The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  ‘What did you say?’ Emma called from upstairs.

  De Villiers had to laugh at himself. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Then come to bed,’ she commanded.

  Southern Angola

  May 1985 21

  By the third week De Villiers was as barefoot as !Xau. The rubber soles of his UNITA-style canvas boots had come unstuck and he couldn’t repair them. He carefully buried them after removing the bootlaces.

  In the fourth week they came upon a band of roving Bushmen, a family consisting of four generations, from an old grandfather down to a couple of babies at the breast. !Xau had smelled their fire during the night, and when he called De Villiers to follow him, De Villiers had expected a short walk, but it turned out to be quite a trek, an hour of brisk walking. In the process they had to leave their planned course and were closer to the Quito River than De Villiers thought safe.

  !Xau, on the other hand, was ecstatic and after the initial greetings had settled as if he were a long-lost relative. The Bushmen shared their hunger. They were perpetually hungry, !Xau said. Hunger was a constant companion to all Bushmen. To De Villiers’s surprise, the Bushmen paid him little attention, although he caught the old grandfather staring at him a few times.

  !Xau explained that the family were from the Tsodilo Hills area in Botswana and that they were moving back home now that food was getting scarce in the Reserve.

  ‘What are these Bushmen doing here?’ De Villiers asked. ‘Surely it would be easier to find food and water where they come from.’

  !Xau shook his head. ‘We can walk and hunt where we like.’

  ‘No,’ De Villiers tried to explain. ‘I was thinking that they are making it difficult for themselves by coming all this way north, when they can find what they need at the Tsodilo Hills.’

  ‘I can see you don’t understand,’ !Xau said. ‘We have always hunted on this land, all the way from here to the sea.’ He pointed south.

  De Villiers squinted into the sun. ‘I just think it’s easier to make a living in Botswana than here.’

  !Xau clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘You have to walk on the land, otherwise other people will stop you.’

  De Villiers gave up.

  Talk of the arrows had started on the first day. From what De Villiers could gather from the animated gesturing and the clicking sounds, !Xau wanted to trade some arrows for the bootlaces De Villiers had saved from his canvas boots. But no exchange was forthcoming. After more pointing and clicking, the hunters in the group – there were three of them – had set off in an easterly direction with !Xau and De Villiers in tow. ‘To find the poison,’ !Xau said. When the hunters stopped under a marula tree, a great deal of discussion followed. They pointed here and there and marked spots in the sand under the tree. When De Villiers asked what was going on, they started digging in the soft sand with their digging sticks, each in his own spot. The four soon stood waist deep in the holes they had dug, the Bushmen as brown as the sand in which they were toiling.

  They brought the larvae out one by one, each ensconced in a tiny clay cocoon. The appearance of each larva was met with a gesture of celebration that appeared to De Villiers’s eye to be the mimicking of the slow stride of a gemsbok with its horns held proud. Then the digging continued until the next larva was found, and the Bushmen repeated their celebration.

  By the time they had made their way back to the camp, it was early evening. The women must have been on their own excursion, for they had tsamas and nuts for dinner.

  De Villiers was tired and slept like a baby.

  He woke up first. The Bushmen were at peace under a variety of skins and blankets, sheltered only partially from the elements by small screens of reed and grass.

  He gently shook !Xau to wake him. ’We have to go,’ he whispered, not to wake the others.

  !Xau shook his head. ‘No, we have to eat with them first, and there has to be meat.’

  And so De Villiers was made to stay. He watched as the hunters dressed their arrows over an open fire, with storytelling, as far as he could gather. The women and children kept their distance. The grandfather told a story with the children gathered around him, the story of the lion tamer.

  The sun.

  The lion sleeps.

  The cubs play hide-and-seek.

  A little one hides under the lion’s mane.

  The lion wakes.

  Pins the child under its paw.

  Licks its face.

  The lion roars.

  Whose child is this?

  The lionesses stand far away.

  The cub sleeps on his father’s paw.

  ‘Children are not allowed to say the name of the lion,’ !Xau said. ‘They must say hair, or the lion will wait until they are grown and then come to look for them.’

  De Villiers turned his attention to the fire. The preparation of the poison started with the removal of the larvae from the small pouches in which the hunters had kept them. De Villiers watched as the hunters squeezed the body juices of the larvae into a small cup made of one half of a monkey apple, and mixed it with the juices produced by chewing the roots !Xau had collected. One of the hunters added the intact poison bag of a puffadder. A sticky consommé of poison was the result. They handled it with the greatest care, with reverence even.

  The hunters dressed their arrows one after the other, each using only the poison from his own cup or bowl. Everyone watched every move with the greatest concentration, no one breaking the silence. Even the children had stopped their games. Each arrow received its coating of poison behind the arrowhead on the sinewy part of the foreshaft, and was laid across a log next to the fire to set in the heat of the coals.

  That night there was dancing, the dance of the hunter.

  It was a dance of anticipation. The hunters paraded around the fire, carrying their weapons. The younger men mimicked the behaviour of their intended prey, an ostrich and a gemsbok, while the hunters stalked them with great purpose and aimed their arrows at them.

  They left for the hunt early the next morning, before De Villiers had awakened, and returned with a young wildebeest. The hunter whose arrow had been identified as the one that had brought the animal down was in charge of the distribution of the meat. With great ceremony he handed each member of the family a share. !Xau received the head and De Villiers the tail. !Xau’s happiness appeared to have no bounds, and he immediately prepared a large fire in a pit he had dug in the soft soil. When the coals were ready, !Xau covered the head of the wildebeest with coals and covered the pit with sand. He explained that the head would be ready for eating the next morning.

  This was followed by a feast that lasted the whole night.

  No part of the wildebeest was wasted.

  De Villiers couldn’t remember a better meal, more gracious hosts, nor a heavier hangover. When he woke up at noon with the others still sleeping around him, he knew that he and !Xau would soon have to continue on their journey.

  But !Xau again shook his head when De Villiers said that they would have to leave.

  De Villiers at first resolved to return to his planned route and to undertake the rest of the journey on his own, but reconsidered when he looked at the map again. His planned route was the long way around. They had not seen any sign of their pursuers for at least a week. And the Tsodilo Hills Bushmen provided both comfort and a subterfuge. There was safety in numbers, not only from his pursuers, but also from the lion and hyena roaming in the Luengué and Mucusso. He and !Xau had had to take refuge in a tree twice when they had heard the roar and the grunting of lion near their chosen sleeping place. Once they had had to stay up all night to ward off an inquisitive and persistent hyena.

  De Villiers changed his plan. For the next four weeks he and !Xau moved steadily southwards with the Tsodilo Hills Bushmen. It was at once frustrating and comforting to be with them. The Bushmen spent most of their day foraging for food and water in their constant struggle for survival. That delayed the passage south. But at the same tim
e, De Villiers took considerable comfort in their gentle ways, in the way they hugged and handled the children in their little group, and in the way they interacted with their environment.

  The children were curious and playful, and after first keeping a distance from De Villiers, were soon engaging him in their games. They gathered around him and pulled his hair and pointed at his blue eyes. To their delight, De Villiers beat them at targetshooting, using their small bows and blunt arrows, and he ran with them as they played a game they called djani, catch-the-light. The light consisted of a stone tied to a short grass rope with some feathers at the opposite end. It was tossed high up into the air. The trick was to catch it on a stick and to flick it back into the air. He taught them to play hide-and-seek, but lost every time. They were far cannier than he could ever hope to be and seemed to melt effortlessly into the surrounding vegetation. No matter how hard De Villiers tried, or what tricks he used from survival training, the children, even the littlest ones, always found his hiding places quickly. Then they would giggle and point and mimic the walk of a gemsbok.

  As far as De Villiers could see, the Bushmen left no sign of their presence on the land except for their spoor.

  He accompanied the men on several hunting excursions while the women and children stayed near their temporary encampments. Porcupine and springhare took refuge deep in their burrows and had to be speared with special barbed sticks. De Villiers learnt to eat the tender flesh of snake and tortoise as well as the stringy meat of springhare. The porcupine tasted as good as his mother’s pork roast.

  But it was a lean time and the women produced most of the food: tsamas, nuts and berries, and various roots and tubers. The larvae of cicadas provided fluids, and once the still featherless chicks in a large combined nest of social weavers were consumed near raw to benefit from their fluids. De Villiers passed his share of the chicks to the children.

  On one occasion the Tsodilo Hills Bushmen saved De Villiers from capture when a helicopter came to hover overhead. De Villiers lay nearby, face up in the hole of an anteater where the Bushmen had hidden him when the first whir of the helicopter’s rotors was heard. De Villiers had held his breath while the soldiers looked down the barrels of their pointed R4s at the Bushmen. !Xau came to help him out of the hole when the soldiers had flown off deeper into the Luengué.

  De Villiers also learnt to dance.

  In the face of their harsh existence, their struggle to survive, or perhaps because of it, the Bushmen sought escape in regular rituals around their fire. They would dance around the fire to the same monotonous rhythm deep into the night, chanting their songs and retelling their stories of love and fear and of the animals and of miraculous interventions by supernatural powers. !Xau interpreted, but the words were few and De Villiers was sure that there had to be more in the chants and mimes of the dancers than !Xau was letting on. To the gentle clapping of the watching women and children, the men would dance around and around the fire, entering a trance-like state, mimicking now this animal, then that, until they would fall down unconscious and lie still until the next morning. Those falling too close to the fire would be dragged away a short distance, gently, so as not to disturb them.

  In the morning the whole family would wake up late, slowly, as if they were suffering from a common hangover or were still under the influence of a powerful soporific.

  Each dance was a ritual that mirrored the cycle of the Bushmen’s struggle for survival and the importance of the hunt. It started with the dance of hunger, enacted with immense emotion and sorrow, followed as the events unfolded by the dance of the tracking, the dancers mimicking their following of the spoor, and then the shot, when they would aim imaginary arrows into the dark of the night. The pace quickened in the dance of the chase, the hunters tracking the wounded animal. The dance of the kill was slow, the dancers circling the dying animal, until one of them would plunge a spear into its throat to end its suffering. The final dance was the dance of the return, when the successful hunters returned to their encampment to share the meat with the women and children. The dance was a dance of great joy and celebration.

  De Villiers often thought of Jacques Verster and the manner of his death as he shuffled along in the line of dancers, as he stomped his feet to the rhythm of the dance and gestured with his hands, with one arm for an ostrich or giraffe, and two arms with index fingers pointed upwards for a gemsbok.

  Their trek south continued, and although De Villiers was beginning to contribute to their food supplies, he was consuming more than he was contributing. Day by day he learnt more about the bush, about which plants were edible and where to look for grubs. At night they sat under the stars while !Xau explained which star represented which animal.

  ‘Why did you join the army?’ he asked !Xau one night.

  !Xau turned his gaze downwards to the sand between his feet. ‘They said the SWAPOs were going to take the land and stop us hunting. And they promised us food and water and clothes. And they gave us money for tobacco.’

  That’s what they told us about the communists, and the Cubans, and everybody else, De Villiers thought.

  By the time they reached the Cubango River, De Villiers had lost a good deal of weight, but he felt strong and fit. His companion looked none the worse for wear and now carried a near-complete complement of weapons: a bow with a quiver of poisoned arrows, a sharpened digging stick and, of course, his Best. All he needed was a spear with an iron blade and he would be fully equipped to kill even the largest animal.

  The Tsodilo Hills Bushmen had turned east the day before they reached the river. There were no goodbyes. When De Villiers had woken up that last morning, there was no sign of them.

  The moment De Villiers and !Xau set foot on the southern bank of the river, they were in South West Africa. The Katima Mulilo–Grootfontein road was tarred and carried civilian traffic under the watchful eye of the military base at Rundu.

  De Villiers knew that he had to start planning for his reception at Rundu.

  Auckland

  28 January 2008 22

  Zoë opened the door when they knocked and, with the candour of a six-year-old, invited them in.

  ‘Mum’s in the bath and Dad’s in the bush. I’ll make tea.’

  She led them into the television lounge and disappeared behind the kitchen nook. They watched as she filled the kettle and turned it on. Henderson and Kupenga took seats on the barstools.

  ‘You’d better tell your mum you have visitors,’ Henderson said, sensitive to De Villiers’s complaint that Kupenga had pushed Emma around. He didn’t want to imagine the fallout should Emma de Villiers come down to the television lounge half dressed or in a bathrobe.

  Zoë ran upstairs and they heard her talking. Henderson decided that discretion was the better part of valour and called Kupenga to follow him outside. They waited outside the open front door on the steps.

  That was where Pierre de Villiers found them. He was slightly out of breath from the uphill walk, but not surprised to see them. The absence of any mention of the assassination attempt in the media meant that there had been no significant progress in the investigation.

  Once inside, they sat down at the kitchen nook. ‘Coffee?’ De Villiers asked. When they nodded, he allowed Zoë to serve them. They made small talk until she left.

  ‘You know quite a bit about bows and arrows, it seems,’ Henderson said, holding the mug.

  De Villiers could see no reason for evasion. ‘But no more than others who grew up on a farm,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe so,’ Henderson conceded, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing that you were quite proficient with the bow and arrows at the shooting range at the Hotel du Vin, and when I showed you the Bushman arrow, you knew in advance that the front part would pull out of the shaft. That’s not something I imagine many people would know.’

  When De Villiers didn’t answer, Henderson prodded him. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, we grow up with bows and arrows there. And we learn about the Bushmen f
rom primary school,’ De Villiers said. ‘You must remember,’ he explained, ‘that an African boy who grows up on a farm is introduced to all sorts of weapons from an early age. We walked about the veld with catapults, bows and arrows and air rifles before we went to school. And we often went hunting with small-bore rifles before we reached high-school age.’

  Kupenga snorted, and then loudly blew his nose.

  ‘I’m sure your parents would only have allowed that under the supervision of an adult,’ Henderson postulated.

  De Villiers shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you, Sir. There wasn’t any supervision. And every boy carried a pocket knife, even to school,’ he added with a glance in Kupenga’s direction.

  It was Henderson’s turn to shake his head.

  ‘Let’s get back to business,’ he said. ‘What sort of bow would one need to cast this arrow thirty metres?’ he asked. He put a set of photographs of the arrow on the breakfast counter.

  De Villiers spread the photographs like a hand of cards, face up. They had been taken by a professional photographer and numbered with a ruler in the photo, standard for exhibits to be used in a trial. The arrow was so slight that just about any bow would do, but De Villiers was tactful for once.

  ‘I would say a proper Bushman bow would fire this arrow up to sixty or seventy metres, but it wouldn’t be accurate beyond thirty to thirty-five, perhaps even less.’

  He rearranged the photographs. Henderson watched him intently.

  ‘How long is a Bushman bow?’ Henderson asked.

  It was an odd question, De Villiers thought. ‘About a metre, no more than one-ten or so,’ he said.

  Henderson held his hands apart and frowned. ‘Could a bow half that size or smaller be used?’