The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  The Ju/’hoan Transcription Group had been active in Tsumkwe since 2002, but the tales had been collected since 1971, some of them recorded almost forty years ago by the distinguished Harvard anthropologist Megan Biesele, and the stories (printed in both English and Ju/’hoan) were faithful translations of recordings that had been made in villages. Much of this work was supported by the Kalahari Peoples Fund (based in Austin, Texas), which dated to the 1970s and operated throughout the apartheid era, creating homegrown reading materials for the local schools. There was no government involvement in the fund; in fact, the Namibian educational authorities had always resisted mother-tongue instruction in this area.

  The Village Schools Project had been created within the Kalahari Peoples Fund in order to lobby the Namibian Ministry of Education to have the Ju/’hoan language used in schools and in printed materials. All of this information was available on the Kalahari Peoples Network, and the whole initiative was funded with foreign donations.

  Over the years, the project had become more and more ambitious. The idea was to create a database of traditional stories, to codify the text by creating a user-friendly orthography for this phonetically complex language. Another goal was the updating of a Ju/’hoan dictionary. A Youth Transcription Group was started in order to pass on skills. This meant the training of transcribers to be computer savvy, the raising of money to buy equipment, and a collective effort to encourage anthropologists, volunteer teachers, writers, and aides to help run the center, guide the project, and see the work into print and onto the Internet.

  Foreign aid! From afar came webmasters, tech assistants, linguists from Germany, donations of laptops and solar panels by foreign companies. After 2007 the Norwegian-funded Captain Kxao Kxami Community Centre became available, and now it had electricity and an Internet connection.

  These aid givers from abroad engaged the whole community, starting with village-based students who would encourage elders to speak about the past and share stories. Some of the elders were healers, who would pass on their experiences of “psychic healing.” But the stories of local leaders who had participated in the struggle for Namibian independence were also recorded. The transcription group was a memory project, the oral history I had described in my talk—but I was a latecomer to this effort.

  In the foreign-funded center with the foreign-funded equipment — computers, digital tape recorders, video cameras — the goal was “technological empowerment” — to protect the culture, produce educational materials for schools, and build an archive. The stated mission was for the Ju/’hoansi people to tell their own stories.

  When I was asked to speak on “Preserving a Cultural Heritage,” this is what I had in mind. It saddened me to think that so much in Africa had been lost — the skills of building and farming, the arts of carving and ornamenting, of music and dance, of storytelling. I had not realized that the preservation had already been under way for so many years, and that the whole Ju/’hoansi community and a large foreign community of supporters were also involved.

  If these foreigners hadn’t done it, no one would have done it. And preserving this history was an important matter — as important as providing water or food. It was all a lesson to me: none of it would have happened if it had been left to the Namibian government, which seemed to regard Tsumkwe and the lands beyond the Vet Fence as beneath notice. Without the inspired meddling of outsiders, Tsumkwe would have subsided into its own dust in silence. Because of this foreign involvement it had pride in its language, an oral history, a growing archive of stories, and a place to meet and make plans.

  In Tsumkwe I met an American, a man from Seattle, who had been teaching in Namibia for fifteen years, the past two in the school at the crossroads.

  “Lots of challenges here,” he said, because I had asked. “Remoteness, drunkenness, teen pregnancy.” But he was not dismayed; he was hoping to stay a few more years.

  I saw that I had been hasty in judging some efforts by outsiders. This was necessary and timely. Yet you cannot see such hope and high spirits in the young and not think: What will happen to them?

  The next day I voiced my anxiety to one of the South Africans, who simply shrugged.

  “They’ll go to the cities. To Grootfontein. To Windhoek.”

  “What will they do there?” I asked.

  “They’ll be servants. Domestic service.”

  It sounded crueler in that accent: dimisteek.

  At the end of my last day, the children in a large group made their way back to the school compound, which was at the far side of the crossroads. They saw me watching from under a shade tree and called out, “Sir!”

  I walked with them for a while and was heartened by their vitality — their humor, their teasing, their intelligence. Each of them carried a copybook with notes they’d taken at the event. When we parted, they called out, “Come back to Tsumkwe, sir!” and then they continued on their way, in the heat, attached to long shadows.

  8

  Among the Real People

  IT WAS ON THE FOLLOWING day, in the hot flat bush some miles north of Tsumkwe, that — as I began this narrative by saying — I crossed the bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.

  I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely called in Afrikaans Boesmanland (Bushman Land), and generally known as the Kaokoveld. This had been redesignated Nyae Nyae, a homeland for the !Kung and subgroups like the Ju/’hoansi — hard to utter, click-thickened names for the ancient race that still inhabited the region.

  An old dream of mine had been to meet and talk with some of these people in their own village, though “village” is the wrong word for a n!ore, the expanse of land they claimed to keep themselves alive — a portion of the landscape with vague boundaries they called home. It was an area of bush where there was water, wild game, and sufficient edible bulbs, tubers, roots, seeds, and manketti nuts for their diet. In that place they would have a campsite, called a tshu/ko, and build shelters — hardly more than windbreaks or twiggy lean-tos—just sleeping places, not for living in or shuffling around inside. They lived under the sky, they lived around the fire. That was the accepted notion of the Ju/’hoansi by travelers like me, many of us romantic voyeurs.

  Long ago, in the freest period of my life, I had worked as a teacher in Africa for six years straight. I had revisited the continent every few years after that, sometimes staying for months. I had been up and down half a dozen great rivers, including the Nile and the Zambezi, hiked the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon, and crossed Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi. I had traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town. I had fraternized with, and worked among, Angoni people, Baganda, Nubians, Karomojong, Watutsi, WaGogo, Masai, Zulus, Kikuyu, the Sena people of the Lower River, the Batwa Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, and scores of other peoples. Yet in all that time I had never met a Ju/’hoansi — elusive, dwelling in small related groups — on his or her own turf.

  But I had glimpsed them with fascination, the way you see a bird of passage flashing onto a nearby branch and twitching its brilliant tail. Their physiognomy — the look of these people, their whole physical being — was unmistakable. Now and then, on a busy Cape Town street or in a sleepy dorp in the countryside, I would see that light-hued, faintly Asiatic face, the narrow eyes, the delicate hands, the small stature, a distinct upright way of standing and a swift, almost skipping way of walking — and, even if the person happened to be wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf against the wind blowing from Table Bay or the Great Karoo, I knew whom I was looking at.

  I always suspected that these people, oblique in answers to my direct questions, were far from home. And I felt there was something radiant about them. It was no illusion. It was the radiance of peacef
ulness from the core of their being, what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas called “their magnificent nonviolence.” They are known as, in a rendering of their own name for themselves, the Harmless People.

  These were the people who had endured, and they had a claim to being the living remnant of the first humans on earth, with an ancient pedigree that was an unbroken link to the present. Bands of other Africans, mainly Bantu, those who were rovers and conquerors, had traveled — some settling, others moving on — through the forests in the heart of Africa, at first clockwise through the Congo and then fanning out and descending, percolating east and south as far as the Great Fish River. That river became a traditional boundary of the Cape Colony, where in the late eighteenth century a confrontation between the Xhosa on one bank and the Dutch and English settlers on the opposite bank led to a series of bloody wars. But both the Bantu and the whites were another story; they were migrants or the children of migrants.

  The Ju/’hoansi were not migrants. Some had scattered because of persecution and land grabbing, but most of them had remained pretty much where they had always been, in this southern part of Africa, since the Upper Pleistocene, loyal to each other and clinging to their skills and traditions, famously peaceful and accommodating — no thieving, no fighting, and divorce so simple a matter that adultery was almost unknown among them.

  Celebrated as trackers of game, masters of the hunt—just a small hunting party could bring down and butcher a fleet-footed, full-grown giraffe, as John Marshall had shown them doing in one of his earliest films. Brilliant as botanists, they recognized an enormous taxonomy of bush and savanna plants — used for food, for medicine, as fetishes, as ornaments. They knew the entomological chemistry of poison and the art of weapon making, the skills of using arrows and spears and snares. Despite all this, they hardly fought or raised their voices, had never gone to war with each other, nor had they become inflamed by bellicosity even against the greatest provocation — slave raids, intruding white settlers, and predatory Bantu hunters.

  It was amazing, in the face of all the encroachments — they lived in a land where diamonds littered the ground like pebbles, where trophy animals might be slaughtered, where cattle might graze — amazing that the Ju/’hoansi still existed. Yet they did, though in dwindling numbers, and they had become the obsessive subjects, even the darlings, of ethnographers, for what they were able to tell us about how we as humans had lived in prehistory, and also as “noble savages” — “one of the most heavily scientifically commoditized human groups in the annals of science,” wrote Robert J. Gordon in The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass.

  They seemed a timeless people, as eternal as the features of the landscape — the rocks, the gullies, the termite mounds. They didn’t grow old, they didn’t change, they endured in their ancestral land. That was the impression I had gotten from the first books I read.

  It was, of course, all wrong, but what did I know?

  Decades ago, the only books about the Ju/’hoansi I could find were the works of Laurens van der Post, but I soon learned to be wary of him. He had published Venture to the Interior in 1952, an account of his surveying trip to Nyasaland, and when I began to live there a little more than ten years later, I saw that he had made a crepuscular and existential narrative out of a fairly conventional few months of bushwhacking with a team of hearties in the Mlanje region of tea estates. I realized from that book and his others that he was something of a mythomaniac.

  I once visited van der Post in England in 1975, for a magazine interview, and found him humorless and vain, monologuing to me, mostly about the highly colored life he had led, in the dry, imperious tone of a headmaster. His life had indeed been extraordinary in many respects (prisoner of the Japanese, friend of Carl Jung’s, patron of the Bushmen), but in his telling it was a succession of sullen boasts. He had an odd pout, his wet lower lip protruding as if in disbelief, staring blue eyes, and a severe, somewhat reluctant manner.

  In a large wing chair he looked like an old auntie interrupted in her knitting, and had an auntie’s lined and tetchy face. He refused to see me alone, but remained canted sideways in his chair, surrounded by sycophants and handmaidens who treated him as a sage. (Later he would become a mentor to a similarly bedazzled Prince Charles.) Starring in his own films, he saw himself as a pioneer interpreter of the Bushmen, and though he had no language proficiency and no deep knowledge of the people, only a romantic enthusiasm for their tenacity and their culture, he was instrumental in helping to frame South African government policy that granted them a homeland.

  I came to see that he was a posturing fantasist and fake mystic in the field, and as a writer he was an impressionist using colors, rather than a social scientist using facts. It was easy to understand and almost forgivable, because the people in the mid-1950s when he first visited them were still (we have the Marshalls’ work as proof) culturally coherent, self-sufficient, remote, and wonderful physical specimens. But van der Post tended to get carried away in describing them; his self-regard and his Jungian glosses impeded his narratives. His work, full of breathless mystery or plain inaccuracy, is either not mentioned or dismissed by later scholars, who seem to regard him, with reason, as a little more than a village explainer (The Lost World of the Kalahari) or fabulist (The Face Beside the Fire) — an unreliable witness.

  The most complete book I found, the bible of Bushman culture, was the classic Specimens of Bushman Folklore by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, the earliest study of the people and their language. (Van der Post had created one of his Bushman books, The Heart of the Hunter, by rehashing the folktales in Specimens.) Bleek — stout, hairy, ursine, even to a lumbering bearish untidiness — was a linguistic genius, a Prussian philologist who migrated to South Africa in 1855 with the aim of compiling a Zulu grammar. But while a young student at the University of Berlin, in 1850, he was, as Neil Bennun wrote in The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People (2004), “the world’s greatest expert on the languages of southern Africa.” He suspected, and tried to prove, that the Bushmen’s languages might be related (because of the northward push of prehistoric peoples) to ancient Egyptian. He was scholarly but sickly — tubercular, easily fatigued, prone to chills, and habitually coughing up blood. He married Jemima Lloyd, daughter of a Welsh clergyman, but it was his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd who became his collaborator on the project of writing down and piecing together the elements of the Bushman language /Xam, and recording the stories and beliefs of these unknown and unregarded people.

  How this happened is a good story, and a short one. Bleek did not have the stomach or the constitution for arduous travel. He could not meet the Bushmen on their own terms in their distant hinterland. But the Bushmen were routinely arrested for minor transgressions — drunkenness, loitering, theft, cattle rustling, trespassing, poaching (“Hunger had made criminals out of the /Xam men,” wrote Bennun). This was in the 1860s and 1870s. The captured men were brought in chains to Cape Town, put on trial, sentenced to hard labor, and jailed. Hearing of this, Bleek volunteered to house one of them at his little estate, The Hill, in Mowbray, a rustic village just outside the Cape Town city limits. This wish was granted, and other prisoners joined the Bleeks. As residents at The Hill, the convicts became their language teachers, and over time these Bushmen divulged their kukummi — their oral history, their traditions, their cosmology, their stories. The Bleek archive of Bushman lore, dictated by the prisoners, grew to twelve thousand pages.

  Many of the stories were harsh, some bitter and violent. “If you were learning the language of the indigenous hunting and gathering people of South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century,” Bennun wrote, “the first words and sentences you learned were to do with hunger, dispossession and crime.”

  Wilhelm Bleek died in 1875 at the age of forty-eight. Lucy Lloyd and Bleek’s daughter Dorothea carried on his work, deepening their understanding, relying on prisoner informants. After many trials, some of this material — groundbreaking
ethnology of the earliest people — was published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911. Through the twenties and thirties curious travelers made forays into the Kalahari, yet these expeditions were largely touristic, not adding much to what Bleek and Lloyd had learned but only confirming the stereotype that the Bushmen were naked semisavage Stone Age hunters who slept under trees, grubbed for roots, chased down antelopes, and ate insects.

  Much later, choosing to live among them and know them better, the Marshall family were the pioneers: Lorna in The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, the subtle and detailed study of the people, then her children, who documented the change and decay in the people’s circumstances — John in his many films, Elizabeth in her two evocative books. Ultimately, many other books appeared, and the titles alone are offputting: Land Filled with Flies, The Land God Made in Anger, The Bushman Myth, Women Like Meat—helpful, well-informed books, actually, but they kept the people two-dimensional, odorless, unphysical, out of focus, in sepia tones, as books of anthropology often do.

  Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you’re reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. That was the case for me from the beginning. Reading and restlessness — dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere — made me a traveler. If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes — importantly — to suffer the effects of this curiosity.