The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  I was shaving by torch-light in the morning listening to the distant roar of a lion fading solemn as a shooting star, when a new sound fell on my ears. Jeremiah, too, heard it and stopped tending the fire to listen. Somewhere in the dark bush between us and the first sear of red in the sky, we heard music. It rose and fell, growing steadily louder, a tune in the wayfarer’s nostalgic pattern, as sad with arrival as departure, but gay with the lift of spirit provided by the journey in between. Soon Nxou emerged into the fire-light, a cloak of skin like a Roman toga about him, playing as he walked, head bowed over one of the oldest instruments in the world. It was shaped like a long bow with only one string, bound in the middle, to the back. One end rested on his parted lips, the other in his left hand while he beat the taut string on either side with a small stick and, catching the reverbations in his open mouth, shaped them between his lips to produce the notes. Behind him walked another who could have been a sturdier brother, hunting bow in hand, and shaft of the spear stuck into a quiverful of poisoned arrows. He was Bauxhau: ‘Stone-axe’, and although not of as fine texture as Nxou he was as authentically Bushman and more vividly handsome. They were close friends and with the good Bushman manners that they expected of others, they squatted down at the edge of the fire-light waiting to be greeted before they came into the centre of our camp. Once by our fire they did not speak unless spoken to, but Nxou went on playing his instrument and Bauxhau listened.

  ‘I see the hotel has an orchestra,’ Duncan remarked when I woke him with coffee, obviously relieved at the sight of his Bushman by the fire. ‘All modern conveniences in fact.’

  ‘This is the last convenience of the day,’ I told him laughing, as I handed him his cup. ‘From now on you’ll have to work as you’ve never worked before.’

  As soon as we had eaten we went to visit Nxou’s people. Those of us who had expected a large settlement were immediately disappointed. We were among the first four shelters before we had even seen them, so discreetly were they made and so naturally did they blend with the growth and colour around them. Basically they were of the same bee-hive design as the other shelters we had encountered in the Slippery Hills but more solidly built and more carefully roofed with branches of thorn and tufts of grass. Each had a tree at the back to support it and from some of the branches hung strips of venison drying in the wind and shade. The floors of the shelters were scooped out in places to make them more comfortable for the hips of the people sleeping in them, the interiors were almost bare of decoration or utensils. But where the women slept hung strings of the white beads and ivory headbands made out of the shells of ostrich eggs, and along the sides of the shelters were rows of ostrich egg-shells securely placed upright in the sand, plugged with grass and presumably filled with water.

  Outside the first shelter a middle-aged woman sat diligently pounding the seeds of the tsamma, the Kalahari melon which sustains man and beast with food and moisture in the long, hot months between the rains. The stamping block is the Bushman woman’s most precious possession: a large pestle and mortar carved out of iron-wood. Wherever she goes she carries it with her to make meal out of nuts and seeds of melons and grass, and to pulverize dried meat for toothless children and old people. As the woman pounded it the block made a curious drum-like sound which travelled a surprising distance, and in the days to come greeted us from afar like a quickened beat of our hearts at the realization that after a harsh day, home was near.

  In front of the second shelter sat Nxou’s father stringing a bow. His wife at his side was cooking something in a small clay pot on a tiny fire which hardly made any smoke. At the third shelter another middle-aged man was repairing one of the long rods used to fish in holes in the ground for spring-hares, porcupines, badgers, ground squirrels, and other animals that live underneath the Kalahari sand. Outside the last of the shelters sat two of the oldest people I have ever seen. They were Nxou’s grandparents and the skins of both were so creased and stained with life, weather, and time that they might have been dark brown parchment covered with some close Oriental script. Both had serene expressions on their faces and they looked continually from one to the other as if in constant need of reassurance that the miracle of being together after so many years was indeed still real. They seemed to have grown old in the right way, they and their spirit being contained within their age as naturally as a nut is enclosed within a shell, and only when fully ripened falling obediently to the need for a renewal of life.

  The old lady I could see was already beginning to feel the heat. From time to time she put her hand deep into a hole beside her to pull out a handful of cool sand which she scattered over her naked body for relief. I have often seen elephants do the same thing with their trunks. She did this as daintily as some Mongol lady fanning herself, and was as shy as a young girl, immediately looking away from us when she caught our eye, and then glancing coyly back out of the corner of her slanted eyes when her curiosity became too great. Her husband, however, looked at us as if trying to get into focus something seen from an immense distance.

  When I asked if that was the whole community Nxou shook his head. The young women and children he said were already out in the desert seeking for food. The other half of his people were grouped around five similar shelters about a mile away. All told they were about thirty persons though it was difficult to determine the exact number because from time to time relations would suddenly appear like reflections in a distorting mirror out of the vast quicksilver day around them, stay for a week or ten days, and then as suddenly vanish again into the desert. But during our stay the number was seldom less than thirty, though often more. I did not press Nxou to elaborate on the answers to my questions because I noticed they tended to make him uneasy. Instead I followed him on foot and in silence to the other shelters.

  They were almost exact copies of the first with people doing the same sorts of things, except that one man was busy redipping his arrows in newly prepared poison, and another softening a duiker skin with incredible swiftness by squeezing the juice of a large bulb on to it and wringing the moist skin between his hands. While we were there the younger women began coming home. They were all naked except for a leather wrap each hung by a strap from one shoulder and tied round their waists. The hem of the wrap was decorated with ostrich-shell beads and around the smooth yellow necks of the younger women hung rows of necklaces made of the same beads. In that sun, against those apricot skins, the necklaces shone like jewels. Each woman carried a shawl of skin tied into a bundle which she placed on the sand and undid, taking out the amazing variety of roots and tubers they had collected in the desert, as well as dozens of ostrich egg-shells filled with water. Like everyone else they appeared to be of pure Bushman stock and in their truly feminine way possessed the same wild beauty that made Nxou and Bauxhau so attractive. Indeed, one of the younger women might have been the model of the girl figuring in one of the most impressive rock paintings. Her dress of draped skin, and the circle of beads below her left knee, was exactly like that of her ancient painted prototype, only she did not walk with a flower in her hand, though her step was as high and her carriage as full of grace. Her name was Xhooxham, signifying, as we gathered with difficulty from Dabe, the equivalent of ‘Lips of Finest Fat’ because fat in that harsh land is one of the rarest and greatest of all delicacies.

  Only one of the women had a child, a baby she carried in a skin on her hip. It was her first, Nixou said, and when she sat down in a patch of shade to feed it and the plump little body was tugging sleepily at her full round breast the look of unimpeded tenderness on her face was so intense that she might well have had a halo around her Mongolian head. But apart from that one little suckling, there appeared to be no other babies. I had always been told that the Bushmen had small families, that the Bushman was, in fact, to use the language of animal husbandry applied to him in my country, a ‘shy breeder’, but even so this lack of children was excessive. I questioned Nxou and he said there were four more children but that was all.
Just then a woman came from the back of a shelter with a little boy. He could hardly walk and was naked except for one string of beads shining like pearls around his fat tummy. Any slight doubts we might have had about the authenticity of the people around us were removed by the vision of the infant man openly displaying his ‘Qhwai-xkhwe’, the ancient badge of his race.

  ‘Look at that little chap, Duncan,’ I told him, ‘and you’ll see why the Bushman calls himself “Qhwai-xkhwe”.’

  Duncan was amazed: ‘Surely he can’t keep it up for long?’ he asked.

  ‘From birth to death,’ I told him, and though Duncan tried to prove the impossibility of the statement the little boy remained a picture-book illustration of the national male condition, and figured so in all our films, even in the climax of midnight-dancing.

  We were still discussing the little boy when a woman called out something to her companions. They all stopped what they were doing and began jumping up and down, clasping and unclasping their hands in gestures of instinctive gratitude, and chanting what I learnt later to be a Hunter’s Praise in such clear and melodious voices that my nerves resounded like violin strings with the sound. Another young man, a little taller than Nxou and almost as attractive, came running into our midst, a small buck like a boa around his neck. His name was Tsexchi, signifying a ‘Powerful Wildebeest’, and he, Nxou, and Bauxhau were so much together that inevitably we christened them The Three Musketeers.

  So the day went quickly by. At noon we did not halt for food but went from one group of shelters to the other meeting new arrivals and making ourselves better known to the old. At each shelter we left a small present of tobacco and the promise to help them hunt for more food. Whatever apprehension may have been felt about our arrival it was, I believe, largely vanquished by that calm, leisurely coming and going between our camp and their shelters. I was not naïve enough to imagine all reservations had been conquered. But when, towards evening, I mentioned the critical matter of water and Bauxhau immediately offered to show us how they themselves dealt with the problem, I felt the major battle of our first contact had been won.

  In the cool of the evening they and Xhooxham, ‘Lips of Finest Fat’, led us some miles away to the deepest part of the old watercourse between dunes yellow in the sun. There we found several shallow excavations dug for water in ampler seasons. But the supply which never failed them was hidden, safe from evaporation of sun and wind, deep beneath the sand. Near the deepest excavation Bauxhau knelt down and dug into the sand to arm’s length. Towards the end some moist sand but no water appeared. Then he took a tube almost five feet long made out of the stem of a bush with a soft core, wound about four inches of dry grass lightly around one end presumably to act as a kind of filter against the fine drift sand, inserted it into the hole and packed the sand back into it, stamping it down with his feet. He then took some empty ostrich egg-shells from Xhooxham and wedged them upright into the sand beside the tube, produced a little stick one end of which he inserted into the opening in the shell and the other into the corner of his mouth. Then he put his lips to the tube. For about two minutes he sucked mightily without any result. His broad shoulders heaved with the immense effort and sweat began to run like water down his back. But at last the miracle happened and so suddenly that Jeremiah gasped and I had an impulse loudly to cheer. A bubble of pure bright water came out of the corner of Bauxhau’s mouth, clung to the little stick, and ran straight down its side into the shell without spilling one precious drop!

  So it continued, faster and faster until shell after shell was filled, Bauxhau’s whole being and strength joined in the single function of drawing water out of the sand and pumping it up into the light of day. Why he did not fall down with exhaustion I do not know. I tried to do it and though my shoulders are broad and my lungs good, I could not extract a single drop from the sand. We named that place, where we saw one of the oldest of legends about the Bushman become a miraculous twentieth-century fact, ‘The Sip-wells’. Were it not for the water we extracted we could not have stayed there in the central desert, but would have had continually to go laboriously back and forth between it and our own remote water-points. And of course without the sip-wells Nxou and his people could not have survived there at all between the rains.

  We were on our way back from the sip-wells, the dunes in the west sharply outlined against a crimson sky, and I was feeling not only content but also warmed and illumined as with revelation, when we came upon another astonishing sight. The bush and plain was just beginning to resound with the call of night-jars, the melancholy cry of carrion birds, and mournful bark of jackal. One would have thought that all good Bushmen would have been sitting around the fires at the mouths of their shelters seeking safety from lion or leopard. But on the edge of the bush, a mile from our camp, we overtook a brave little procession composed of three of the four children, all up to their ears in thorn and grass. A little boy, grubbing stick in hand, led the procession with a bundle full of roots, tubers, caterpillars, and succulent grubs in his hand.

  A small girl, whose name meant ‘Spoor of Gazelle’, followed with a bundle of wild and sun-dried berries and rare groundnuts. She was already clearly a little mother to her companions because, although she followed the boy in front dutifully like a wife, she made sure by constant backward glances and affectionate exhortations that the youngest of all, who was in the rear, stayed close to her. He carried a large tortoise in a hand held level with his shoulder, and he was breathless with the conflicting efforts of supporting it and keeping up with his elders in front.

  Nxou’s face when he saw them was instantly warm with affectionate delight. He went on his knees beside them, peered into their bundles, and uttered such sounds of astonishment and appreciation that the children, who clearly loved him dearly, stood shaking with laughter of sheer joy despite their fatigue. When Nxou took up the tortoise he made a great fuss over it and, according to Dabe, told the little boy that if he gave that to his grandmother she would certainly tell him a bed-time story that would last well into the night.

  In their company we came home, the light of our fires red on the leaves of the trees standing solemnly under the darkness which was about to crush the last glimmer of a great day. All evening long we sat by our fires comparing our impressions and I was not surprised that we all shared the main one. None of us doubted that we had struck a pure Bushman community living their Stone Age life. Even I, who was most ready to distrust the conventional portrait of the Bushman and the grotesque caricature of his life drawn in our histories, had not imagined it would be like this. I had not expected anything so comely, dignified, and orderly. In the past, wherever I had broken through into lonely communities in remote regions of Africa, some clear demonstration of the impact and excitement of the arrival of a rare stranger, particularly a red stranger, had always greeted me. Here there had been none, just everywhere a formal exchange of greetings and welcome. Of course Nxou had prepared his people for our coming and this must have had something to do with the calmness of their response. Yet I did not believe that to be the whole story. I suspect it went much deeper and had to do with fundamental questions of birth and breeding in the spirit of an ancient centred people. In the days that followed the suspicion sharpened and gradually became certainty.

  Daily, the lies and the distortions of the past were thrown more firmly into our faces by this small but self-contained Stone Age example. Daily, I became more convinced that in this regard our version of history was largely rationalization and justification of our own lack of scruple and excess of greed, and that the models drawn upon by historians and artists must have been the Bushmen nearest them who had already been wrenched out of their own authentic pattern to become debased by insecurity and degraded by helplessness against our well-armed selfishness. I could not explain on any other basis the stories of Bushman excess and apathy handed down as universal facts. One story, for instance, which I have seen repeated in many an anthropological and scientific treatise, states th
at the Bushman is so unconscious a creature that after gorging himself with food like a python he will go to sleep and, when the pangs of hunger again begin to stir, he will merely draw the band of skin tighter and tighter around his stomach until at last only death from starvation serves to make him conscious enough to go out once more to hunt.

  This certainly was not true of our sip-wells community or the few other little groups we found on our rounds while based with them in the central desert. When they killed more game than usual they would certainly treat the occasion as a feast day, eat largely, and perhaps sleep through the day. But on the whole they were contained in a natural sense of discipline and proportion and curiously adjusted to the harsh desert reality. They never ate all their meat at one sitting. Whenever possible they set something aside for a leaner day. Later on their stories clearly showed us that they had considered the ways of the ant and bee and had been made wise thereby. Most of the meat was immediately cut into strips and skilfully dried in the shade and wind to become for them what pemmican was to Eskimo and Red Indian. It was most impressive to see them skin and cut up game. Nothing was wasted or discarded except the gall and dung in the stomach. The entrails were cleaned and preserved, and even the half-digested grasses in the paunch were wrung out like washing for the juices they contained, and these collected in the skin and drunk by the hunters to save their precious water. In case of need they even stored water in ostrich egg-shells on the extreme perimeter of their permanent base at the sip-wells. One day out hunting with Nxou and Bauxhau some seventy miles from the sip-wells I was puzzled to see them break away from the spoor we were following in the terrible heat of the day and make for particular scrub which, to me, was exactly like the desert of scrub around us. They dug into the sand and disclosed a cache of six ostrich egg-shells filled with water from which they emptied two before covering the rest carefully again with sand. The same foresight and sense of economy seemed to go into their building of fires which they made in the classical way of rotating a round rod of hard wood between their hands in a hole in a small board of softer wood at their feet. There was never any shortage of firewood. It is one of my greatest joys to build big camp fires in the desert and sit in the night in a Gothic structure of tall aspiring firelight, with my companions grouped around for comfort and conversation. They were, I suspect, shocked by the extravagance: their own fires were so discreet, neat, and unwasteful of wood.