The Afrikaner

by Arianna Dagnino

  In the distance, looming over the desolate and arid plain, Zoe makes out the red, black and white flag of the Free Republic of Baster.

  “Roger that,” she replies.

  “Proud bunch,” Sam says.

  “You bet,” she says, knowing what Sam is hinting at. Turning a racist insult into a stern declaration of identity: That’s what the offspring of Cape Dutch settlers and Khoikhoi women did. Their odd mix of Hottentot traditions, Afrikaans language and strict Calvinism must have intrigued Dario. After driving across the Basters’ hot, arid “promised land,” he filled several pages of his journal writing about the thirty thousand of them still living there, a hundred years after their fathers fled the Cape area to escape discrimination from white colonists. “Now they are facing the hostility of the ruling black tribes, who greatly suffered under Pretoria’s protectorate,” Dario wrote, adding his doleful conclusion: “Once again, they are on the wrong side of history. The mixed loyalty springing from mixed blood won’t be easily forgiven.”

  That night, they camp on the outskirts of Rehoboth, the Basters’ settlement. The day after, early in the morning, they’re in Windhoek.

  The capital of the newly independent Namibia still bears the imprints of its distant German colonial past. They drive through Bismarck Strasse and Bahnhof Strasse and park near the neo-Gothic construction of Christuskirche. The café where they stop for breakfast offers in its menu Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut and Apfelstrudel; the waiter addresses Zoe in German. She orders for everyone then walks up to the window overlooking the sidewalk. The scene is almost surreal: A Prussian blue, cloudless sky towers over fanciful early nineteenth-century houses with terracotta roofs and extravagant spires; a black newsboy strolls up and down trying to sell the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a local version of the German daily newspaper.

  Everything around here looks like a stage for actors who have long left. The Whites are few, the descendants of the early German settlers even fewer. Dario didn’t miss the irony of it all. Zoe takes his notebook out of the breast pocket and reads again through his notes: “People are mostly Bantu-speaking Ovambos ... The other local ethnicities were decimated during the colonial administration in what was then German Südwesafrika ... The Herero and the Nama tried a rebellion in 1904 and were crushed to the point of genocide ... more than 100,000 killed ... mass murder for mass land-grab. Despite it all, Windhoek hasn’t lost its taste for Sacher Torte.”

  They quickly leave behind the small desert capital with its incongruous traces of white Bavaria and head for Grootfontein, 450 kilometres to the north-east. There they refuel and fill their reserve tanks. “No petrol ahead,” reads the signpost at the beginning of the dirt road that starts in a few metres. From then on, they will be on their own. While she is paying, Zoe catches her reflection in the small mirror behind the counter. She sees a woman with sad eyes, the stumps of her cropped hair hidden under a sun-bleached headscarf, her khaki shirt marked by sweat stains. She can barely recognize herself.

  They drive for another four hours through a plain of flat horizons, leaving a long cloud of dust in their wake as they bump along over gravel and sand. They pass a few hills and lots of baobabs, but no people and no cars or trucks.

  It’s late in the afternoon when they finally reach Tsumkwe, the Bushmanland administrative centre and the last outpost before the emptiness of a frontier desert. There isn’t much there, and what there is, is spread out. “The village boasts a general store, a bottle store, a school and a thousand inhabitants, mainly Hereros, Kavangos and Bushmen,” Dario wrote in his notes. “The Whites are six in all: two rangers of the National Parks Board, a magistrate with his wife and two full-time missionaries.”

  They drive along the main street, past the police station and a small clinic. At the intersection, where another thin gravel road crosses theirs, they find the only store. Zoe steps off the Land Rover and asks two young boys who are playing in the dust directions for the rangers’ house. The kids run ahead of her car, gesturing her to follow them. As they come around a bend, they have to stop. A Bushman has passed out drunk in the middle of the track. Zoe remembers what Dario wrote about the Ovambos in Tsumkwe: “They make a big profit out of the Bushmen’s plight. For ten rand the woman running the shebeen fills old whisky bottles with wine; each day, home-made beer is brewed in fortygallon plastic garbage pails; twenty or so Bushmen pass the bottle around, dancing barefoot in the dirt as they drink.”

  No ancient wisdom there, just pure hell — this is the dark side of places like Tsumkwe, Zoe keeps thinking as the children lead her to a single-story, ranch style house.

  The rangers’ house is a modest structure, with a corrugated iron roof and cracked red brickwork, surrounded by a garden clearly in need of more care. Soon the sun will sink out of sight as abruptly as it has risen in the morning. Zoe walks up to the veranda and through the screen door sees a lanky man somewhere in his forties, bare-chested and barefoot, in faded military shorts, coming to greet her.

  “Daniel Uys?” she asks as the ranger opens the door with one hand, holding a steaming cup of rooibos tea with the other. He has a thin and haggard face and in his deepset eyes Zoe catches a sort of feverish light. One of those hermits who live on the margins of the civilized world, she guesses.

  “Ja, it’s me. And you’re Zoe, right? Welkom, I’ve been waiting for you guys. How was the trek?”

  “A schlep, no doubt,” Zoe says.

  “I told you you wouldn’t make it to the camp in one haul. You’ll have to stay here for the night.”

  “You were right. I’m beat.”

  “I can tell. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Life in the bush teaches you to get straight to the heart of issues and people, doing away with pleasantries and formalities. Though Zoe has never met Daniel before and has only spoken to him a few times via radio in the weeks before, a handshake is enough to establish a comradely relationship. Yet, there is something else in this reciprocal acknowledgment. Our being both white, she presumes: the primeval instinct to look for your own people.

  “My colleague Morgan is away at the moment, you can have his room,” the ranger says looking at her and then at Sam and the two bushmen standing by the two vehicles. “Your driver can sleep on the couch.” They both know that Koma and Namkwa would rather sleep outside. Even in Tsumkwe the houses that the government has assigned to the San people are used primarily as workshops, stores or food pantries. The Bushmen live in the yard, where they build their simple round huts made of sticks, mud and grass.

  That evening Zoe takes a long shower, knowing it will be the last real one before the wilderness. She stands beneath the thin water jet thinking of all the things people take for granted in some privileged pockets of the modern world. A fat slice of humanity has forgotten the sacrifices endured across the ages, when it lived without whirlpools and microwave ovens. She is going back into a world where women are leaving every morning to cut wood and fetch water from a well before they can do their cooking.

  They have a quick dinner outdoors around a garden grill, after which Koma and Namkwa go to look for their people in town. To reciprocate the ranger’s hospitality, Zoe has opened a couple of bottles from the crate of Cape Pinot Noir they’ve brought with them. No reason to wait for some “special occasion,” despite what her brother suggested in the accompanying note: The furnace of the Kalahari would spoil the wine in no time. While they enjoy the wine, the conversation turns to Bushmanland. The ranger tells a few anecdotes about his life there and then updates her about the base camp, which he regularly visits during his site inspections of that part of the park.

  “Nice chaps you have down there,” he says as he cleans the grate with a heavy-duty wire brush. “Dr. Oldani had picked them well, poor bugger!”

  Zoe keeps quiet, gazing into the glowing embers. She isn’t ready to talk about Dario, nor his death. There’s an awkward silence. Sam takes a burning stick from the fire to light his zol. After a while, the ranger stands up and goes
into the house. He comes back a few minutes later with a big folder under his arm.

  “These are drawings I’ve made of some rock paintings we’ve recently found in the area,” he explains, passing around a bunch of pictures. “Some of them must’ve been done in the second half of the 19th century, since they show men on horseback, cattle, rifles, covered wagons with teams of oxen. Others might be even twenty to thirty thousand years old.”

  Zoe looks at the first one. She follows the ochre outline of a human figure painted in white, with an antelope-like head and hooves instead of feet: A therianthrope, most probably a shaman who, in a trance state, took on the power of an animal.

  “Beautiful,” she says while passing it to Sam.

  The ranger rubs his unshaved cheek and then adds: “I can’t get enough of them.”

  Sam blows smoke from his zol over the painted scene as if he could revive it by breathing life into it: “Looks like the staging of an after-death experience.”

  Zoe scans the other pictures: Whoever conceived those drawings was able to convey with a single, virtually uninterrupted line the terror of a zebra on the run, the regal prowess of a lion with prey in its jaws, the elegance of an eland caught silently watching from behind the bushes.

  “We still know so little about them,” she says. So much so that we’re not even sure what to call them or how they call themselves — First People, Bushmen, San, Khoisan. Tragically misunderstood, driven off the land they once roamed freely on, enslaved and shot at to the last person before anyone — white or black — took the time to ask them who they were, let alone what they thought about things.

  “Just a bunch of crude, rudimentary lines ...” Daniel says, moving his hands while he’s talking, reproducing in the air what he has seen in his solitary excursions.

  “Yet, so powerful,” Zoe finishes the sentence for him. She has caught the hallucinatory glow in the ranger’s eyes, as if he had peeked beyond the threshold of reality, in some otherworldly dimension. Looking back at the past few days, she thinks she recognized the same visionary glaze in Sam’s eyes too. She shudders. It’s getting harder to discern reality from auto-suggestion, separate delusion from exhaustion.

  “Let’s call it a day,” she says rubbing her eyes. “We’ll leave at dawn, Daniel.”

  “Goeienag. I’ll be up to see you off.”

  Another clear Namibian dawn is rising from the darkness. They down their coffee standing on the stoep, eager to get moving. Daniel feels their impatience and doesn’t hold them back.

  “I’ll come to visit you soon. Every so often I check on Narro’s clan,” he says mentioning the village leader on whose Noré the base camp stands.

  “I count on it,” Zoe says while climbing on the Land Rover.

  The engine starts on the first try.

  They are the last thirty kilometres, and the hardest. The bush, at last, Zoe thinks as her eyes hover over a drabness of shrubs, prickly grass and scrawny camel-thorns. She glances at Namkwa in the rear-view mirror, ever so calm and contained. Now the old woman’s eyes are intent on discovering life where she can see only flat desolation. All that she learned in Schmidtsdrift about the Bushmen’s way of life comes back in orderly succession. On average, a San woman knows the nutritional and medicinal value of over three hundred plants. Looking at an insignificant stem, she can determine if, half a metre underneath, there is a big tuber swollen with water or a root rich in valuable nutrients. A spiny, low-branching shrub can tell her where to find the larvae of an insect from which to extract the poison for the hunters’ arrows. A particular type of grass will help her, if necessary, to abort a pregnant woman.

  From mother to daughter, San women have handed down the secrets of the bush. Twenty thousand years of adaptation to a semi-desert eco-system have been preserved across the generations, through the oral histories of the tribe.

  Zoe is busy negotiating a deep pothole in the tiny dirt track when Koma points out something. She follows the direction of his index finger and meets the gentle eyes of a duiker, the tiniest of antelopes; it’s staring at them, curious and scared at the same time. Zoe doesn’t even have time to bring the car to a stop and switch off the engine — the animal is gone, seeking shelter in the thicket.

  “They’re so elusive. That’s a good sign, isn’t it, Koma?”

  “Ja. The heart is happy to be back.”

  Zoe searches the arid landscape before starting the engine again. In the sheer stillness, she detects the faintest silver quivering of grass tussocks. And there is this light, unlike any other: clean, sharp, unfiltered. She recalls what Dario wrote in his notebook the first time he entered the Kalahari: “Muscles relax, the mind expands. The vastness enters into the skin like a shot. ‘Our’ time dissolves.”

  You and I can only share the poetry of the desert, now.

  14

  THE CAMP

  FINALLY, AFTER THREE hours spent negotiating the bumpy and sandy dirt track, they reach the camp. It stands in a clearing surrounded by low acacia trees, less than five hundred metres from the Bushmen’s kraal of Xobaha and fifteen kilometres from the border with Botswana. The military canvas tents have been pitched in a circle.

  A burly boy in his mid-twenties walks up to her car, wiping sweat from his face with a kitchen towel.

  “Goeiemôre,” Zoe says in Afrikaans. “You must be Wally.”

  “Ja, Professor Du Plessis, we were waiting for you,” he replies with a broad smile. “The others left two hours ago for the pit. I cook and guard the camp.”

  According to Dario’s notes, Wally is a Xhosa. In addition to him and the foreman Moses Mazivila, a Shangaan, the group of diggers includes a Tswana, a Swazi and a Sotho: a small cross-section of multiethnic South Africa, no doubt. She will have to manage her miniature Rainbow Nation with determination, her one card to play as a young woman at the head of her first excavation.

  Fifteen minutes later an old, heavily battered bakkie stops right outside the camp in a cloud of dust.

  “Just in time, Dr. Du Plessis,” Moses says, rushing to greet her after Wally called him on the car radio. “We’ve found three other fragments.”

  In the last radio contact before Zoe left Johannesburg, the foreman reported the finding of a skull fragment, most probably belonging to an old hominid. It’s a good start. But it’s just that, a start. Every paleoanthropologist’s dream is to find a hominid skeleton. Yet, until now, no more than six of them — dating back to various eras and all incomplete — have been found throughout Africa.

  “Nice to see you again, Moses,” she says shaking the outstretched hand of a tall, ascetically thin middle-aged man. Taking off his cap, he reveals a perfectly bald head, which now shines in the searing light like waxed leather.

  “The pleasure is mine, Mejuffrou.”

  When a few years ago Zoe met Moses during an expedition to the Lesotho mountains, she saw for herself the legendary skill of this fossil hunter, the son of a shepherd in the Lowveld with no money and too many children. Moses was only sixteen when he started working as a digger with Phillip Tobias, the other great pioneer of South African paleoanthropology. Tobias was struck by the boy’s innate ability to spot the tiniest fossils even where other experts’ eyes had already combed the place. In addition to his extraordinary eye for fossils, Zoe’s foreman can now boast over thirty years of experience out in the field, in some of the harshest areas of the continent. However, he is not the kind of guy who would brag about it.

  “Wally, please help Sam to unload,” she cries already heading towards Moses’ bakkie.

  Then, as the foreman starts the engine, she addresses him: “Did you find them in the same spot as the other piece?”

  “Ja, in the bed of a dried-up river, about five kilometres from here. The dating is still to be confirmed, but we are in the three-million-year-time frame.”

  In his field journal, Dario mentioned at least four potential sites not far from the base camp, highlighting them on the enclosed map in red pencil. So far, the me
n have been working on two of these, mainly finding fossil remains of animals: wildebeest jaws, baboon femurs, long giraffe bones.

  As he drives with his eyes on the rough and broken ground ahead, Moses opens up, his voice low and croaky: “I’m sorry for what happened to Professor Oldani.”

  Zoe doesn’t turn around to look at him, but lets her eyes roam the expanse of arid scrub savannah. They’ve left the track now and are following a faint 4x4 trace wandering off across a patch of open woodland. She holds back her tears and says, her voice barely audible above the noise of the engine: “It was a hard blow for all of us.”

  A long silence follows. Then Moses says: “He had the eye.”

  They have entered a river bed. They follow it for a couple of kilometres until they meet a team of men bent under the sun, intent on scouring the ground, palm after palm. They all stand up to greet her, taking their caps off and drying sweat from their faces with dusty kerchiefs.

  “These are Shadrack and Lionel, young but capable,” Moses says. “And this is Steve. He’s been with me for twenty years.” Then he turns to point out a couple of spots on the ground. “Here. This is where we found the first fragment and this is where we found the other three.”

  Zoe feels the desire to touch those holes, push her hands into that soil, but she restrains herself.

  “Where are they?” she asks.

  Steve takes the fragments out from a small metal box lying at his feet and hands them to her.

  Holding the biggest piece between her thumb and index finger, Zoe gathers from its thickness and shape that it could belong to the skull of an Australopithecus. You were right, then, she tells herself, acknowledging Dario’s ability to identify even in the midst of this featureless desert a potentially favourable site. It’s too early to get carried away, nonetheless. On too many occasions the initial discovery of some minute fragments turned out to be an empty promise. In this field more than in any other, scientific celebrity is the product of sheer luck almost as much as of undisputed expertise. What we are looking for are needles of Palaeolithic evidence in the immense haystack of Africa.