The Last Train to Zona Verde (19 page)

I
T WAS ON THE FOLLOWING
day, in the hot flat bush some miles north of Tsumkwe, that — as I began this narrative by saying — I crossed the bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.

I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely called in Afrikaans Boesmanland (Bushman Land), and generally known as the Kaokoveld. This had been redesignated Nyae Nyae, a homeland for the !Kung and subgroups like the Ju/’hoansi — hard to utter, click-thickened names for the ancient race that still inhabited the region.

An old dream of mine had been to meet and talk with some of these people in their own village, though “village” is the wrong word for a
n!ore
, the expanse of land they claimed to keep themselves alive — a portion of the landscape with vague boundaries they
called home. It was an area of bush where there was water, wild game, and sufficient edible bulbs, tubers, roots, seeds, and manketti nuts for their diet. In that place they would have a campsite, called a
tshu/ko
, and build shelters — hardly more than windbreaks or twiggy lean-tos—just sleeping places, not for living in or shuffling around inside. They lived under the sky, they lived around the fire. That was the accepted notion of the Ju/’hoansi by travelers like me, many of us romantic voyeurs.

Long ago, in the freest period of my life, I had worked as a teacher in Africa for six years straight. I had revisited the continent every few years after that, sometimes staying for months. I had been up and down half a dozen great rivers, including the Nile and the Zambezi, hiked the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon, and crossed Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi. I had traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town. I had fraternized with, and worked among, Angoni people, Baganda, Nubians, Karomojong, Watutsi, WaGogo, Masai, Zulus, Kikuyu, the Sena people of the Lower River, the Batwa Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, and scores of other peoples. Yet in all that time I had never met a Ju/’hoansi — elusive, dwelling in small related groups — on his or her own turf.

But I had glimpsed them with fascination, the way you see a bird of passage flashing onto a nearby branch and twitching its brilliant tail. Their physiognomy — the look of these people, their whole physical being — was unmistakable. Now and then, on a busy Cape Town street or in a sleepy
dorp
in the countryside, I would see that light-hued, faintly Asiatic face, the narrow eyes, the delicate hands, the small stature, a distinct upright way of standing and a swift, almost skipping way of walking — and, even if the person happened to be wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf against the wind blowing from Table Bay or the Great Karoo, I knew whom I was looking at.

I always suspected that these people, oblique in answers to my direct questions, were far from home. And I felt there was something radiant about them. It was no illusion. It was the radiance of
peacefulness from the core of their being, what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas called “their magnificent nonviolence.” They are known as, in a rendering of their own name for themselves, the Harmless People.

These were the people who had endured, and they had a claim to being the living remnant of the first humans on earth, with an ancient pedigree that was an unbroken link to the present. Bands of other Africans, mainly Bantu, those who were rovers and conquerors, had traveled — some settling, others moving on — through the forests in the heart of Africa, at first clockwise through the Congo and then fanning out and descending, percolating east and south as far as the Great Fish River. That river became a traditional boundary of the Cape Colony, where in the late eighteenth century a confrontation between the Xhosa on one bank and the Dutch and English settlers on the opposite bank led to a series of bloody wars. But both the Bantu and the whites were another story; they were migrants or the children of migrants.

The Ju/’hoansi were not migrants. Some had scattered because of persecution and land grabbing, but most of them had remained pretty much where they had always been, in this southern part of Africa, since the Upper Pleistocene, loyal to each other and clinging to their skills and traditions, famously peaceful and accommodating — no thieving, no fighting, and divorce so simple a matter that adultery was almost unknown among them.

Celebrated as trackers of game, masters of the hunt—just a small hunting party could bring down and butcher a fleet-footed, full-grown giraffe, as John Marshall had shown them doing in one of his earliest films. Brilliant as botanists, they recognized an enormous taxonomy of bush and savanna plants — used for food, for medicine, as fetishes, as ornaments. They knew the entomological chemistry of poison and the art of weapon making, the skills of using arrows and spears and snares. Despite all this, they hardly fought or raised their voices, had never gone to war with each other, nor
had they become inflamed by bellicosity even against the greatest provocation — slave raids, intruding white settlers, and predatory Bantu hunters.

It was amazing, in the face of all the encroachments — they lived in a land where diamonds littered the ground like pebbles, where trophy animals might be slaughtered, where cattle might graze — amazing that the Ju/’hoansi still existed. Yet they did, though in dwindling numbers, and they had become the obsessive subjects, even the darlings, of ethnographers, for what they were able to tell us about how we as humans had lived in prehistory, and also as “noble savages” — “one of the most heavily scientifically commoditized human groups in the annals of science,” wrote Robert J. Gordon in
The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass
.

They seemed a timeless people, as eternal as the features of the landscape — the rocks, the gullies, the termite mounds. They didn’t grow old, they didn’t change, they endured in their ancestral land. That was the impression I had gotten from the first books I read.

It was, of course, all wrong, but what did I know?

Decades ago, the only books about the Ju/’hoansi I could find were the works of Laurens van der Post, but I soon learned to be wary of him. He had published
Venture to the Interior
in 1952, an account of his surveying trip to Nyasaland, and when I began to live there a little more than ten years later, I saw that he had made a crepuscular and existential narrative out of a fairly conventional few months of bushwhacking with a team of hearties in the Mlanje region of tea estates. I realized from that book and his others that he was something of a mythomaniac.

I once visited van der Post in England in 1975, for a magazine interview, and found him humorless and vain, monologuing to me, mostly about the highly colored life he had led, in the dry, imperious tone of a headmaster. His life had indeed been extraordinary in many respects (prisoner of the Japanese, friend of Carl Jung’s,
patron of the Bushmen), but in his telling it was a succession of sullen boasts. He had an odd pout, his wet lower lip protruding as if in disbelief, staring blue eyes, and a severe, somewhat reluctant manner.

In a large wing chair he looked like an old auntie interrupted in her knitting, and had an auntie’s lined and tetchy face. He refused to see me alone, but remained canted sideways in his chair, surrounded by sycophants and handmaidens who treated him as a sage. (Later he would become a mentor to a similarly bedazzled Prince Charles.) Starring in his own films, he saw himself as a pioneer interpreter of the Bushmen, and though he had no language proficiency and no deep knowledge of the people, only a romantic enthusiasm for their tenacity and their culture, he was instrumental in helping to frame South African government policy that granted them a homeland.

I came to see that he was a posturing fantasist and fake mystic in the field, and as a writer he was an impressionist using colors, rather than a social scientist using facts. It was easy to understand and almost forgivable, because the people in the mid-1950s when he first visited them were still (we have the Marshalls’ work as proof) culturally coherent, self-sufficient, remote, and wonderful physical specimens. But van der Post tended to get carried away in describing them; his self-regard and his Jungian glosses impeded his narratives. His work, full of breathless mystery or plain inaccuracy, is either not mentioned or dismissed by later scholars, who seem to regard him, with reason, as a little more than a village explainer (
The Lost World of the Kalahari
) or fabulist (
The Face Beside the Fire
) — an unreliable witness.

The most complete book I found, the bible of Bushman culture, was the classic
Specimens of Bushman Folklore
by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, the earliest study of the people and their language. (Van der Post had created one of his Bushman books,
The Heart of
the Hunter
, by rehashing the folktales in
Specimens
.) Bleek — stout, hairy, ursine, even to a lumbering bearish untidiness — was a linguistic genius, a Prussian philologist who migrated to South Africa in 1855 with the aim of compiling a Zulu grammar. But while a young student at the University of Berlin, in 1850, he was, as Neil Bennun wrote in
The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People
(2004), “the world’s greatest expert on the languages of southern Africa.” He suspected, and tried to prove, that the Bushmen’s languages might be related (because of the northward push of prehistoric peoples) to ancient Egyptian. He was scholarly but sickly — tubercular, easily fatigued, prone to chills, and habitually coughing up blood. He married Jemima Lloyd, daughter of a Welsh clergyman, but it was his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd who became his collaborator on the project of writing down and piecing together the elements of the Bushman language /Xam, and recording the stories and beliefs of these unknown and unregarded people.

How this happened is a good story, and a short one. Bleek did not have the stomach or the constitution for arduous travel. He could not meet the Bushmen on their own terms in their distant hinterland. But the Bushmen were routinely arrested for minor transgressions — drunkenness, loitering, theft, cattle rustling, trespassing, poaching (“Hunger had made criminals out of the /Xam men,” wrote Bennun). This was in the 1860s and 1870s. The captured men were brought in chains to Cape Town, put on trial, sentenced to hard labor, and jailed. Hearing of this, Bleek volunteered to house one of them at his little estate, The Hill, in Mowbray, a rustic village just outside the Cape Town city limits. This wish was granted, and other prisoners joined the Bleeks. As residents at The Hill, the convicts became their language teachers, and over time these Bushmen divulged their
kukummi
— their oral history, their traditions, their cosmology, their stories. The Bleek archive of Bushman lore, dictated by the prisoners, grew to twelve thousand pages.

Many of the stories were harsh, some bitter and violent. “If you were learning the language of the indigenous hunting and gathering people of South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century,” Bennun wrote, “the first words and sentences you learned were to do with hunger, dispossession and crime.”

Wilhelm Bleek died in 1875 at the age of forty-eight. Lucy Lloyd and Bleek’s daughter Dorothea carried on his work, deepening their understanding, relying on prisoner informants. After many trials, some of this material — groundbreaking ethnology of the earliest people — was published in
Specimens of Bushman Folklore
in 1911. Through the twenties and thirties curious travelers made forays into the Kalahari, yet these expeditions were largely touristic, not adding much to what Bleek and Lloyd had learned but only confirming the stereotype that the Bushmen were naked semisavage Stone Age hunters who slept under trees, grubbed for roots, chased down antelopes, and ate insects.

Much later, choosing to live among them and know them better, the Marshall family were the pioneers: Lorna in
The !Kung of Nyae Nyae
, the subtle and detailed study of the people, then her children, who documented the change and decay in the people’s circumstances — John in his many films, Elizabeth in her two evocative books. Ultimately, many other books appeared, and the titles alone are offputting:
Land Filled with Flies, The Land God Made in Anger, The Bushman Myth, Women Like Meat
—helpful, well-informed books, actually, but they kept the people two-dimensional, odorless, unphysical, out of focus, in sepia tones, as books of anthropology often do.

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you’re reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. That was the case for me
from the beginning. Reading and restlessness — dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere — made me a traveler. If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes — importantly — to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

That was what compelled me to travel through a desiccated landscape from Tsumkwe to the Ju/’hoansi village on this very hot day.

Some Ju/’hoansi men were drying and curing slashed hunks of meat — thicker than mere strips; great black sinewy belts of it — that looked more like old leather than flesh, turning it into the jerky known all over southern Africa as biltong. They had food and water on their minds.

The settlement of shacks and shelters was up a narrow road of sand so soft and deep our vehicle plowed and butted it clumsily into heaps like a tipped-forward and wobbling wheelbarrow. We became stuck several times, the useless wheels scouring deeper ruts until the axles rested against the road. The sand was hot, too, as I found out when I knelt in it to push against the back bumper. I thought of walking the rest of the way to the settlement, but the driver, who was himself a town-dwelling Ju/’hoansi, and calm, urged me to be patient. After a while, the vehicle was plowing the sand again, and we swayed and slewed into the village.