The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  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:

  Rough storms may rage.

  Around me all is night

  But God, my God, shall protect me.

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Pact and the Random Years

  THE older I grew the more concerned I became over the part my own family must have had in the extermination of the Bushman. That it was considerable I had no doubt. My mother’s family had been in Africa since the European beginning. By all accounts more restless, bold, and adventurous than most, they had always been in the forefront of what we called ‘progress’ and expansion, but what must have been retrogression and contraction to the Bushman. In fact my mother’s own grandfather had been one of the very first to cross the Great River with a small band of kinsmen in covered wagons and to move north across the reeking and smoking cannibal plains of the centre. They were all soon observed, superbly stalked, and finally massacred by the Matabele at dawn of a very still day and only my mother’s mother, her sister, brother, and coloured nurse miraculously survived to tell the tale. My mother’s father’s people too, as she once told me, had always lived naturally on frontiers and he had been one of the earliest to settle north of the Great River. It seemed to me impossible, along such an advanced line, that they could have avoided taking part in extinguishing the Bushman. But when I asked for precise information I found the members of the family instinctively conspired to silence. They would answer questions in general readily enough, but when it came down to particulars of family history in this regard they were dumb. Their silence confirmed my worst suspicions. I sought comfort in the fact that I witnessed from birth daily manifestations of the capacity of love of my mother’s people for everything that was indigenous and natural to our land. They were open-hearted, and, although austere, their lives were lived justly according to their exacting lights.

  All who worked for my grandfather, no matter whether Griqua, Hottentot, Bushman, Basuto, Bechuana, Cape-coloured, or poor white, were ultimately held in equal affection as part of his family, and the relationship was nightly redeemed by calling them into his dining-room to share with his wife and children in his communion with his God. One can only realize how significant such an attitude was when one remembers that the descendants of men like my grandfather are today trying to exclude such people from common worship in the same churches. I concluded, therefore, that in a brutal age my mother’s people might have been, perhaps, less brutal than most. That helped, though not overmuch, for I knew that with their deep Calvinist addiction to what they thought right, they would have done their duty conscientiously. Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. Fearful, I was certain they would have persuaded themselves that it was right to punish the Bushman and so would have joined in his killing, no matter how reluctantly.

  It is true that when my grandfather bought his vast estate around ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’ from the Griquas, ‘Pretty Little Rose’ had already cleared the area of the little hunter. But there were still isolated bands out in hills of the Great River. They had all been proclaimed, as we put it, ‘Bird-Free’ by the government of the day. That meant every burgher was permitted, if not actually enjoined, to shoot a Bushman on sight. The Bushman raids, and those of others against the Afrikaner settlements that were being fast consolidated, finally were found to be so provocative that a great commando was assembled to deal with them. The fact that my grandfather played a prominent role in that expedition was known, but what precisely happened remains hidden to this day. All I know is that in the colourful background of the wonderful home my remarkable grandfather had made of ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’, two little old Bushman men moved like twilight shadows. My grandfather, I believed, had found them as children, whimpering among the boulders and taken them home to

  ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’ to grow up in his service. But found them where? What were they? Survivors? But survivors of what? Another Bushman tragedy in the long series of tragedies? And which particular one? Now I shall never know because the people who could speak of it with authority are dead. But I can only say that the whole of the Bushman past came to a point for me in those two little men. They confirmed all that I vaguely feared and wondered at, and the world of the past which I came to recreate for myself in my imagination spun on into the future and gathered substance with those two little men always at the imponderable centre.

  From these two old men and others left in my native village I learnt something of the imagination of the Bushman and his knowledge of the inmost life of Africa. That was another aspect of the past that confounded me. How little we ourselves knew of the Bushman’s mind and spirit. We had killed him off after nearly two hundred and fifty years of contact without reall
y knowing whom we had exterminated. True, an old German professor had tried to reconstruct Bushman lore and grammar from a few convicts working on the breakwater in Table Bay, and a British geologist had tried to gather together the threads of remembrance still adrift on the sterile winds of our history and to weave them into some coherent design of the past. But what was known was a fragmentary and, to me, reproachful residue which made my slight contact with the few survivors all the more meaningful since it gave me the actual feel of the living texture and quality of the vanished people.

  In this way, for instance, as children we learnt where to find and how to distinguish the edible from inedible tubers and roots of the veld and made good use of our knowledge. In winter our colds were doctored effectively by our parents with medicine brewed from a wild herb to which the Bushman had introduced us. I learnt how to extract a thick milky liquid from a plant with the shape of an elephant’s ear and the hide of a hippopotamus, which was what the Bushman used as glue for the poison on his arrows, and later learnt how to make a sticky paste of it, spread it on traps baited with corn, and so catch the birds who, attempting to feed, found their claws held fast by the glue. In summer we children descended into the deep bed of the Great River, threw off our clothes, and lived there as the Bushman had done before us, naked. At evening we would stand, as the Bushman had taught us, to watch the bees flying home on burning wings. At dusk we were up in the wreath of purple rocks high above the gleaming river where the bees had vanished and listening, in the prescribed Bushman manner, for the bees’ hymn of thanksgiving to die down in the amber catacombs of some tired nest, while baboon sentinels on the peaks around boomed out a challenge to warn their sleepy kinsfolk that we, the humans, were still near. Finally, making smoke ‘the Bushman way’ we would extract our prize and come down in the dark to our camp-fires wtih buckets full of fragrant black honey.

  Often at dawn we stood still in the shallows among the rocks above the rapids armed with long, supple, blue-bush wands. When the golden bream on their way up-stream rose to the surface, a surface so filled with the light of the opening sky that they might have been birds with folded wings swooping out of the blue, we would smack the water smartly over their heads just as the River Bushman had done, and the shock would turn the fish over on their backs to drift helplessly into our clutches. At home our coloured and Bushman nurses would send us to sleep with stories of animals, birds, streams, and trees, which were part of the response of the Bushman’s creative imagination to the reality of his great mother earth. Somehow, in imagination, the Bushman was always with us even when the two little old men were no longer there to represent him. And in an even more subtle way the earth too participated profoundly in the process. Ever since I can remember I have been struck by the profound quality of melancholy which lies at the heart of the physical scene in Southern Africa. I recollect clearly asking my father once: ‘Why do the vlaktes and koppies always look so sad?’ He replied with unexpected feeling: ‘The sadness is not in the plains and hills but in ourselves.’

  This may be true for others, but it was not true for me. For me, the country in its own melancholy right was sad and in a deep mourning. As a young boy I came to believe that some knowledge of the tragedy of the Bushman was always deeply implicit in the physical scene, making the blue of the uplands more blue, the empty plains more desolate, and adding to the voice of the wind as it climbed over the hilltops and streaked down lean towards the river, the wail of the rejected aboriginal spirit crying to be re-born. It seemed to me that both the earth and I were aware that spread out before us was the scene of a great play in which the principal actor was absent and He who first created it, missing.

  I soon came to believe, too, that the country was haunted. Late at night on lonely journeys when I climbed out of cart or wagon to open a gate in a pass, I would suddenly tremble with fear for the nearness and certainty of unacknowledged being. It was not just a normal fear of darkness. Often I would find the horses sharing my feeling and shivering deeply under my hand as I laid it on their necks as much to comfort myself as to calm them. Sometimes when the sense of a presence in the dark was at its most acute, a silent jackal would let out a yelp of pain as if one of the arrows that fly by night had suddenly hit it. Another time, out with a Hottentot groom on the veld many miles from any habitation in a night as black as an Old Testament Bible, our horses reared, stopped dead, and stood, legs wide apart, heads up, snorting with terror and trembling all over. The Hottentot groom who believed as do all his kind that horses have second sight, cried hysterically: ‘Please little master, let’s turn back! Please don’t go on! . . .’ But he would never say what he thought he had seen. I have seen black women come screaming back to their homesteads in the dying fire of dusk sobbing that they had been beckoned by a compelling ‘little man’ who had suddenly risen up from the river reeds.

  Ghosts in the conventional semblance of themselves may not exist, but looking back at moments like these I am certain that the pattern which makes the use of a ghost in Macbeth so meaningful is constant in the spirit of all persons and countries who have perpetrated a crime against life which they refuse to acknowledge. I am certain it was the mechanism of a spirit haunted in this sense that was so intensely at work among us all no matter what our race or colour. However, the climax in childhood awareness came for me when the two little old men died, one I believe of pneumonia, the other, soon after, of a broken heart. I was inconsolable and lay awake at nights close to tears because I was convinced that now, never again, would the Bushman and his child-man shape be seen upon the earth.

  For some years I grieved secretly in this manner until one day a man more picturesque than most appeared among the many colourful people who were always passing through our ample home. He was tall, lean, burnt almost black by the sun, and his skin of the texture of wild biltong. His grey eyes in a dark face glittered so that I could not take mine from his. He had just come from some far northern frontier and had been everywhere in Africa. Our rebel community frowned upon him because he was thought to be on his way to join the British in their Great War. Then one day I heard him volunteer casually that on a recent journey to an oasis in the Kalahari Desert he had found the authentic Bushman living there as he had once lived in the country around us. After that, I could think of nothing else. Later in the afternoon I locked myself in the study of my father who had died some weeks before and took out a diary in which, secretly, I had begun to write poetry and record my thoughts. The day was 13 October 1914 and in High Dutch I wrote: ‘I have decided today that when I am grown-up I am going into the Kalahari Desert to seek out the Bushman.’

  Many years went by and the impact of remorse and resolution became obscured. I never lost my preoccupation with the Bushman and his fate, but my interest lost its simplicity and therefore much of its force. Part of the explanation, of course, is that like all of us, I had to live not only my own life but also the life of my time. Today we overrate the rational values and behave as if thinking were a substitute for living. We have forgotten that thought and the intuition that feeds it only become whole if the deed grows out of it as fruit grows from the pollen on a tree. So everywhere in our civilized world there tends to be a terrible cleavage between thinking and doing. Something of this dividing power of my time helped to separate the deepest impulses of the child from the calculated behaviour of the man. Also there were the obvious difficulties. I had to make my own way in life, I had a living to earn, and other compelling urges to satisfy. None the less I never entirely forgot the pact with myself. In my twenties I made two attempts to keep faith with it and go into the Kalahari to find the Bushman but neither was served with enough imagination nor pressed with sufficient energy to succeed. What I saw too of the sad mixtures of races that pass for ‘Bushman’ on the fringes of the ‘Great Thirstland’, as my countrymen call the Kalahari, were so unlike the true Bushman that they prompted me to doubt whether he could still be found in his aboriginal state. Yet I saw enough of the Kalahari to
be drawn to it as to no other part of the country, and to realize that if there were one place left in the world where the true Bushman might still be living it could only be there.