The Lost World of the Kalahari (9 page)

I woke up certain not only that I would live, but also with the whole of the lost world which had revolved around the little Bushman once more made accessible to me, as fresh and unimpaired as if no long years of neglect lay in between.

After this I wish I could say the way was open but I came out of three years of prison under the Japanese to go straight back on active service. I did not get leave until some years after the Japanese war had ended. I came back then to find the associations which had sustained me in war and prison irrevocably dissolved and I wandered, like a kind of Rip Van Winkle, into a strange new world with nine years of unshared and incommunicable experience separating me from it. I alternated between Africa and Europe in a state of suspended being like a ghost from some unquiet grave, shocked almost as much by the ruthlessness and brutalities of peace as I had been by those of war, deeply aware only of how privileged I was in being, even so uneasily, alive.

In this mood I volunteered for work of national importance in Africa and before long, guided like a sleep-walker in his dream, I found myself committed to a series of missions, the first of their kind, which led to my systematic exploring of the Kalahari. Then suddenly one night round our first camp-fire on my first post-war expedition, I found myself and my companions talking about the Bushman with great animation. In a flash the grim inarticulate years between the confused soldier and the child ceased to exist. And the scene was repeated night after night in every camp as we went deeper and more widely into the Kalahari. Soon the newcomers to the land caught the fever and I was struck by their spontaneous interest because it seemed to confirm that my interest was not purely subjective but valid also in the natural imagination of other men. Although none of my missions had anything to do with the Bushman, finding him became important to us all. Yet weeks passed before we saw any sign of him.

As we navigated our vehicles, like ships by the stars, across the sea of land I felt deeply it was not as empty of human beings as it looked. Our black servants and companions had the same feeling. Six weeks went by in which we covered some thousands of miles without meeting the Bushman. Then one evening at sundown, a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest known water, I came to a deep round pan in the central desert. It had obviously held water some weeks before and there, clear-cut in the blue clay of the dried-up bottom, was a series of tiny human footprints leading up the steep sides and vanishing in the sand underneath a huge storm-tree. As I stood there in the violet light looking at the neat little casts in clay I seemed to hear the voice of the old 'Suto herder of my childhood saying again, close to my listening ear: ‘His footprint, little master, is small and like no other man's and when you see it you know it at once from those of other men.'

It was clear that some weeks previously a party of authentic Bushmen had come to water at the pan. But though we camped there that night, and in the days that followed examined the country around, we saw no further sign of them. Sometimes, far from river, fountain or well, in the bed of steep old water-courses that have not run for centuries, we found the Bushman's light grass shelters leaning empty against banks of crimson sand: or one of his game-pits neatly dug, and the sands littered with the hair and bone of the animal. Once, some miles away from our camp, deep in the desert a fire suddenly flared up in the dark, was caught by the sterile west wind, and went flying past us like an overland night express. ‘
Massarwa!
Bushman!' the cry went up among our startled black companions. But as the weeks went by still we did not see him.

One evening, in a camp hurriedly pitched for shelter against the first violent storm of summer, I was watching the Gothic lightning strike at the reeling earth around us when, against a flash of flame on the horizon, I saw a movement above the line of bushes. I watched carefully and when the sheet-lightning flared purple in the smoking rain again I saw the silhouettes of two little heads peering intently at us.

Instantly I left the camp in the opposite direction, crept out into the storm, and worked my way around to the line of the bushes. I came out about thirty yards beyond the place I had marked. The noise of thunder, wind, and rain was at its height and greatly helped me. I rose carefully. Between me and the light of our fires indeed were two little Bushman heads. I crept up quietly, suddenly put my hands on their shoulders, said loudly: ‘Good day. I saw you from afar.'

The two little men fell over backwards with astonishment and, far from being upset, began laughing so much that they wriggled helplessly in the wet sand for a while unable to stand up. I took them into my camp and though none of us could speak their dialect we spent one of the happiest evenings I have ever known. I watched them eating the huge meal of roast springbuck, rice, and raisins which my wonderful old safari cook and friend, Simon Marenga, a Northern Rhodesian, had cooked for us, and the sight of their pure Bushman faces and bodies sent a warm feeling to my heart. I looked forward to days of their company. But when morning came the pair had vanished and not a footprint left by wind and rain to show which way they had gone.

On another occasion, during a halt to mend a wheel, on a day of steel, two little hunters suddenly appeared like reflections in a distorting mirror on the far face of the shining ridge. They trotted easily towards us in the manner my aunt had described so well, and came straight into our midst holding out before them the buck-skins they wanted to exchange for tobacco. We took them on with us in our trucks for awhile but again were unable to speak except by signs. The use and shape of our trucks was a complete puzzle to them so we had to lift them, like babies in arms, in and out of the vehicles. One of them, excited by a herd of buck he wanted to chase, hurled himself from the vehicle which was going at full speed to fall on to the sands, apparently knowing no other way of leaving it! Surprised, by signs, we asked if they never climbed the great desert trees to spy out game? They seemed astonished and indicated clearly that they would never do anything so unnecessary while the spoor of game was printed plainly in the sand for them to read. We then shot some game for them and saw them throw themselves, helpless with laughter, upon the sand when the first of the guns went off. As the sun began to sink, though we besought them to stay, they insisted on leaving us. I longed to accompany them but my mission was too exacting to allow it. Full of chagrin I watched them, each carrying a buck across his firm little shoulders, walk gracefully away from us into the sunset.

One afternoon, on another expedition, at a time of terrible drought we came across the footprints of one grown-up person and two small children. The manner of the spoor perturbed me greatly. I showed it to my tracker. He confirmed my fears, saying: ‘People in trouble.' Instantly we followed the spoor for six miles, while it became more faltering and desperate. At the edge of a great pan I felt certain it was made by people half-dead by thirst. We searched the hollow depression. It was waterless, and the dried-up mud in the bottom was cracked and dull like the scales of a dead fish. Then far away in the white flame of heat we saw three little blobs of brown fluttering like wounded birds. We found a Bushman woman with a baby strapped to her side and two little boys nearly dead of thirst staggering about. We gave them water. The woman drank nearly three gallons though she was careful to ration the children. Again we could not speak her dialect and had to make signs to her inviting her to stay. However she steadfastly refused. As soon as she had eaten, she filled all the empty ostrich egg-shells she carried in a leather shawl with water. I offered to come with her but, in a fever of agitation, she signed refusal. Then, apparently fully recovered, she picked up her baby and set off with the little boys, to vanish into the sand and the bush on the far side of the pan.

In the years that followed I had other brief and tantalizing encounters with the genuine Bushman. But I was too busy to pursue the matter independently to its own lawful conclusion. Instead I tried to persuade more fully qualified people, scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists to follow up this line of living research and go and live with the Bushman in order to find out, before it was too late, his way of spirit and life. It seemed a strange paradox that everywhere men and women were busy digging up old ruins and buried cities in order to discover more about ancient man, when all the time the ignored Bushman was living with this early spirit still intact. I found men willing enough to come with me to measure his head, or his behind, or his sexual organs, or his teeth. But when I pleaded with the head of a university in my own country to send a qualified young man to live with the Bushman for two or three years, to learn about him and his ancient way he exclaimed, surprised: ‘But what would be the use of that? The Bushman would just fill him up with lies!'

So for many precious years I cast around to find someone with more than a sharply sided interest in the Bushman. But it was a vain search. Yet all over the world whenever I spoke of the Bushman a look of wonder would come into the eyes of ordinary people and I took heart from that. I believe one cannot fully know people and life unless one knows them also through the wonder they provoke in one. Without a sense of wonder one has lost not only the spoor of life but the power of true increase.

Increasingly, my own imagination became troubled with memories of the Bushman, and in particular with the vision of the set of footprints I had found in the pan in the central desert at the foot of a great storm-tree. It was almost as if those foot-prints were the spoor of my own lost self vanishing in the violet light of a desert of my own mind. I found myself compelled against my conscious will towards the conclusion that, ridiculous as it might seem, I myself ought perhaps to take up the spoor where it vanished in the sand. Then one morning I awoke to find that, in sleep, my mind had been decided for me.

‘I will go and find the Bushman.' I told myself, suddenly amazed that so simple a statement had never presented itself to me before.

The difficulties were obvious. I was not qualified. I had no training. I was not a scientist. The demands on my time were many and exacting. And I could not possibly afford it.

But there was this pact I had made with myself in childhood. I could no longer ignore it and somehow felt the difficulties would resolve themselves.

THE
world I grew up in believed that change and development in life are part of a continuous process of cause and effect, minutely and patiently sustained throughout the millenniums. With the exception of the initial act of creation (which as every good Afrikaner boy knew was accomplished with such vigour that it took only six days to pass from chaos to fig-leaves and Adam), the evolution of life on earth was considered to be a slow, steady, and ultimately demonstrable process. No sooner did I begin to read history, however, than I began to have my doubts. Human society and living beings, it seemed to me, ought to be excluded from so calm and rational a view. The whole of human development, far from having been a product of steady evolution, seemed subject to only partially explicable and almost invariably violent mutations. Entire cultures and groups of individuals appeared imprisoned for centuries in a static shape which they endured with long-suffering indifference, and then suddenly, for no demonstrable cause, became susceptible to drastic changes and wild surges of development. It was as if the movement of life throughout the ages was not a Darwinian caterpillar but a startled kangaroo, going out towards the future in a series of unpredictable hops, stops, skips, and bounds. Indeed when I came to study physics I had a feeling that the modern concept of energy could perhaps throw more light on the process than any of the more conventional approaches to the subject. It seemed that species, society, and individuals behaved more like thunder-clouds than scrubbed, neatly clothed, and well-behaved children of reason. Throughout the ages life appeared to build up great invisible charges like clouds and earth of electricity, until suddenly in a sultry hour the spirit moved, the wind rose, a drop of rain fell acid in the dust, fire flared in the nerve, and drums rolled to produce what we call thunder and lightning in the heavens, and chance and change in human society and personality.

Something of this sort, in a small way, had happened to me overnight. I, who had been going round in circles for twenty long years in the particular matter of the Bushman, had now not only found my way but wanted to go it at once. Before I was dressed I knew exactly what I had to do and how to do it.

I decided I would go to the Kalahari at the worst time of the year. I would aim to set out at its most northerly frontier on the Zambesi river at the end of August. I decided to do this entirely because I felt it was the only way to make sure that the Bushman, if I found him, would be pure. There are many peoples of mixed Bushman blood all around the fringes of the Kalahari, and from experience I knew that all these people would penetrate deeply into the Kalahari immediately after the rains had fallen. For the miraculous thing about the Kalahari is that it is a desert only in the sense that it contains no permanent surface water. Otherwise its deep fertile sands are covered with grass glistening in the wind like fields of gallant corn. It has luxuriant bush, clumps of trees, and in places great strips of its own dense woods. It is filled too with its own varieties of game, buck of all kinds, birds and lion and leopard. When the rains come it grows sweet-tasting grasses and hangs its bushes with amber berries, glowing raisins, and sugared plums. Even the spaces between the satin grass are filled with succulent melons and fragrant cucumbers and in the earth itself bulbs, tubers, wild carrots, potatoes, turnips, and sweet potatoes grow great with moisture and abundantly multiply. After the rains there is a great invasion of life from the outside world into a desert which produces such sweetness out of its winter travail of heat and thirst. Every bird, beast, and indigenous being waits expectantly in its stony upland for the summer to come round. Then, as the first lightning begins to flare up and down below the horizon in the west as if a god walked there swinging a storm lantern to light his great strides in the dark, they eagerly test the winds with their noses. As soon as the air goes dank with a whiff of far-off water they will wait no longer. The elephant is generally the first to move in because he not only possesses the most sensitive nose but also has the sweetest tooth. Close on his heels follow numbers of buck, wildebeest, zebra, and the carnivorous beasts that live off them. Even the black buffalo emerges from the river-beds and swamps shaking the tsetse fly like flakes of dried clay from his coat, and grazes in surly crescents far into the desert. When this animal movement is at its height and all the signs confirm that a fruitful summer is at last established, the human beings follow. What I feared was that this invasion into the normal life of the desert would make the genuine Bushman shyer and more than ever difficult to contact. I feared also that the return to the desert in summer of the so-called ‘tame' Bushman who is reared in the service of the tribes and colonists impinging on the Kalahari might complicate my task. For the ‘tame' Bushman, no matter how irrevocably wrenched from the pattern of his past, cannot entirely live without the way of his fathers. From time to time he refreshes his spirit by going back into the desert. Through the spring, as rain and electricity accumulate along the vibrant horizon, a strange tension mounts in his blood. He becomes moody and preoccupied until suddenly he can bear it no longer. Throwing away his clothes of service he commits himself, naked, to the desert and its ancient ways like a salmon from a remote river backwater coming to the open sea. Those who have inflicted a feudal vassalage on the Bushman wake up one morning to find him vanished. They do not see him again until the summer is over. I knew from others who had already been seduced by his plausible recapitulation of the aboriginal way that the ‘tame' Bushman would only be distinguishable from the genuine Bushman by a protracted probe into both mind and history. I could not afford any confusion or delays of this kind. But I knew also that it was only the genuine Bushman who would stay deep in the desert through the worst time of the year. In those uncertain months between winter and the breaking of the rains all fair-weather life quickly withdraws from the desert, and only the desert's own carefully selected and well-tried children like the genuine Bushmen remain to endure the grim diet of heat and thirst. It was their tiny feet that had left in the pan, far from water and habitation, the set of footprints that now drew my thoughts as a magnet draws the dust of sawn steel.