A Million Years with You (9 page)

 

Interestingly, although I own plenty of clothes, I wear about the same number as would a Ju/wa women—underpants, bra, jeans, shirt, sandals, belt, wristwatch, glasses. It's the rest of the stuff that's different. At the time of this writing I have nineteen items just on my desk, including a computer, a monitor, a printer, a keyboard, a mousepad, a rectangular plastic box which I turn upside down to cover my keyboard so my cats don't walk on the keys, also a telephone, a telephone book, a lamp, an empty cat food can that serves as an ashtray, a pen, an ordinary pencil, a red pencil, a pencil sharpener, a letter opener, a notepad, a box of Kleenex, a thesaurus, and a dictionary. The extension of my desk—just the surface—has one hundred and fifty-four items, not counting all the pens and pencils, just counting their containers, but counting a file holder and twenty-three files. The rest of my office has twenty-one pieces of furniture or other large objects, such as a wood stove, a fire extinguisher, a cat tower, and six filing cabinets (never mind the files inside). My office also has twenty-four bookshelves, each one filled with books. On just one of those shelves there are ninety-two books and three pamphlets. So far I've mentioned three hundred and ten items, but with the rest of the books, the contents of the filing cabinets, the contents of the desk drawers as well as two deer antlers, one moose antler, three mobiles, an empty birdcage, and a cat-sized radio collar which I sometimes use to follow the doings of my cats, I have literally hundreds more.

And that's just my office. To list everything in the house, garden shed, and toolshed is beyond my powers, to say nothing of the garage with two cars and all that's inside them. In my sewing basket alone there are thirty-nine items—spools of thread, scissors, sewing needles, a tape measure, a small, sharp gizmo with which to open a seam, and a rotating gizmo with which to cut a big piece of cloth laid flat. That sewing basket has twice as many items as the average Ju/wa of the Old Way. No doubt my house, or for that matter anybody's house, has more items than all of those owned by the entire Ju/wa population of the 1950s in the six thousand square miles of Nyae Nyae. Interestingly, we can name every single one of those items, and most of them we don't need.

What the Ju/wasi needed, and had in large quantities, was accurate knowledge—not just general knowledge but thousands if not millions of specific facts. So here's another contrast—the contrast between our knowledge of the natural world around us and the Bushmen's knowledge of the natural world around them. In our case, that would be the trees and bushes that we see from our windows and whatever else is alive out there, most of which we can't name and don't understand. We might say that a certain tree is an oak, but that's not the same as saying that the microwave is an Amana Touchmatic Radarange or the car is a 2001 Subaru Forester with 186,000 miles on it. We know our possessions much better. But for every natural feature we could name, the Bushmen could have named fifty.

One night I was watching a television program when the host of the show (maybe Jay Leno) asked a woman which was bigger, the moon or an elephant. Yes, she said the elephant, but if you think that's bad, try asking a few college students where the sun rises. Many of them won't know even that. The Bushmen, in contrast, could name hundreds of plants and tell you their properties and who ate them. They also knew every amphibian, reptile, bird, or mammal they encountered, also most of the arachnids, insects, and other invertebrates, knowing not only the animals themselves but also their tracks and their habits. To this day, I can't help but compare the ten- and twelve-year-old Bushmen children to my adult self in my own woods, where perhaps I know the mammals well enough, but certainly not all the insects, fungi, and plants. And I think of myself as some kind of naturalist. So rather than listing all the things in the environment that the Bushmen knew, it's easier to say that there was virtually nothing that they didn't know.

None of us would be on earth today if our Bushman ancestors did not have that kind of knowledge, and I think I had a glimpse of how they got it.

 

Today I noticed the attention to the tiny paid by the Bushmen. One woman was given a handful of tobacco which she seemed to reckon by the grain rather than by the handful or pipe full, and when two shreds of tobacco dropped into the sand she picked them out and lifted the sand grains away from them and put them in a tiny bag with the rest of the tobacco, then picked all the tiny shreds and grains that clung to her palm and put them in the bag too.

 

Other people tend to pay attention to the big things, and might see the tobacco as one handful rather than as a collection of grains. But it's the sum of all the tiny things that informs you, and the Bushmen knew that. How else would they have found their arrow poison?

Such knowledge is essential for all who live in the Old Way. Chimpanzees, for instance, have been called excellent botanists by the primatologists. According to a bear biologist, bears are excellent botanists too. Bears not only recognize a plant when the edible berries are on it, but also when it's sprouting (the bear comes back for the berries later) or when it's dry and brown in the fall. The fact is, we have very little concept of the knowledge of those who live in the Old Way, especially the nonhumans, and we tend to attribute such knowledge to “instinct,” as if they didn't learn. We also belittle this kind of knowledge because, as my friend Sy Montgomery has pointed out, it's for animals and “primitive” people, and we, the advanced, modern people, have outsourced our knowledge to our electronic devices and the Internet. But if our ancestors hadn't had trustworthy knowledge in their heads we wouldn't be alive today to scoff at them.

 

I'd say that virtually everything the Bushmen did, including their social stability, was geared for survival. Their kinship system, which is unlike any other but which my mother managed to fathom, is vastly more complex than our rather simple kinship system (which at the time was called the Copper Eskimo system). Many westerners don't understand this. In later years, for example, a western visitor to Nyae Nyae asked the anthropologist Megan Biesele how the Bushmen managed to avoid incest. I don't think I've ever heard a more stupid question. The answer is simple. They don't fuck their relatives. But Megan is too classy to have said that. In fact, the incest taboos of the Ju/wasi are stricter than ours and probably always have been. DNA studies show more genetic diversity among these former hunter-gatherers than in any other human population. This fact alone would have aided their survival.

In addition to the unification arising from kinship and marriage, the Ju/wasi were further unified by a system called
xaro
, for which I'd say there's no translation. As the anthropologist Polly Wiessner discovered, it's the practice of giving gifts. Almost everybody had one or more gift partners whom they would visit, sometimes traveling great distances to do so. That's how the cowrie shells—my mother's gift to the Gautscha women—spread through the length and breadth of Nyae Nyae in just one year. People gave them to other people, who in turn passed them along. And why was gift-giving so important? Nyae Nyae provided a good example, because it had only eight permanent water sources. If, in the dry season, people were living at a water source that failed, they would need to travel to another, which would already be occupied by other people. Whoever needed to go there would want to be welcomed, and the strong ties of kinship and of gift partnerships helped to assure a welcome.

Survival of the individual mattered enormously, of course, but so did the survival of the group. Without the group, our species would have vanished long ago. In the interests of group cohesion, all important foods were shared. Women were equal to men, although there was a division of labor in that women did most of the gathering but didn't hunt. Important decisions were always made by consensus arising from discussions in which every adult who wanted to took part. To keep survival as a goal wasn't always easy—the tracking part of a hunt could take many days during which the hunters might go without food or water—and a woman giving birth to a second child too soon after the birth of her first child might have to dispose of the newborn, as her milk would support only one child and her choice would be to lose both infants or just one. This happened extremely rarely, but it could and did happen, and it wasn't any easier for the Bushman women than it would be for us.

For a sense of what survival meant, I remember a note I made about the hot season:

 

The women go gathering just as soon as it is light enough to see, and they come back by 9:00 AM and bury themselves
[in the sand]
and stay until 4 or 5 when it's cooler, and thus do they survive the waterless, scorching drought.

 

The people at Gautscha had water. They drank from the water hole by day and filled their ostrich eggshells in case they got thirsty at night, because a pride of about twenty lionesses and a lion lived nearby and at night would drink from the same water hole. So did a leopard and three or four brown hyenas. Sometimes at night I would drive the Dodge Power Wagon down to the water hole and watch to see who came there, as I was fascinated by the wildlife. Most of the predators had an equal interest in us, especially the lions, who sometimes would come to our encampments to see what we were doing. I remember being in my tent, falling asleep, when I heard the loud voices of the Ju/wa men speaking strongly. The people didn't use that tone with one another, so I went out of the tent to see what was going on.

Four lionesses were standing on tiptoes at the edge of the Ju/wa encampment, looking over the tops of the shelters at the men. The men spoke respectfully to the lionesses, but told them that they had to leave. One man reached behind himself to grasp a burning branch that someone was handing him, then flourished the branch over his head. Sparks flew. Perhaps the lionesses knew about burns, because they seemed to be thinking things over. They turned their heads, then soon turned sideways and walked off quietly into the night.

This was, we were to learn, characteristic of the Nyae Nyae lions. They did not hunt people, and nobody really knows why. If those lions had meant to hunt, not just to observe, they probably would have succeeded.

Once when we were traveling, we were very tired when night came so we didn't make a camp. We just put our sleeping bags on the ground. In the morning we found the tracks of lions all around us. They had even looked down into our faces. I was glad not to have opened my eyes to look up into the nostrils of a lion. But this, we were to learn, was normal lion behavior. The Ju/wasi didn't hunt them, of course, which seemed to have something to do with the situation. As one Ju/wa man told us, if people hunted lions, as did the pastoralists who lived at the edges of the Kalahari, the lions would hunt people, but if people left them alone, they wouldn't.

As for me, I've come to think of the arrangement as a truce. The people and the lions both lived in groups, using the same water and hunting the same game, so there was a similarity, but the people went about in the daytime and the lions went about at night. Surely they had coexisted for thousands of years, which, I think, could have been due to these similarities, especially because these two groups of high-end predators needed to use the same water. The people who owned the water could have gone to live with relatives if the lions had raided them, but they'd live there as guests, not as owners. And the lions would have had nowhere else to go. In that pristine, Paleolithic wilderness, every source of water would be owned by a different pride of lions. Either the refugee lions would drive off the resident lions or they would be driven off themselves, to the tune of much injury, which would compromise their survival. Without the human-lion truce, both populations would have been at risk. Better that the people and the lions used the area at different times of day. That way, they could hunt the same animals and drink the same water without risking injury or death by making problems for each other. People from agricultural or industrial cultures would feel the need to kill the lions, but that wasn't the Old Way.

The truce did not apply to leopards or hyenas. Not that people hunted them, but they hunted people. However, it was easier to discourage them than it would be to discourage lions. One night a hyena put his head into the open door of my tent. Hyenas sometimes took bites out of sleeping people, so perhaps he wanted to learn if I was sleeping. I wasn't. Our noses almost touched. We looked into each other's eyes. I asked, “What is it?” The hyena turned his head and withdrew politely.

Such restraint didn't always work, however, as several people had been killed by hyenas. In the instance I knew most about, this happened when people were traveling and the man who was killed was unable to keep up with the group. His was an unusual situation, as by the time this happened he had no relatives, no one tied to him, no one who cared about him. He was the only person we knew who had never married—this was because he had never successfully hunted, which was a prerequisite for marriage —thus he had no in-laws. His elderly sister had looked after him, but she had died. They had been living with her husband's people, and when those people decided to travel to another place, he followed them. But when night came, he had dropped behind, and the others didn't go back to find him. The event was exceedingly rare, and was one of the many reasons that the Ju/wasi took such care to be cohesive.

 

Strangely enough, a tent, like a Ju/wa shelter, was good protection, not that a predator couldn't tear through the fabric. But for some reason they didn't. Perhaps by watching from afar how people went in and out, my hyena used the front flap and thus exposed himself to view.

I loved my tent—a little one-man tent made for a backpacker. Not only did it protect me from the prowling hyena, but to be inside it was beautiful.