Hallowed Ground

by Paul Twivy

  ‘You see…every circle is the grave of a bushman: a bushman killed by the white invaders. They have come, for hundreds of years, preaching their ways, killing us for being different. But we have lasted longer than anyone on Earth, until guns anyway. God has cried a giant tear for each one of us to mark where we fell. If you tamper with those circles, you tamper with the dead.’

  That night, Basarwa’s face haunted all of them. In the morning they woke exhausted but relieved to hear the birds.

  5

  Half Term Discoveries

  Joe read out the inscription at the base of the statue that overlooked Windhoek, as his father circled it taking photographs. ‘Their blood waters our freedom.’

  ‘Powerful isn’t it?’ Ben suggested, in between snaps.

  It was a half-term tradition: Joe was spending a few days at work with his father. They had got up ridiculously early, much to Joe’s annoyance. He always looked forward to sleeping in at half-term: wallowing, half-asleep, in a warm bath of his dreams. This morning, his dream had been of Selima and vivid to the point that he felt she was in the room with him when he woke.

  Sadly, the figure at the window that had greeted him had not been her, but his father tearing the curtains apart in an unspoken accusation of laziness.

  ‘Come on. We’re going to the Museum together. I want to get there early.’

  There was little need for this last sentence because Ben Kaplan always wanted to get everywhere early. He was never up and about later than 6 a.m. regardless of when he’d gone to sleep.

  Joe had lost count of the times when, in the holidays, he’d accompanied his father to the obscure vaults of a ‘Museum of Native This’ or ‘Anthropological Institute of That’.

  This morning, they had duly arrived at the Alte Feste, a 19th century German fort overlooking Windhoek. It was now largely abandoned with a sad museum inside. On the outside though, it glistened a pristine, toy-town white in the early sun. They were standing in front of a statue which Joe could tell, both from the emotion of its figures and its prominent position overlooking the capital, was significant.

  A male and female Namibian stood side by side, on top of what appeared to be the half-dome of a skull, but was, in fact, the roof of a traditional hut. The outer arms of both the man and woman were raised to the sky in a triumphant gesture. Dangling from their wrists were the sawn-off shackles of the slavery from which they had just been freed.

  ‘Whose blood?’ Joe asked, referring to the inscription.

  Ben stopped taking photographs and sat down on the grass next to Joe, staring him squarely in the eyes.

  ‘Between 1904 and 1907, the Germans wiped out most of the Herero tribe and half of the Nama.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Four thousand Germans attacked six thousand Herero men. The Herero were defending forty thousand of their women and children.’

  Ben picked up a stick and drew a crude map in the dirt to indicate what had happened.

  ‘The Germans forced them eastwards into the desert. Then they refused them access to water. Ten thousand Herero died of starvation and thirst. Can you believe it? Then the Germans issued the order to exterminate the rest. Those that weren’t shot, were put into death camps or used as slaves on the railways. They did the same thing to the Nama.’

  Joe cast his gaze to the ground, shocked.

  ‘So, Jews weren’t the first people to be put in concentration camps?’ he asked after a while.

  ‘No, we weren’t,’ Ben replied, cupping his hands around Joe’s face, lifting it up to his own. He kissed the top of Joe’s head in gratitude for his very existence. ‘And, tragically, we won’t be the last either.’

  ‘How many died?’

  ‘They reckon sixty-five thousand Herero and ten thousand Nama.’

  Joe got up and walked round the back of the statue, its true significance now clear. The sky was blue but now it felt dark. He’d had this feeling before, visiting the Holocaust Museum in Israel. From behind, the statue was even more powerful. The liberated Namibians, spines unfurled by freedom, seemed to be hammering on the gates of heaven, demanding to enter.

  They both fell silent.

  ‘Come on,’ Ben called, deciding to lift the gloom. ‘My crates will be waiting for me.’

  A few minutes later, Joe was inhaling the musty smells of a storeroom, in the, nearby, Owela Museum. Its walls were bare and cracking, its shelves heaving with labelled antiquities and boxes. They sat at a workbench. His father had ordered a couple of crates to be brought up from the archives. Somehow, his request, made through the University, had got bogged down in paperwork and Joe could see the tense excitement in his father’s hands and shoulders, having waited so long.

  Ben hovered above the first crate, pausing momentarily, hands held aloft as if in prayer, before diving in with relish.

  Joe had often observed his father at moments like this: picking apart the entrails of different cultures, absorbed to the point of almost disappearing. How could he not admire him as well as love him? But, how often had he also felt put to one side by Ben’s all-consuming passion for the past?

  That’s how it had happened, three years ago, when they were living in California.

  It had been the last day of Summer Camp. The heat of the intense summer day was starting to fade as parents arrived en masse to pick up their children.

  Lining up to greet the parents as they arrived at the camp car park, was a parade of cheerleaders in two ragged but enthusiastic lines. They sang their way through all the songs: songs that had become the soundtrack of their summer.

  Joe gazed at every arriving car, hoping to pick out the familiar roof lines of their family station wagon. Behind each insect-spattered windscreen, Joe could see mothers, over-excited, anxiously trying to pick out their son or daughter’s face in the waiting crowd. Fathers stepped out of the cars and arched their backs like cats, trying to stretch out the effects of long, stressful drives and searched for the elusive keys of roof-boxes.

  There were hugs and tears aplenty. There were proud, excited, introductions of people’s newly-acquired best friends to their parents, with pleased smiles and the criss-crossing of many hands. Dotted amongst these fever-pitched encounters were the inevitable arguments, as returning teenagers confessed to having lost or broken various possessions in the course of camp.

  ‘Your parents here yet?’ one of Joe’s friends asked, struggling with an overstuffed rucksack.

  ‘No, not yet. They’re always late. I’m used to it.’ Joe remembered catching a tone of bitterness in his own voice.

  ‘Stay in touch on the Facebook Group yeah?’

  ‘Of course. Cheers bud!’

  As the parking lot emptied to a thin straggle of cars and the camp songs faded into the near-silence of the surrounding woods, Joe had started to feel worried. On her last call, his mother had told him that she was away on a conference and so his dad would pick him up.

  He tried to call Ben’s mobile. It went to voicemail. He texted. No reply. He tried again with the same response.

  As his last friend left, his isolation felt embarrassing. Being conspicuously alone made him angry. Camp staff had come up to him to check if everything was all-right and to invite him into their cabin and he’d palmed them off with the same patter. He stayed defiantly sitting on his suitcase. He tried to look nonchalant, but the anger and panic was building inside.

  He calmed himself, as he often did when confronted with a difficult situation, by calculating the probabilities of what might have happened. He had read that road accidents in California ran at an average of five a day. He calculated they would be lower in the summer because of better road conditions. He then looked up the population of California on his phone, divided it by two to arrive at a rough car population – two cars per average household of four – and then tried to work out the percentages and math
ematical probabilities that his dad had been in an accident.

  Four hours later, after finally succumbing to a painfully long and self-conscious wait in the caretaker’s lodge, watching a baseball game, his father had finally shown up. Ben had forgotten he was supposed to pick Joe up. He had also been so absorbed in the finds from a recent dig, that he forgot his phone was on silent and failed to notice Barbara and Joe’s frantic texts.

  Joe could still remember trying to hide the hot tears of rage as Ben drove him away from the camp in silence. None of the profuse apologies from his father could disperse his anger and shame.

  Joe struggled back to the present. His father had already picked a variety of objects from the first crate and placed them carefully in sections on the table, like a surgeon laying out instruments for an operation. One of them was a Victorian writing box with initials carved with italicised lettering on the top.

  ‘Who is J.W.A?’ he asked.

  ‘General James William Alexander. Well, he was actually a Captain at the time he came to Namibia.’

  Joe found himself curious about the range of objects on the table. There were painted rocks; stretched animal skins; spears with broken shafts; primitive cooking utensils now rust-red; a Bible; some old maps and sepia photographs.

  ‘What do you know about him?’ Joe asked.

  ‘He was Scottish. Father was a financier who went bankrupt. He went into the Army, first for the East India Company, then the British Army. Travelled the world.’

  ‘What period are we talking about?’

  ‘Well he came to Africa in the 1830’s’

  ‘Why was he here in Namibia? The British didn’t fight wars here, did they?’

  ‘He fought in one of the Cape Frontier Wars in South Africa, then travelled north and fell in love with it. It wasn’t Namibia then of course. He was sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society to explore what they called Damaraland.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘Near here. He became fascinated by the local tribes.’

  Joe picked up one of the explorer’s notebooks and started leafing through it.

  ‘Uhm. Gloves please,’ his father said.

  Joe had accompanied his father enough times to know where to find another pair of thin, transparent gloves in his father’s bag. He squeaked a pair on. They were tight. He already had bigger hands than his father.

  He returned to the notebook. He turned the pages slowly. There were, neatly labelled sketches, in faded ink, of the Herero cooking, hunting, lighting fires and dancing.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Joe asked, finding himself intrigued by the man who’d made these meticulous notes and sketches.

  ‘That’s the thing. No-one really knows. He wrote several journals, but we only have copies of the first. It was clear that he was enchanted by the Herero. He was also trying to unravel a mystery when he died.’

  ‘What sort of mystery?’

  ‘All we have is a letter he wrote home to his wife. He spoke about visiting somewhere the Herero believed to be a sacred resting place. He asked them to accompany him. When they came close to the spot, the shaman - their priest - fell into a trance. The elders took it as a bad omen, a sign from the ancestors. They refused to go any further. So, he went on alone.’

  ‘What happened?’ Joe had sat down on a stool wanting to bury himself further in the story.

  ‘He describes entering an underground tomb. Something panicked him and he left, vowing to come back.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘That was the last letter he ever wrote. We don’t know if he ever returned. His body has never been found.’

  Joe fingered the notebook as his father was speaking. His mind was running.

  ‘Mum, you must control your temper when you meet them. You know what you’re like when you get on your high horse!’

  Selima was feeling sick from the car journey. It was suffocatingly hot in her mother’s small car because Ilana refused, on ecological grounds, to ever switch on the air conditioning. ‘Save the planet but kill your offspring,’ Selima had once said to her sarcastically, but it had zero impact.

  Ilana was in a determined mood as they drove north into Damaraland.

  ‘You don’t understand, Selima. This country has only recently found its dignity. We’re a democracy but we’re also fragile… like so many small countries.’

  ‘Small? I wouldn’t exactly call Namibia small,’ Selima exclaimed, gesturing to the vast landscapes wrapped around their car windows.

  ‘You know what I mean, small in population. What’s worse, we’re rich in minerals and that means the whole world and his wife are queueing up to rape our land. Look at all the mines that are springing up.’

  ‘Well mines are one thing. But this is a hotel. A hotel that hasn’t even been built yet. I feel just as passionately as you do, about protecting our country. This is where I grew up, where I belong. I’m just saying, don’t go overboard…’

  ‘This isn’t like you, Selima. Since when were you afraid of speaking out?’

  ‘Look, Mum, Mrs Kaplan - the woman in charge of planning the hotel - is my friend’s mother, OK?’

  ‘Which friend?’ Ilana asked turning her head away from the road.

  ‘Joe.’

  Selima thrilled at saying his name but tried not to betray too much excitement in her voice. Her mother had emotional radar like no-one else on Earth. She was forensic when she detected something.

  ‘Is that your American friend? The one you sat next to on the coach?’

  ‘You don’t need to say it in that accusing way. Have you got something against Americans?

  ‘Of course I haven’t. Except when they ride roughshod over other people’s culture.’

  ‘It seems that most countries have done that in Africa. In fact, America less than most.’

  ‘Look, I know you think I go off the deep end… but Namibia is not exactly short of land and they’re planning to build this hotel right next to a sacred burial site. That’s what I am trying to stop. Hold on. This must be it…’

  They turned off the main road and down a dirt track, the tyres chewing the stones and scattering them as if in anger.

  ‘Slow down, Mum, I’m feeling sick as it is.’

  Ilana realised she was venting her anger on the car’s accelerator and eased the angle of her foot. Some makeshift huts and tents came into view and a small mechanical digger. They were clearly already excavating ground to test it for the hotel’s foundations.

  Ilana got out of the car agitated, not waiting for Selima.

  Barbara Kaplan was seated at, what the architect had laughingly called, a draughtsman’s desk, but was actually more like a wallpaper pasting table. Sprawled in front of her were print-outs of Excel spreadsheets - her constantly shifting budgets - with jottings pencilled in the margins like angry graffiti. Next to those lay floor plans and elevations for the hotel, held down at the corners by pebbles and, in one case, an ostrich egg. The use of the egg only further exacerbated Ilana’s growing sense of outrage when she spotted it.

  Selima felt faintly sick at meeting Joe’s mother for the first time in these circumstances. She knew from the way that Ilana had stormed out of the car that this was going to be painful.

  She would hang back, disown her if need be.

  She saw her mother extend her hand, which at least suggested a polite start.

  ‘Mrs Kaplan?’

  Barbara looked up from her plans.

  ‘Yes. Guilty as charged.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ilana Van Zyl.’

  They shook hands.

  Ilana gestured behind her.

  ‘This is my daughter, Selima. She knows your son, Joe. They met on the field trip to Sossusvlei.’

  Barbara looked piercingly at Selima. Any friend of her son was of immediate interest to her. />
  ‘Nice to meet you, Selima. Joe’s talked about you often.’ She wasn’t sure he had, but it sounded like the right thing to say.

  Selima tried not to blush or to feel too pleased.

  ‘So, you’re at the Augustineum as well?’

  ‘No,’ Selima replied. ‘My mother was the tour guide on a school trip. That’s why Joe and I met… and Hannah and Freddie.’

  ‘I see,’ Barbara said, trying to work out why a tourist guide and her daughter had arrived at their reconnaissance site. ‘Well, welcome to our rather makeshift site. There are some rather uncomfortable stools tucked under here.’

  Barbara pulled two of them out from underneath the table.

  ‘There you are. Please, do sit. Can I get you some tea?’

  Selima was about to say yes, parched from her mother’s suffocating car, but her mother cut across her as the words were forming in her throat.

  ‘That’s very kind but no.’

  ‘Then please at least have some water’

  ‘Thanks!’

  Selima poured water from the jug for her and her mother and gulped, not just from genuine thirst, but also to fill the horrible pregnancy of the ensuing silence.

  ‘Mrs Kaplan…’ Ilana began, as they sat around the table.

  ‘Please. Call me Barbara.’

  ‘Very well. Barbara, I believe you are planning to build a hotel here. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes. Well, my employers are planning to build a hotel here to be precise. We build what are usually called boutique hotels.’

  Ilana wasn’t getting any more comfortable. Selima decided that staring into the bottom of her water glass was preferable to watching her mother squaring up to this new adversary.

  ‘You see, Barbara, although being a tourist guide is my job, my passion is conservation, the environment, sustainability, whatever you wish to call it.’

  At the mention of these words, Barbara’s heart sank. It was, a roll-call, of now sacred terms, with which she was all too familiar: from the protesters who always appeared whenever they had built their hotels around the world. She respected their views, indeed agreed with most of them, but it spelt headaches, more pressure.