The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  I know it is useless to abstract people and events from the context of their own time. Perhaps one of the most prolific sources of error in contemporary thinking rises precisely from the popular habit of lifting history out of its proper context, and bending it to the values of another age and day. In this way history is never allowed to be itself but is given such a vicarious and negative extension that whole nations, classes, and groups of individuals never really live their immediate present but go on repeating a discredited pattern of the past. Nowhere is such a negative entanglement with history greater than in my own country. On one side, there are those of my countrymen who have made a determined effort to suppress and falsify the history of the Afrikaner people in order to show our forefathers establishing themselves as saviours in Africa. On the other side they are presented as a race of human monsters from which has sprung a monstrous generation in the present. Neither is right. But I am certain we shall never be free of the destructive aspects of our history until we can honestly look our past in the face and truly see ourselves for what we were: ordinary in our human fallibility, with much that was dishonourable and inadequate in our behaviour as well as a good deal that was brave, upright, and lovable. Both black and white peoples could begin so healing an exercise in no better way than by pondering upon the ills we all inflicted on the first little man of Africa. There our mutual records could not be blacker.

  While the giant hordes of black races in the far north had already fallen on the Bushman and were driving deeper into the heart of his ancient land along the east and west coasts as well as down the centre of Africa, we landed at the Cape of Good Hope and seized him in the rear. From that moment it was a war of encroachment from all points of the compass with gathering retaliation on the Bushman’s part. He asked for no quarter and was given none. He himself would go with gay defiance into the weighted battle, his quiver full of arrows and another supply handy in a band around his head, from which he deftly sent arrows whistling like a wild pigeon’s wing with incredible rapidity at his enemies. They were terrified of his arrows. The old Basutos, who only finished their war of extermination in my grandfather’s day, said that a wound from one of the Bushman’s arrows unnerved the bravest of their warriors. The terrible pain caused by the poison made them hack with spears and knives at their wounds, slicing through veins and arteries in their panic and merely hastening their own end. This sort of scene is depicted in some of the greatest paintings of the Bushman twilight hour. My own people, thanks to their horses and guns, usually managed to keep out of range and fell only when ambushed. When they stormed the Bushman in his kranses and caves they usually moved behind a screen made of their saddle-cloths and thick duffle coats. The Bushman never had a chance against them. His only hope lay in a compassion against which the hearts of the Europeans and the brutal hour were firmly shut. Yet even when surrounded and cut down by hosts armed with shields, clubs, and assegais, or shot at from a safe distance by guns in the hands of a race of unequalled marksmen, he never asked for mercy. Wounded and bleeding he fought to the last. Shot through one arm, Stow says, the Bushman would instantly use his knee or foot to enable him to draw his bow with the uninjured one. If his last arrow was spent he still struggled as best he could until, finding the moment of his end had come, he would hasten to cover his head so that his enemies should not see the agony of dying expressed upon his face. On all sides his enemies had just enough generosity to admit that he died royally. The same instinct which made Charles the First on his last grey morning in Whitehall ask for an extra shirt so that he might not shiver with cold and be thought by the crowd to be afraid, came to crown also the Bushman’s end. What, indeed, could be prouder than the Bushman’s reply to young Martin du Plessis, a boy of fourteen who was sent into a great cave in a mountain near my home (blatantly miscalled ‘Genadeberg’, Mountain of Mercy) where the Bushman was surrounded in his last stronghold by a powerful commando? The boy, almost in tears, besought him to surrender, promising to walk out in front of him as a live shield against any treacherous bullets. At last, impatient that his refusal was not accepted the Bushman scornfully said: ‘Go! Be gone! Tell your chief I have a strong heart! Go! Be gone! Tell him my last words are that not only is my quiver full of arrows but that I shall resist and defend myself as long as I have life left. Go! Go! Be gone!’

  Again, what could have been more Spartan than his end among the rocks of the projecting shoulder of a great precipice in the Mountains of Snow in the Cape Province where, for the last time, he turned at bay with his kinsmen to face another murder commando. Bushmen, dead and dying, were piled high on a dizzy ledge, others in their death struggle had rolled over the edge and fallen into the deep crags and fissures that surrounded them. Still they resisted. At last only their leader remained, undaunted. Posting himself on the outermost point of the projecting ledge of the precipice where no man dared to follow him he defied his pursuers and plied his arrows with immense skill, all the time bearing what seemed to be a charmed life among the bullets flying about him. But inevitably the moment came when he held the last arrow in his bow. A feeling of compassion stirred the hearts of his pursuers. Someone called on him to surrender and promised him life. He sent his last arrow at the speaker with the scornful answer that ’a chief knew how to die but never to surrender to the race who had despoiled him’. Then, with a shout of bitter defiance, he turned round and jumped over the precipice to be shattered on the rocks far below.

  But long before the Bushman made his last stand in the hills he was remorselessly driven from the great buck-bright plains below. For two hundred years and more, all along the steadily expanding European frontier, he was shot on sight and hunted down with horses, dogs, and guns with as great ardour as the lion and other carnivorous animals of the veld. Even a professed philanthropist like le Vaillant tells without shame how he and his attendants pursued and tried to kill a party of thirteen Bushmen merely because they were seen near the area where he kept his stock.

  Wherever the Bushman struck back, as he did, with increasing bitterness and vindictiveness, my countrymen immediately banded together and went after him with their deadly guns and quick-footed horses. They would load the heavy muzzles with extra powder and special shot and, taking care to keep out of arrow-range, provoke the Bushmen to charge them. Then they would open fire with terrible effect. One leader, Commandant Nel, alone on one small sector of the long frontier, in the thirty years from 1793 to 1823, served on thirty-two expeditions against the Bushman. On those raids great numbers of little men and their women were killed and their children carried back as slaves to the farms of the men on commando. One of Nel’s expeditions massacred no less than two hundred Bushmen and yet he himself seemed to have suffered no especial remorse for what he had done. Although he was in all other respects declared to be a God-fearing and benevolent man, he claimed ample justification for his deeds in the atrocities Bushmen had reputedly committed on farmers and their stock.

  On the northern front the Bushman fared no better. I hope some day a historian from among my black countrymen will not shirk the full implications of their share in the over-all tragedy. The traveller Chapman, for example, has several detailed stories of how Leshulatibi, a Bantu chief in Ngamiland, persecuted the Bushman. On one occasion when two of the chief’s horses were suffocated in a bog, he bound the two Bushmen slaves in charge of them to the dead animals and thrust them back into the morass. Later, when another group of Bushmen carried off some of his cattle and vanished into the desert, he waited some months for revenge. Then he sent envoys with presents of tobacco and by various sustained acts of kindness lulled their suspicions and persuaded them to come to a great feast. There they were overpowered and brought to where he was sitting on a veld stool. From there he personally supervised the cutting of their throats, embellishing their last moments, it is said, by every taunt and sarcasm that came to his sinister imagination.

  But as a child what shocked me most was the realization of what we had done to the
Bushman’s children. If we pause to reflect, our justification for eliminating him is revealed as guiltladen hypocrisy in view of the extreme value we placed on his children. Everywhere they were in great demand as slaves because, when they survived captivity, they grew up into the most intelligent, adroit, and loyal of all the farmer servants. Even long after slavery was abolished and until the supply was dried up their service was exacted under a system of forced labour. From the earliest days, all along the frontier, the more desperate and adventurous characters among my countrymen added to their living by kidnapping Bushman children and selling them to the land- and labour-hungry farmers. Hardly a commando came back from an expedition without some children, and an early traveller speaks casually of seeing wagons full of children returning from a raid across the frontier. Many of the children died of the heart-ache, shock, and the suspension of the only rhythm their little lives had known. Many tried to escape and, if recaptured, were flogged heavily for their pains. Others, more fortunate, once clear of the settlers, would try furtively to signal by fires to their own people. If they saw no answering smoke in the land round about them, they would quickly extinguish the fire for fear of attracting the attention of their pursuers and move stealthily ever deeper into the interior. Then they would try to signal from another place. So it went on until they either found some people of their own race, or died of hunger, or were eaten by wild animals. Stow, who learned all this from Bushman survivors when the last act of the tragedy was barely over, suggests that far more children died than ever got through to safety. His description of their fate impressed me so deeply that sometimes as a boy, when I was alone on my pony below the hills at home where the Bushman had lived, I thought that the wind coming up behind me through the pass brought the fading voices of doomed lost children crying in the bleached grass between the ironstone boulders under an empty and unresponsive blue heaven.

  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 o
f 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.