The Lost World of the Kalahari (7 page)

This hopeless situation reached its climax and declined swiftly into its fatal resolution between the years 1800 and 1860. Already at the beginning of this period the Bushman's extensive hold on Africa had shrunk to the country along the Great River, the southern and central water-points of what was to become the Orange Free State, and some of the steeper and deeper gorges of the Dragon ranges and their splintered spurs. He was still fighting back in tiny little pockets all over the veld but only in these areas did he retain some semblance of his former cohesion with his own kind and the other natural children of Africa. But about the year 1800 all that quickly changed. In that period pressure from the south reached its greatest force; in the north, its starkest brutality. A long process of demoralization of the spirit of the indigenous peoples of Africa was fast approaching its climax. Already, for centuries, human society in Africa had been society on the run. But in this period the whirlwind welter of migratory hordes having their violent way with weaker peoples, as well as the systematic raiding, year in and year out, deep into the heart of the continent by the pitiless slave trader from Zanzibar armed with powder and shot, produced a convulsion and disruption of human life and spirit on a scale not seen before. Terror, destruction, and disintegration, like the smell of the dead rotting on an apocalyptic battle field, stood high in the shining air. Almost every tribe of Africa picked up only what was negative in the situation. The weak lost the courage and wit that alone might have saved them and were ruled by blind terror. But they, too, whenever forced to flee into the country of someone even weaker than themselves, practised with all the ruthlessness of the convert the terror which had hitherto flayed them. The strong thought of little more than plundering and preying on the weak and making themselves ever stronger. Then they fell out among themselves, setting up rival combinations for loot and destruction.

Great and fantastic figures began to appear and to agitate even more the fearful scene. Chaka, the terrible, the beautiful, the wisely yet madly inspired, the victim caught for all his magnificence and strength as a fly in the web of the spider spinning that terrible hour, arose to take the glittering Amazulu in hand and sent his crescent impis to burn and loot Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Zambesi, and from the Umbeni to the Great Lakes. How many perished we shall never know but the number has to be reckoned in tens of thousands. Even among his own followers the slaughter was immense. On the day of the death of his mother (whom like many conquerors he loved darkly and to excess) seven thousand people were killed so that she would have fitting company in the Hereafter: and for a year following her death every woman found to be pregnant was put to death with her husband. What showed up the tragic darkness of this hour even more was the glimmer of a strange subliminal honour and belief which clung to slaughter of this kind, like phosphorus to the tentacles of a giant octopus groping in the darkness of the oceans.

After Chaka others crowded fast to ruin more thoroughly the world of crumbling spirit: Dingaan, Sikonyella, Moselikatse, of the Matabele off-shoot of the Amazulu, and the warrior-queen with thick, long, black hair who came like a comet in the night leading the dreadful hordes of Mantatees with their shields, spears, and battle-axes. For years, unafraid and invincible, they advanced from one Bantu settlement to another destroying all defenders and, after eating up grain and cattle, not staying to plant or husband but moving on, like locusts, to devour more.

All along the extremities of the zone of terror packs of lesser tyrants and robbers formed and reformed like hyaenas and jackals to quarrel over what was left by the pride of lions. Pushed out of the Cape by the fast-expanding European colony, the Hottentots, bands of bastards, and outlaws of all sorts of colours armed with European guns, moved in north to pick off whatever was left of life on the smoking and reeling veld. Away from the main routes of the murderous traffic there was no secluded place that did not conceal some group of broken people clutching at life like drowning men at straws. Food had become so scarce that far and wide the outcasts and survivors of disrupted tribes began to eat one another without shame. For two generations and more a phase of intensive cannibalism set in over all the unfamiliar parts of the land. Too weak and unequipped to hunt the, by now, thoroughly alarmed and athletic game of the veld, men made up packs to hunt, snare, trap, kill, and eat other weaker men. Even the lions and leopards, it is said, gave up preying on game and indulged in a new and easier taste for the flesh of defenceless humans. When a whiff of human being came to their noses the terrible wild-dogs broke off the hard chase of buck and, moaning with relish, went after some emaciated fugitive, while vultures became so gorged that they could scarce waddle fast enough to take to the air.

For some reason which I suspect to be part of the general reluctance of us all to accept the unpleasant facts of the history of our beginnings in Africa, this phase is glossed over in our text-books and I, myself, do not know of any specific research done in the matter. All I know is that these activities were carried on so intensively, and so close to my own day, that as a child I was possessed by the fear of being eaten by cannibals. All our old servants, black and coloured, spoke to me openly about it, and the horror of it had come down to them so vividly that many a time I shivered with them at the recollection. I met one very old 'Suto woman who frankly told me that, in the time of the Great Hunger (as they call this period) she, as a child, after searching the veld all day for edible bulbs and tubers, came home one evening to the cave which sheltered her family to be met by the unfamiliar smell of roasting meat. To her amazement she discovered that it came from a ham-of-man being grilled over the fire. Whenever my coloured nurses thought fear would be good for discipline they threatened to send, not for a policeman, but for a cannibal and for several years I believed the distant hills at home still contained men who lived off human flesh.

So great was the destruction let loose in this period over the central portion of Southern Africa that the wide open plains were strewn with animal and human bones. One of my grandfather's elder kinsmen who penetrated into the area at this time threw a fearful glance at the scene as uneasily he hastened through it, and spoke later of the immense quantities of scattered bones. Again and again, he said, where some band of refugees had been forced to make a stand, the human bone was scattered in hapless heaps like the splintered timbers of a single wreck swept by a vanished storm on to some deserted foreshore. Even in my childhood great quanties of bone, then almost entirely animal, were still a feature of the landscape. I still remember how the precise wind of our blue transparent winters would sing a lyric of fate in the hollow bone left on the veld and how I shivered in my imagination.

This, then, was the setting for the final act of the drama of the little Bushman. By this time not only was every man against him but also he was against every man. Others, even the most miserable, seemed to find allies in their misery. But the Bushman had long since been forced to reject any idea of trust in other men. Yet, even in this moment of his greatest misery and isolation he seemed to retain intact a certain dignity abandoned by other races. He never took to eating his own kind. He and his lived or died together: there was no compromise. Knowing, as I do, how small a chance the human being in Africa has had to discover his dignity and develop a truly creative self, I marvel that he should have retained these essentials of human honour to the end: starving rather than prolonging his life by eating the flesh of fellow-men; dying without a whimper.

Some of the last of the Bushman's battles raged around the village where I was born, and in the hills among which I grew up. There, largely at the inspiration of a Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, a final attempt was made by a few Europeans to succour him. But the land-hunger and the destructive forces were so great on all sides that the experiment was doomed before it began. The 'Suto people, one of the first to try to break out of the deadly cycle of destruction and to reintegrate the demoralized Bantu peoples, the moment they regained their strength hunted the Bushman down there. On my grandfather's farm in the little circle of stone on the hills above the ‘Fountain of the Bushman' a nephew of Moshesh, the remarkable founder of the Basuto, and so ugly a person that he was known to my wry people as ‘Pretty Little Rose', one morning at dawn fell upon the Bushman there and destroyed him. My own father collected the skulls of the women and children and was moved to write a poem about them. I myself fingered a few of the broken beads buried in the rubble among the stones. Hardly had ‘Pretty Little Rose' withdrawn when the amoral Korannas came down out of the west. They found substantial groups of Bushmen concentrated on the neat cones of two hills standing side by side, like identical twins, near the ‘Place of the Three Perennial Fountains' and known to us children as the ‘Hills of Weeping'. The Korannas who normally lusted greatly after Bushman women, for most indigenous Africans were excited by their golden colour, on this occasion spared none, not even a child. On the heels of the Korannas came the Griquas, armed with European guns, and accompanied by the itinerant missionaries who pleaded their cause and justified their deeds to remote, unknowing Governors. Soon the Bushman was cornered in the very places where he had known the greatest security and enjoyed the longest tranquillity. One by one his names for the caves, shelters, and fountains were obliterated from memory, and in the centre of the area a new settlement was founded and called Philippolis, ‘The Town of Philip', after the eminent missionary divine who brought the Griquas there. I have never shared the hatred of my countrymen for the well-meaning Dr Philip. But I have found it hard to forgive the naive, wilful way in which he helped the Griquas to absolute power over the Bushmen at the most critical moment in their history. His behaviour, to say the least of it, appears as incongruous as the Macedonian-sounding ‘Philippolis' that was imposed, like a top-hat on a Hottentot, upon my native village in memory of him. For a brief period the ‘Town of Philip' became the capital of a fantastic kingdom from which the Griquas continued their war of extinction against the Bushman. One of them years later, speaking of Philippolis, told a Government commission: ‘We exterminated the Bushman, we shot him down and occupied the country.' Another spoke openly of how one day, alone, he helped to cut the throats of thirty Bushmen. While all this was going on commandos of European farmers appeared in the area to punish the Bushman for thieving across ‘their' frontiers. When the confusion, destruction, and horror was at its greatest, the decisive complication developed.

One fine day the Afrikaner spirit erupted and the hungry European frontier, which had advanced steadily to a depth of hundreds of miles since 1652, overflowed broadly. Impatiently loading their women, children, and possessions into their large covered wagons, gathering together their movable stock and numerous half-caste servants, groups of Afrikaners everywhere abruptly turned their backs on the south and struck out north. Guns in one hand, Bibles in the other, singing their sombre battle hymns, like my grandfather's favourite:

they penetrated deeply into the interior and took this nightmare of tribal warfare, like a bridal opportunity, into their arms. First they settled with the strongest of their black rivals for the country. They broke the Amazulu, repelled the Matabele, cowed many others, and pinned down the formidable Basuto among the hills. Then, with some little barter fair enough perhaps according to the tight rule of the narrow day, a great deal of legal guile, natural cunning, bribery, and corruption, all encouraged by supplies of the fiery Cape brandy known to us children as ‘Blitz' or ‘Lightning', they dispossessed the dispossessing Griquas. When all that was done they turned to the accepted refinement of conquest in Africa, the extermination of the Bushman. They did this with greater dispatch and efficiency than any before them. Soon only a few names such as ‘The Fountain of the Bushman' and ‘The Hills of Weeping' were left in that wide land to preserve his memory like broken-off spars above a sunken ship which marks the place and manner of her going.

For a while longer the Bushman made a desperate stand in the higher peaks of the Dragon Ranges, but there, too, before the end of the century, the growing power of the Basuto silenced him for ever. Thereafter he was only to be recognized dragging out his diminished days in the harsh household of some conqueror, or working among the worst criminals on the breakwaters in Table Bay – a criminal, perhaps, because, starving; he had stolen one of the many sheep now owned by men who had stolen all his land. But even in these conditions, he stood out as an individual, despite his convict suit. I am told that his face, creased, lined, and wrinkled, was unmistakable and like some Admiralty chart of the circumscribed sea of his time on earth. A sketch in colour of his old grey convict head shows his oddly slanted eyes filled with the first light of man and the last light of his race, both joined to make a twilight valediction to the land of his birth. At the back of his eyes is a look I found disturbing. It was not the calm acceptance of fate untroubled by hope or despair, but rather the certainty that, though he may vanish, his cause remains dynamic in the charge of life. I have been told by those who saw him thus that often the joyless warders guarding him with loaded guns would be startled by a gush of merriment that broke from him suddenly, like a fountain from the earth finding the freedom of air for the first time. A laugh of pure, unequalled clarity like a call on the trumpet of a herald from afar would ring out then among the hammers chipping at the convicts' stone. I did not know which perturbed me most, the look in his eyes or the description of his laughter. In such a time and place the laughter could have come only as intimation of a future in which neither conqueror nor conquest could have place, and as a reckoning of which we have not yet begun to be aware that would be ready for presentation to all who have for so long so cruelly denied and rejected the Bushman.