The Lost World of the Kalahari (3 page)

My aunt was more impressed by the Bushman's way with the ostrich. She said he used it, without its knowledge, as his hen and chicken. He never cleared a nest of all its eggs but always left one for the bird. When I asked the reason she said the Bushman knew that the ostrich, although the greatest in size of all birds was also the stupidest, and so unless he left one egg in the nest to remind it what it was supposed to be doing, it would forget its job and stop laying! She also gave me wonderful imitations of how the hunter covered himself with the wings and feathers of a dead ostrich and then, with the neck and head of the bird held erect by a stick, set out to stalk a flock of birds with inevitable success.

But perhaps my favourite of all the Bushman stories came from a very old 'Chuana cattle-herder who had been raised in superb giraffe country. I remember him today mainly for two reasons: for the beating I got from one of my elder brothers because one day I addressed that crumpled old body directly by his first name and omitted the respectful ‘old father' which should have preceded it: and also for this story. The Bushman, this old father told me, knew only too well that all giraffe were women at heart, utterly inquisitive and completely incapable of resisting a pretty thing. Moreover the Bushman knew from long experience what hard and thankless work it could be stalking one who looked down on life from so great a height and out of such far-seeing eyes. So he thought up a wonderful plan. He took out a glittering magic stone he always carried on him and crawled into a bush which was just in sight of a troop of giraffe. He held the stone in his hand in the sun at the side of the bush, constantly turning it in the bright light so that the giraffe could not fail to see it. At first they thought nothing of it, dismissing it as a sparkle of sun on dew, or an effect of the mirage of the heat-mounting distortion and hallucination in the quicksilver light of day. But as the sun climbed higher and this sparkle followed them, so prettily, wherever they moved, they began to get curious. ‘And there little master,' the old father would always exclaim, ‘the fat was in the fire!' I could see the giraffe, vivid in the mirror of the old man's words, their timid hearts, despite all their other instincts and whatever they had of reason in their shapely Victorian heads, drawn slowly towards the concealed hunter. They would come so near that the Scheherazade pattern in the silk of their clothes would be distinct and visible and their wide slanted eyes, perhaps the loveliest of all animal eyes in the world, would shine behind their long dark lashes like wild honey deep within the comb. For a moment they would stand there in the hypnotic sparkle of so unusual and pretty a thing – and then the Bushman would send his arrows trembling like tuning forks into the tender place below the shoulder because, much as he loved the lard of ‘fat little old aunt sea-cow', he loved more the marrow in the long giraffe-bone.

Yet with all this hunting, snaring, and trapping the Bushman's relationship with the animals and birds of Africa was never merely one of hunter and hunted; his knowledge of the plants, trees, and insects of the land never just the knowledge of a consumer of food. On the contrary, he knew the animal and vegetable life, the rocks, and the stones of Africa as they have never been known since. Today we tend to know statistically and in the abstract. We classify, catalogue, and sub-divide the flame-like variety of animal and plant according to species, sub-species, physical property, and use. But in the Bushman's knowing, no matter how practical, there was a dimension that I miss in the life of my own time. He knew these things in the full context and commitment of his life. Like them, he was utterly committed to Africa. He and his needs were committed to the nature of Africa and the swing of its wide seasons as a fish to the sea. He and they all participated so deeply of one another's being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to
know
what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion, an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab tree, yellow-crested cobra, or starry-eyed amaryllis, to mention only a few of the brilliant multitudes through which he so nimbly moved. Even as a child it seemed to me that his world was one without secrets between one form of being and another. As I tried to form a picture of what he was really like it came to me that he was back in the moment which our European fairy-tale books described as the time when birds, beasts, plants, trees, and men shared a common tongue, and the whole world, night and day, resounded like the surf of a coral sea with universal conversation.

I do not want to trouble a picture of the beginning with wisdom after the event. But I am trying to articulate now what was then too deep for the powers of expression of a boy on the veld. What drew me so strongly to the Bushman was that he appeared to belong to my native land as no other human being has ever belonged. Wherever he went he contained, and was contained, deeply within the symmetry of the land. His spirit was naturally symmetrical because moving in the stream of the instinctive certainty of belonging he remained within his fateful proportions. Before we all came to shatter his natural state I have never found true evidence that he exceeded his proportions. His killing, like the lion's, was innocent because he killed only to live. He never killed for fun or the sake of killing, and even when doing it was curiously apprehensive and regretful of the deed. The proof of all this is there in his paintings on his beloved rock for those who can see with their hearts as well as their eyes. There the animals of Africa still live as he knew them and as no European or Bantu artist has yet been able to render them. They are there not as quarry for his idle bow or food for his stomach, but as companions in mystery, as fellow pilgrims travelling on the same perilous spoor between distant life-giving waters. And there is proof too of the balance and rough justice of his arrangements in the fact that when my ancestors landed on the southern tip of the continent three hundred years ago, Africa was nearly bursting its ancient seams with riches of life not found in any other land on earth. Even I who came on the scene so long after the antique lock was picked and the treasure largely plundered, can still catch my breath at the glimpes I get, from time to time, of the riches that remain. Whenever I do so one vision of the little hunter, who alone is missing from the privileged scene, comes urgently to my mind because it illustrates with delicacy as well as clarity what I am trying to convey of his poignant standing with nature.

The Bushman loved honey. He loved honey with a passion that we, with a sweet-shop on every corner, cannot hope to understand. Bitterness is to the tongue what darkness is to the eye; darkness and bitterness are forms of one another. And the taste of honey to the Bushman was like the light of the fire to his eye, and the warmth of its ruby flame in the black night of Africa. His bees' nests, like his springs and water-holes, were almost the only things in the land about which he felt possessive. He cared for the wild nests and collected his honey from them in such a way that the bees were not disturbed. He knew how to calm and secure a swarm on the wing, and his nests were passed down from father to son. One of the many tragic sights of the closing phase of his history in the country wherein I was born, was the reappearance, at odd moments, in the bed and valleys of the Great River of some wrinkled old Bushman body come from afar to harvest the honey passed on to him by a line of ancestors, only to be shot down in his efforts by some Griqua or European invader. Indeed the taste of the honey on his tongue drove the Bushman to do many reckless things. He would scale great cliffs to get at honey in places where only ‘the people who sit on their heels' (as is his dignified name for the baboons) would dare to go. I had one such place pointed out to me which I would not have attempted without rope and climbing boots. Yet the Bushman had climbed it regularly on bare hands and feet, driving pegs of wood for a grip into the fissures of the cliff-face. At the top he had only a narrow ledge on which to stand while he made his special herbal smoke to drug the bees before he dared reach out for the honey in the hole in the damp overhanging rocks. For the wild bees of Africa are the most formidable bees I have ever encountered. They are smaller than most but quick, fearless, and quite unpredictable. In the village where I was born no hive was allowed by special by-law within four miles of the township because one sleepy summer's afternoon all the bees had carried out a combined operation against everything that moved in the streets and sun-filled courtyards and paddocks. I have forgotten the precise extent of the casualty list but I remember there were two little coloured boys, pigs, hens, sheep, goats, dogs, and several horses among the dead. To this day they, the mosquito, and the tsetse fly, are among the stoutest defenders of ancient rights in Africa. They resent strangers, black as much as white. But for the Bushman they had no such antipathy. They appear to have known from his colour and his smell that he too was part of the necessity of Africa and to have stung him only perfunctorily, as if merely to save their sensitive, jet-eyed, and oddly oriental little faces.

Whenever some disaster overwhelmed his bees the Bushman would set out to look for a new swarm. He would be up early in the morning hoping to find the black water-carrier bees among the dew, and with his eyes would follow them and their silver burden in the slanted light back to their base. Or he would stand still in some fragrant spot at sunset comforted by the tall shadow beside him, and wait for an illumination of wings to draw a bee-line home. It was quite unbelievable, my aunt said, how far those slanted, oddly Mongolian eyes of his could follow the flight of a bee. Long after the European or black man lost sight of it he would still be there marking the flight. When he failed to follow the bee he would go to the spot where the bee had vanished, mark the place, returning the next day and thereafter as long as was necessary to determine the exact whereabouts of the swarm. But most wonderful of all, he had an ally in a little bird called ‘
Die Heuning-wyser
', the honey-diviner, who loved honey as much as did the Bushman. It always had its bright little eyes wide open for a nest and whenever it found a swarm at work it would come streaking back, its little wings whirring and starry in the shadows of the trees, to tell the Bushman of its discovery.

‘Quick! Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!' it would sing at the Bushman from the nearest bush, flapping its wings imperiously in the trembling air. ‘Quick! Quick!'

At once the Bushman would understand the bird's excited chatter and hasten to reassure it with a melodious call of his own: ‘Look, oh, person with wings! Gathering my things and following thee quickly I come.'

When at last he had drawn his amber ration he would never fail to reward the bird with honey and, on a point of mutual honour, share with it the royal portion of the harvest: a comb as creamy as the milk of Devon with its own cream made of half-formed grubs.

And there I must leave them in this moment of fair exchange and communion. I shall return later to the Bushman's relationship with the bees and birds and the significant role which honey, and the bubbling mead he made from it, plays in his spirit. But this seemed to belong here because it came to me in the very beginning, breaking out of the darkness of the past like moonsparkle blown by the night wind from some startled water, a portion of the glory the Bushman trailed in his nakedness from the God and Africa that were his home.

Now one of the many arguments used by his enemies to show that this little hunter and seeker after honey was really a very inferior person, was precisely the fact that he was utterly dependent on nature. He built no home of any durable kind, did not cultivate the land, and did not even keep cattle or other domestic chattel, and this seemed to prove to his enemies that he was a human ‘untouchable' and not far removed from the beasts of the veld. The Hottentot, a devout pastoralist, the Bantu who was both pastoralist and tiller of the soil, and of course the white man were all rated much higher than the Bushman. Now it is true that the shelters the Bushman built for himself when on the move after game were of the lightest possible structure. Home, for the greater part of the year, was wherever he made a major kill. None the less he had a permanent base on which his whole life swung. In my own part of the country he built round walls of stone, on top of the hills near his permanent waters. The walls were from four to five feet high and according to the local tradition without opening or roof of any kind. At night he would merely climb over the wall, light a fire and cook his food out of the wind, and then curl up by the coals under a blanket of skin. Long after he had vanished from the land it was possible to see, within some crumbling circle of stone, the scorched earth and blackened pebbles where his fires had burnt for centuries. Close by was the hollow he had scratched in the ground to ease the lying for his hips and which was the only bed he ever inherited from his fathers, or passed on to his sons.

I was shown the site of such a permanent base as soon as I could scramble up a hill. It was on the top of the hills at the back of the homestead on my grandfather's immense farm. The lovely place was made more attractive for me by its evocative name: ‘Boesmansfontein' – the fountain or spring of the Bushman. This name it possessed already when my grandfather bought the property, so lightly, from its Griqua robbers nearly a century ago, and is enough to show that the fountain once was the permanent water of a Bushman. It came gushing out of the earth in a cleft over-grown and purple with the shadow of blue-bush, Karreetree, wild poplar, and African willow. It was unique among the springs in the area because it gushed simultaneously out of what we called ‘Three-eyes', that is to say it had three distinct round openings for the urgent crystal water. The water was sweet and bubbled in the light with a noticeable rhythm as if somewhere within the earth a caring heart was beating to pump it up to us. As a child who had participated already from birth in my native country's perennial anxieties about water I never looked at it without feeling that I was in the presence of an Old Testament miracle. Yet, more unusual still, barely a quarter of a mile away the water of the spring joined naturally with other permanent waters in the bed of a stream always musical with bird-song and well clothed in silky reeds and tasselled rushes. This stream had the provocative name of ‘Knapsack River', but it remains one of the minor disappointments of my life that I have never discovered the answer to the question ‘Whose knapsack?' About six miles of this water flowed through my grandfather's farm and both it and the three-eyed fountain made the hills behind an apt site for a permanent Bushman base. It was far enough from the waters not to frighten the game from drinking there, and high enough for the Bushman to observe the movement of the buck below in the plains between the lone blue hills which we called
vlaktes
, and also to allow him to watch on the passes against timely signs of invasion. There the Bushman certainly had neighbours to read his signals of smoke, to join in his celebrations, and help in his troubles.