The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  Standing stock-still seemed to be his way of taking exception to my generalization. He said, “We have problems.”

  “Tell me some of your problems.”

  “The main one in this village is water,” Dambó said. But “village” seemed a misnomer for the small cluster of huts and sheds in the immensity of low thorn scrub. “We have to walk so far to find water.”

  “The children go for the water.” I had been struck by the small kids setting off with their buckets and basins on the hot weekday morning.

  “That is the children’s work.”

  “What about other problems?” I asked. “How do people get along?”

  “We get along,” he said.

  Practically all observers of the Ju/’hoansi spoke of their acceptance of adultery, because divorce was a simple matter. An adulterous partner was separated from the marriage and, suddenly single, allowed to continue without the taint of transgression.

  So I asked Dambó about this, and he gave me a surprising answer.

  “If your wife has sex with another man, you beat her,” he said. “You might beat the man, too. Or kill him.”

  “Do such things happen here?”

  “A few years ago a man killed his wife in this village.”

  It seemed uncouth to ask for details, so I let it pass. Many of the violent crimes among the Ju/’hoansi were attributed to drunkenness, which was a scourge of Ju/’hoansi life today. According to one recent researcher, as much as a third of a family’s income might be spent on alcohol.

  Recalling the film Rite of Passage, which I had seen in Tsumkwe, I asked Dambó about his first kill. The memory of this successful hunt animated him, and though it was said that the Ju/’hoansi did not dwell in the past, and were unmoved by historical events, it was a different matter — if Dambó was an example — in the case of personal history, where ritual was involved.

  “My first kill was an oryx,” he said. The usual name for this large antelope (Oryx gazella) is the gemsbok. A mature male can weigh over four hundred pounds, and its long sharp horns, like a pair of samurai swords, make the oryx more than a match for an attacking lion. Dambó raised his arm and said, “He was bigger than this.”

  “And how big were you?”

  “I was small.”

  “How did you kill him?”

  He hoisted his bow and made the gesture of nocking an arrow and letting it fly. He said, “Then I used my assegais.”

  “What happened after you killed the oryx?”

  “They cut my arm — see?” He showed me the ritual scars of the slashes on his forearm that his father had made and pressed with hot fat and oryx flesh.

  We talked some more, and out of idle curiosity I wanted to ask about the Ju/’hoansi word for orgasm, which was tain. I had read (in Richard B. Lee’s The Dobe Ju/’hoansi) that tain was also the word used to describe the intense sweetness of wild honey. I resisted inquiring because I thought he might be offended, and rightly so, by something so indelicate. Otherwise, I was so happy talking to this old man I had not noticed the time. He seemed content to answer my questions, and perhaps because he was so venerable, no one was emboldened to interrupt.

  But during a long pause in the conversation, John tapped his watch and mouthed the words “bush walk.”

  Dambó stayed behind, frowning in the dappled shade, as we set off into the low thorn scrub in a long file of men and women wearing skins who seemed to dance through the bush. They pointed out the plants they used for medicine, the berries they ate, and the branches that were the hardest and straightest for arrow shafts.

  The young elfin-faced woman found a vine and dug up a finger-shaped tuber from the dark, strangely moist hole she’d made and cradled it in her hand. As she flicked dust from the root, it paled beneath her fingertips, and, smiling, she offered the first bite to me. Then everyone shared it, as they shared everything.

  Farther on, two men knelt in the leaf litter facing each other. They took turns spinning a two-foot-long stick between their palms, which raised a puff of smoke from the friction of its bottom end in a darkening piece of soft wood, and in the dust of the drilled block some sparks were lit. One man lifted the glowing, gently smoking wood and blew on it with lips framed in a kissing expression, and we had fire.

  The women sat in the shade and watched, one of them nursing her baby, as an older man made, out of twisted vine and a bent-over branch, a snare for a guinea hen or any other unwary bird.

  They named the trees, they identified a lizard and chased it, they called out to each other, they laughed. The sun beat down. The heat was tremendous and seemed life-giving, and everything was golden.

  And though it was all a charade, my mood of happiness persisted.

  Back at the clearing and the rack of drying elephant meat, the shelters and sheds looked more depressing and shantylike after the light and air of the bush walk. All the men and women had vanished, and soon others appeared, dressed in faded used clothes. But what I took to be a whole new crew were the same people, who had changed from their animal skins into Western clothes that had been handed out by foreign charities, T-shirts lettered Tommy Hilfiger and Springfield Hockey, and old pleated skirts and threadbare pink pajama tops with bunny rabbits printed on them.

  They all hung back, looking a bit apprehensive, because they had a favor to ask.

  John, the dapper interpreter and driver, said, “They are asking if you can take some of them to Tsumkwe. That one” — and he pointed to a thin teenage girl in a blue blouse and plaid skirt — “she is sick and wants to go to the clinic.”

  “Tell them they can come with us,” I said. Five of them climbed into the Land Rover, the ailing girl helped by the others into the back seat, where she lay as if sorrowful, and she did not move even when farther down the road the vehicle became stuck in deep sand and we struggled to push it.

  What I had seen, all of my happiness, my bliss bordering on rapture, was the result of witnessing a reenactment.

  “Today, nobody lives in the old way,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote in 2006. “All Bushmen, unless they put on skins for a photographer, wear the clothing of the dominant cultures … and none live by hunting and gathering, although with these activities they sometimes supplement their meager diet, which today is often cornmeal provided by the Namibian government as a welfare ration.”

  A German charitable organization, the Living Culture Foundation, sponsored some of these Ju/’hoansi villages as “Living Museums” (Lebende Museen). As the foundation elaborated on its website and in its brochures, “A Living Museum is an interesting and authentic way of presenting traditional culture,” and “guests can learn a lot about … the original way of living of the San.”

  “The Living Culture Foundation’s three aims are to protect traditional culture, to encourage intercultural dialogue, and to fight poverty.” Toward the realization of the last aim, the foundation encouraged “the establishment of sustainable projects for the tourism industry, for example our ‘Living Museums.’ ”

  In the mid-1930s, when the Ju/’hoansi were still known as Bushmen, a white South African named Donald Bain mounted a campaign to protect their way of life, put some of them on display at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, and promoted them (for their “Stone Age” reputation) as “living fossils.” What he managed to do, to realize his vision of the people, was not very different from the creation of the Living Museums.

  What I saw — what visitors in general see — is a travesty in the precise meaning of the word: a parody, a dressing up in unnatural clothes. The Ju/’hoansi were costumed, misrepresenting themselves to cater to the imaginations of fantasists, of which I was one. It was like taking the reenactment at Plimoth Plantation, and its employees dressed as Pilgrims, for the reality of life south of Boston today. Ultimately, I saw the reality of Tsumkwe, and read more of the Ju/’hoansi’s travails, which were extreme. “Far from being ‘beautiful people living in a primeval paradise,’ ” one anthropologist has written, “th
ey are in reality the most victimized and brutalized people in the bloody history that is southern Africa.”

  If I was a latecomer to the world of the Ju/’hoansi, I was not alone. Anthropologists agree that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle ended in the 1970s, largely as a result of the South African army’s installing itself in Tsumkwe and recruiting Ju/’hoansi into its ranks to fight the Namibian nationalists. The South Africans spread money around; they doled out free food; they discouraged hunting in some areas and made it unlawful in others. Deprived of their traditional livelihood, the Ju/’hoansi moved closer to the growing town, and with their army money they bought food at the store and alcohol from the shebeens. And for the first time in tens of thousands of years they began to suffer from Western diseases — high blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments, and alcoholism.

  The Kalahari Peoples Fund was started in 1973, the moving force behind it being the anthropologists and linguists who had observed the decline of the traditional lifestyle. In 1981 John Marshall and Claire Ritchie started the Nyae Nyae Development Fund and began drilling boreholes to supply water to family compounds. One hope for the people’s survival lay in learning agricultural and stock-raising skills to become small farmers, as well as earning wages and doing occasional foraging. To that end, the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Cooperative was established.

  At about the time the Ju/’hoansi had nearly abandoned hunting and gathering, a South African filmmaker shot The Gods Must Be Crazy in and around Tsumkwe, using Ju/’hoansi actors and celebrating the “living fossil” aspect of the people. This was in 1984, and though the gimmick of the film — the McGuffin — was a CocaCola can that was chucked from a plane into the unviolated Eden of Bushman Land, it was a time when in fact Western soft drinks and beer were freely available, when alcoholism and poverty were eating away at the culture.

  The Ju/’hoansi lost their land in the cause of nature conservation, tourist safaris, and expanding game reserves where elephants (like the fillets and biltong of the one I had seen) were killed by wealthy foreigners. Robert Gordon, in The Bushman Myth — his subtitle, The Making of a Namibian Underclass, says it all — gives a detailed chronology of the loss of Ju/’hoansi lands and describes how tourism robs the people of their dignity, exploits and suppresses them, and leaves them manipulated and unprepared for new ways of life.

  But there is near unanimity in the belief that the Ju/’hoansi no longer want the traditional lifestyle for themselves. “Is it right that we should still be wearing loincloths?” one elder asks, referring to a planned government game reserve for tourists in which the Ju/’hoansi would be part of the colorful foreground (described in Lee, The Dobe Ju/’hoansi): “[Eating well] is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean our women should have to expose their stomachs and buttocks again by wearing skin clothing.”

  In the aftermath of the anachronistic The Gods Must Be Crazy — which made anthropologists apoplectic with rage — John Marshall compared the Ju/’hoansi, in the way they were stereotyped, to the conventional image of the Hollywood redskin. Almost thirty years ago he wrote, “Among the simplest and dangerous [misconceptions] is the widespread conviction that, somewhere in the Kalahari, Bushman people still live skillfully and peacefully by hunting and gathering. The danger lies in the belief that these mythical people both can and want to live their ancient life in isolation” (John Marshall and Claire Ritchie, Where Are the Ju/’wasi of Nyae Nyae?).

  The process of this misunderstanding he calls “Death by Myth,” the title of one of his last films. It is the myth that they are still hunter-gatherers, that they can go back to it and flourish that way. “The myth is inherent in our thinking about Bushmen.”

  The traditional mode of living is long gone. A Ju/’hoansi born after 1950 would know little or nothing about hunting and gathering. “The cycle of knowledge was broken.” Apart from a handful of Ju/’hoansi who allowed themselves to be co-opted into the choreographed charade I had seen, the vast majority want to join the mainstream, go to school, work, live in a stable and safe place, and never again have to depend on the insecure life in the bush. They have drifted to town, where manual labor, even pick-and-shovel work, is easier than hunting. Some welfare was available at Tsumkwe, and the new clinic was installed to deal with the new diseases.

  In this grim fate, the Ju/’hoansi had gone from a fleet-footed bush-dwelling people who chased down game, to sedentary town dwellers plagued by drunkenness and hunger. In the past they had been able to move their settlement, to search for animals or water. But by living in a static way, in a cash economy, in a house on a small plot of land, this was not possible, so they became more dependent on government assistance.

  The myth of the Bushman has shaped the plans of the NGOs that try to help them. For the many charities and NGOs (the Living Museums program was the most visible one), which were sentimental like me, hankering for the days Before the Fall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas had a shrewd rejoinder: “Such organizations have no choice but to carry out their missions,” she wrote in The Old Way. “No wonder that they wish to save traditional Nyae Nyae, a place where an indigenous population occupied an ecosystem for 35,000 years without ruining it. Who would not want the survival of a life style that could accomplish that?” And she added, “The myth was that the Ju/’hoansi wanted it.”

  So they don’t hunt as they once did. They eat junk food and too much refined sugar, and they drink themselves into stupefaction, yet even in dysfunctional Tsumkwe the Ju/’hoansi retain their social culture of interdependency. With this mode of survival and generosity, they help each other through hard times.

  There was no future for them in being dependent on tourists’ visits, or the leftovers from trophy hunting, or government handouts. It seemed to me that, at bottom, Tsumkwe was one vast welfare scheme funded by NGOs. But in the face of an indifferent government, what was the alternative? I had seen that in the recording of oral histories and folktales, and with the health programs, some success had been achieved by the agents of virtue from foreign countries.

  And perhaps the Ju/’hoansi would manage to become small sustainable farmers, keeping cattle, feeding themselves, and overcoming the new diseases and the old hardships of hunger and lack of water.

  I was disillusioned, of course, as anyone would be, knowing what I knew now. I had been wrong. Being wrong and disillusioned seems an inevitable consequence of any serious African journey. But I felt lucky in one respect. I had met the old man Dambó. He was undoubtedly a man from the past, and knowledgeable — wise, experienced, a patriarch. That part of my visit, I was convinced, was neither a travesty nor a charade. Dambó was a true relic who had somehow survived from an earlier age. He could have said, with Job and Ishmael, And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  The image of the Ju/’hoansi we cling to — I did anyway — is that of a wild-dwelling, self-sufficient people. We seem to need them to be that way, not merely different from us, and purer, but more different than they really are — tenacious, resourceful, generous, peaceful, as if inhabiting Eden. They are reminders of who we once were, our ancient better selves. At one time, long ago, all of us were foragers on earth. What a relief it is in a world yearning for authenticity to know that though we have blighted our habitat, there is an unspoiled place on the planet, and a people who have defied modernity by clinging to their old ways. The past recaptured. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

  9

  Riding an Elephant: The Ultimate Safari

  THE ENORMOUS EMPTY SKY over the Kaokoveld Desert eased my mind with the prospect of freedom, and the flat land of grit and crumble was inspiring too — you could go anywhere under all this untroubled air and dazzling sunlight. Even on the worst day in the African bush the sky and the space offer relief.

  At the end of a simple bumpy drive on a bad road east from Tsumkwe, just over the Namibia-Botswana border, the small stony town of Dobe baked like a biscuit in the sun — more hard-up Ju/’hoansi looking for a livelihood, anthropologists searching for subjects, an
d baboons with tragic faces picking through roadside garbage. Not far from Dobe, still easterly, in a channel of the Okavango Delta, there was a luxury camp for people who paid large sums of money to ride elephants across mushy ground, and through tall grass and swamps, to look at birds and big animals. No one else in Africa rode elephants. At Abu Camp all they rode were elephants.

  I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts — cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint. “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage” — I agree, and canaries and parrots, pythons and panthers, too. Even drooling, needy, yappy dogs seem a bit sad to me. Early in the last century, Lord Rothschild broke four zebras and harnessed them to pull his carriage through London; Michael Jackson kept a demented orangutan in a barred cell at Neverland; a Chinese fruit vendor in my former neighborhood in Singapore trained his macaque to pick coconuts. Some people consider bull riding, or the sight of synchronized swimming of killer whales in a pool, a thrill.

  There is a hint of sadism in all of this. But the notion of African elephants submitting to the conveying of tourists through the bush was something I felt I had to see, because it seemed overwhelmingly absurd, and besides, the man who ran the operation was a friend of mine. Knowing how I felt about domesticating wild animals, he had encouraged me to pay a visit to his safari operation, called Abu Camp.

  After miles of gravel, upright spinning funnels of dust devils, the light brown scrub of the bush, and an immensity of woodland and camel thorns — after all that thirst, the Okavango Delta is unexpectedly drenched, as the desert deliquesces into a watery mirage, a deep green marvel that bubbles up and sprawls over the left shoulder of Botswana as a succession of swamps. Most river deltas — perhaps all of them in the world — occur at the edge of a land-mass, widening and dumping soil and water, enlarging the shore, pouring the river current into a body of water, the sea or a lake. The Okavango is unusual in being landlocked; the stream of the river, fed by numerous watercourses draining from a catchment area in the planalto of Angola, the wooded highlands of the far north, becomes a delta hundreds of miles wide. This river, lush and sodden and silted, empties its flow into the middle of the Kalahari Desert. The precise and pretty term for this natural wonder of watery interstices and spreading rivulets is an alluvial fan.