over from the house with a spryness that seemed at odds with his pronounced limp. He wore a bizarre mixture of clothing: a blue jacket striped with spangly gold lamé, above a xai, or loincloth of animal skin, his legs, chest and stomach all bare. ‘This,’ announced Cait, ‘is Dawid Kruiper, head of the Xhomani clan.’ He shook my hand and hers, squinting ingratiatingly, and said, ‘Ja, Ja Mama’.

Some ten or so adults pushed through the staring wall of children, also proffering hands. Cait made the introductions. There was Jakob, a handsome man with a beard and slightly dreadlocked hair, clad only in a xai, his lined face betraying an age of perhaps fifty, though his body was that of a twenty-year-old. Leana, 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 fascinated me as much as their wildness, their elusiveness.

Arriving 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 state, he might not outrun them. The lions, lying just too far off for a successful sprint, also could not move, for that might trigger a flight that they in their turn might not outrun. So predators and prey waited, immobile, patient, the sun beating savagely upon them while the flies buzzed and bit. A contest of patience and endurance.

Back at the Red House, when we told Dawid what we had seen, he laughed, gestured towards the fences that surrounded the little settlement and shrugged. Next to him Ou Anna, his ancient, wrinkled aunt (and the late Regopstaan’s sister), chimed in: ‘Life here is still good. We have the sand, the sunshine. Sometimes the white people come and help us. But there in the park – that, that is life.’

Chris and I wanted to know if it would be possible to organise a hunting and gathering foray for the Xhomani, which we could perhaps film, maybe on one of the surrounding farms, which were still semi-wild. Cait said that there was an old coloured farmer some kilometres to the south who was known to be better disposed towards the Bushmen than others in the area and who sometimes allowed them on his land. She consulted Dawid, who said he thought the man might be persuaded, for a fee, to let them try their luck across his dunes. After a brief, shouted exchange with the rest of the clan, the senior men, Dawid and Jakob, along with Dawid’s youngest son Pien, a tautly muscled youth in his early twenties, squeezed themselves into the back of the Toyota, along with Sanna, Leana, Dawid’s daughter Oulet and assorted kids. The men brought bows and the women digging sticks and skin bags. The back of the vehicle was stifling hot, but everyone squashed themselves in cheerily, elated at the prospect of an unexpected outing, laughing and joking in rapid-fire Afrikaans and clicking Nama.

The farmer, who lived in a two-roomed concrete block cottage with a battered old car and donkey cart parked in the yard, turned out to be amenable: for two hundred rand, he said, Dawid and his people could spend the afternoon on his land, and catch or gather whatever they could find, as long as it wasn’t a sheep. We paid, then drove up into the dunes. Around us the veld had been reduced to bare sand. Goats and sheep had stripped every low-growing bush almost to the ground. Clumps of desiccated grass and leafless thorn clung to the few sheltered hollows between the dunes. Yet still there was life – from one of these hollows a small steenbok went skipping away in front of us to the accompaniment of shouts and howls from the back. Did Dawid want to stop and hunt, we asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Drive on.’

We sighted a shack standing by itself in the hot dunes; a strange, crumpled construction, consisting of a sawn-in-half truck supporting a large tent of woven grasses. Outside, in its scant shade, squatted two Mier shepherds: middle-aged, sun-shrivelled men with bodies lean and gnarled as biltong* inside loose-fitting blue overalls, battered felt hats pulled down over their eyes. They showed no surprise at our approach, nor when Dawid told us to stop and we pulled up outside their shack.

Getting out of the suffocating vehicle was sweet relief – though the outside air was hardly cool. The two shepherds greeted Dawid familiarly. He squatted down in the shade next to them, pulled his tobacco pouch from his little skin shoulder-bag, and rolled up a cigarette with a torn piece of newspaper, making a perfectly symmetrical, fat cone that he licked smooth with one long stroke of the tongue before lighting it from a match offered wordlessly by one of the shepherds. Then, as we whites hovered in the background, the three men began to talk, asking each other how they were, how their families were, how the sheep had been. Was there still grazing? Were jackals or leopards stealing the stock?

This was obviously going to take some time, so I drifted over to the shade of a small thorn tree where two gaunt, droop-headed horses, a grey and a dark bay, stood swishing and stamping at the flies. Above my head, hanging from one of the spiky branches, I suddenly noticed the freshly skinned body of a young goat, dead eyes staring from a peeled face down which dripped blood and clear fluid. It gave off the rich, sickly smell of meat left out too long in the sun. Flies crawled up and down it, clustering at the eyes and nostrils. I left the tree and wandered back towards Dawid and the two shepherds, who were still conversing quietly. Cait, Andrew and Chris had also gravitated towards the trio. It looked as though they had finished their smoke. Abruptly, Dawid got up, and bid a quick, curt good-bye.

Driving away, Cait leaned back to shout through the glass partition – why had we stopped there? Dawid replied angrily, then spat. ‘He says he wanted to buy a sheep or a goat from them,’ translated Cait. ‘But they were asking too much. He’s annoyed, says the coloureds always try and rob the Bushmen.’ So this was no hunt, but a shopping expedition. If the National Park management were claiming that the Xhomani were no longer ‘real Bushmen’, that they had lost their ancient skills and their place in the Kalahari’s delicate ecological balance, Dawid seemed to be proving them right. When he next asked Andrew to stop the vehicle – by a particularly large dune – it was again neither to hunt nor gather but just to have another smoke. This time all the men and women – looking Bushmanlike enough with their xais, bare torsos and bows carried over the shoulder in the traditional way – climbed the dune, obviously relieved to be out of the truck, and sat up on the ridge, where there was a breeze, rolling newspaper zols (joints) and chatting quietly, completely ignoring us and seemingly impervious to the searing sun.

We got out of the car too. Cait caught my sour expression and smiled wryly: ‘There’s always another agenda with the Bushmen. It always happens like this – you arrange to do something and then the next thing you know you’re driving up and down the road giving this person a lift, waiting while that person goes off to buy some dope, then going back to pick up somebody else’s stuff and take it to some other place, until eventually you forget what it was you originally set out to do. They don’t often get a chance to be driven around, so when it comes they make the most of it. We’re just the taxi drivers. They tell you whatever you want to hear, then take total advantage.’

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