The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  As an archer he was without equal. My grandfather said he could hit a moving buck at 150 yards, adding that he would not have liked to expose any part of himself in battle to a Bushman archer under a hundred and fifty yards’ range. But he not only hunted with bow and arrow. In the rivers and streams he constructed traps beautifully woven out of reeds and buttressed with young karee wood or harde-kool (the ‘Hard-Coal’ wood my ancestors used in their nomadic smithy fires), and so caught basketfuls of our lovely golden bream, or fat olive-green barbel with its neck and huge head of bone and moustaches like those of ‘a soldier of the Victorian Queen’, Hongroise-pomaded point and all. The baskets at the end of the traps were like the eelbaskets of Europe but never so bleakly utilitarian. They were woven of alternate white and black plaits not because they were better that way but, my aunt said with great emphasis, because the Bushman wanted to make them pretty. Hard-by among the singing reeds he dug pits with a cunningly-covered spike in the centre in order to trap the nocturnal hippopotamus whose sweet lard meant more to him than foie-gras to any gourmet.

  When my grandfather first crossed the Orange River, or the Great River as the Bushman and we who were born close always called it, there were still many of those big game pits left. The trekkers, or covered-wagon pioneers of my people, kept patrols of horsemen scouting well ahead of the lumbering convoys to look out for these holes and, on a signal, someone would go to the front of the large span of oxen and lifting the lead rope from the horns of the two guide-oxen, march carefully at their head. My grandfather often said he wished he had a dollar for every mile he had led his span by the head through the veld. Once in very early childhood, on one of our spring hunting and fishing excursions in the deep bed of the Great River, I saw some of those holes. The spikes in the centre and the top-cover were gone but I remember the sensation of wonder that came over me as one of the elder men said: ‘That’s how he did it! That’s how fat old tannie sea-cow found her way into the pot.’ ‘Old tannie sea-cow’ was our endearing way of naming the hippopotamus, so called because it was there in the surf of the sea to welcome my people when they first landed in Africa. Between the sea and the Great River of my childhood lay hundreds of difficult miles, and it was impossible to find a place of water and reeds not associated in local legend and story with the sea-cow. However, long before this day of which I am speaking, ‘Fat little old aunt sea-cow’ had vanished like the Bushman, who had so admired her waistline and so loved her lard.

  In the tracks between water-holes and rivers the Bushman spread snares of tough home-made rope. The snares according to my grandfather were made of several kinds but the favourite was the classical hangman’s noose. The noose was spread round the rim of a hole delicately covered over with grass and sand. Its end was tied to a tense spring made of the fiercely resilient stem of blue bush wood. This stem was doubled over into the sand and so triggered that, however deft a buck’s toe or crafty a leopard’s paw, the merest touch would release the spring. The noose would instantly be jerked tight and the straightened stem hang the lively animal by paw or throat in the air.

  So skilful and confident a hunter did the Bushman become that he did not hesitate to match himself in the open against the biggest and the thickest-skinned animals. For instance, my grandfather said he would provoke the male by darting in and out of a herd of elephant, or teasing the smaller crashes of rhinoceroses, relying only on his knowledge of their ways and his own supple limbs for survival. He would contrive to do this until an angry elephant bull or some never very enlightened rhinoceros father would charge out to deal with him. Twisting and turning and shrieking a charm of magic words, the Bushman would flee until the animal was involved in a baffling pursuit. Then a companion would run up behind unperceived to attack the only place where such a rampant animal was vulnerable to Stone-Age weapons. Smartly he would slice through the tendons above the heel. The animal now helpless on its haunches, the Bushman would close in to finish him off with spears and knives.

  On top of his great daring and resource as a hunter, he was also subtle. That was a quality stressed by all those who had known him. He never seems to have attempted to accomplish by force what could be achieved by wit. The emphasis in his own natural spirit was on skill rather than violence. I can remember my grandfather saying with a note of admiration if not envy strangely alive on his pious Calvinist tongue: ‘Yes! he was clever, diabolically clever.’ The Bushman would, for example, use the lion as his hunting dog. When his normal methods of hunting failed him he would frighten the game in the direction of a hungry lion. He would let the lion kill and eat enough only to still its hunger, but not enough to make it lazy. Then the Bushman would drive the lion off with smoke and fire, and move in to eat the rest of the kill. In this way he would follow a favourite lion about from kill to kill and it was extraordinary how he and the lion came to respect their strange partnership. My grandfather said there was something uncanny about it. He remembered, too, his father telling him that when they first felt their way into the country across the Great River they found that all the lions were man-eaters. The many thousands of dead bodies left on the veld after a generation of massacre and counter-massacre by Korannas, Griquas, Mantatees, Zulu, Matabele, and Barolong had given the lions such a taste for human flesh that they ignored the herds of game whenever it was possible to go after human prey. Yet oddly enough they never seemed to go after the Bushman. It was said that the Bushmen smeared themselves with an ointment whose smell so offended the lion’s sensitive nose that it would not come near them. But whatever the reason the Bushman would come and go fearlessly and unscathed through lion-country wherein a man armed with a gun was barely safe.

  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 wi
de 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.