The Lost World of the Kalahari

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Nor, when fed, did they lie apathetically all day long round their shelters. They were always going about work of some kind. The younger men like Nxou, Bauxhau, and Tsexchi were constantly out hunting for game. Nxou, who was not only the moving spirit among the three but the outstanding personality in the little community and clearly destined to become its leader, was utterly dedicated to his hunter’s role. We soon saw why he was called ‘A Bowl of Food’, for that is what he was as hunter to the bodies, and as musician to the spirit of his people.

  Daily, too, the younger women and children went out with their grubbing sticks to look for food in the sands of the desert. Whenever I accompanied them the intelligence, diligence, and speed with which they harvested the earth never ceased to astonish me. A tiny leaf almost invisible in grass and thorn just above the surface of the red sand and to me indistinguishable from many others, would cause them to kneel down and grub deftly with their wooden digging sticks to produce what I, in my ignorance of Kalahari botany, called wild carrots, potatoes, leeks, turnips, sweet potatoes, and artichokes. One of their greatest delicacies was a ground-nut which, when roasted on their fires, would eliminate all rivals from cocktail counters. And, of course, they loved the wild tsamma melon in all forms, and highly prized the eland cucumber. This last was so near to its European counterpart in flavour and texture, despite the fact that it was protected with formidable thorn on the outside, that from it Jeremiah made salad and vegetable dishes for us. All this was achieved at the worst time of the year. I longed to see the riches that could be garnered in the full harvest of summer.

  While the hunters were out the older people did the maintenance work of the community: repaired the bows and arrows and the long ‘fishing rods’, and prepared the poisons used in hunting. This they did out of a deadly compound of a mysterious grub found in summer at the end-root of a certain desert bush, powdered cobra poison, and a gum produced by chewing a special aloe blade in the mouth and then mixing the extract in a wooden cup with the other powders. They also cured and tanned the skins of the buck brought home by the hunters. When I looked back on the laborious methods used on our own farms I was amazed at the speed and skill with which they worked. They were natural botanists and chemists and had an unbelievable knowledge of the properties of desert plants. A bulb gave them the acid to remove the hair from the skin without damage, another softened it in a remarkably short time. This activity was of particular importance to the community. These skins produced for them the ‘iron’ they used for their arrows, spears, and knives. From time to time one of them would vanish with a parcel of skins to contact someone who had a definite link with an African or European outpost where these things could be bartered.

  They also made the tough Bushman rope used in their bows, snares, and daily round of living. They did this by extracting from wild Kalahari sisal long silky threads which they plaited and spun into rope of all lengths and thickness. We watched one of them producing a length of rope with only a springbuck horn and his toes and fingers as instruments, and using his thighs as work table. When finished we had a bet on its quality, and set Nxou and the maker tugging against each other to try and break it. But they failed.

  Swift and neat efficiency really was an impressive feature of this community. Whenever called upon to do so they worked with devotion and will. Their arrows, spears, skins, ropes, and snares were not merely functional but beautifully marked in a manner which showed that they were also an image of spirit. The older women, in their spare moments, made beads out of broken ostrich egg-shells and strung them into necklaces or the broad shining bands which they wore around their heads for ceremonial occasions. Hour after hour they would sit chipping nimbly and delicately with the sharp end of a springbuck ram’s bone at a fragment of shell in order to produce one little round white disk from the brittle and fragile raw material. According to Dabe they seldom got more than three beads out of one huge shell, and as a headband needed hundreds of beads the task obviously was prodigiously exacting and long. Yet they kept at it diligently, the same look on their faces that I have seen in the eyes of silversmiths at work in the bazaars of Aleppo and Damascus. Every woman and girl child possessed several necklaces and at least one glittering headband, apart from the beads used to decorate the leather wrap, shawl, and shoulder satchel which were their only covering. Sometimes, too, they carved greater beads out of a crimson root and amber wood, and this combination of ivory white shell, crimson, and amber jewellery on the smooth apricot skins between the firm round breasts of the younger women seemed to me as truly belonging as a ruby garland against the skin of a Hindu deity. Some of the men, particularly Bauxhau, patiently carved abstract patterns into the ostrich egg-shells that were their drinking vessels. The designs were either dyed ink-black with some vegetable extract, or burnt in with fire.

  But alas! the Bushman no longer painted. The dream that I had carried with me since childhood of seeing a Bushman artist painting had to join the haunted world of the unfulfilled. When I asked them about painting, sombrely they shook their heads. I had reproductions of some of the beautiful copies the selfless Stow had made of Bushman paintings in my native Free State. When I showed these to our sip-wells community the two old people, man and woman, began crying as if their hearts would break and hid their heads in their arms. But the younger men instantly crowded around and exploded with sounds of astonishment, as if suddenly they saw confirmed something that, until then, had been only rumour. I have myself a favourite copy of a herd of eland resting in the heat of the day. I call it ‘StoneAge Conversation Piece’ because the grace and ease of the grouping are so striking that it might almost be some eighteenth-century family depicted in a salon at their country seat in a France, great under its ‘King of the Sun’ and oblivious of revolution and disaster to come.

  ‘Look at that old bull,’ Nxou now said to Bauxhau, making him giggle like a girl. ‘Do you see the glint in his eyes? He has had enough of that old cow at his side and is thinking of what he can do with that young heifer over there! But you see those young bulls there? They are thinking the same thing! He’ll have to fight them if he is to have his way. And do you think he’ll win? And look at that mother licking the face of her child! Surely, it must be her first for her heart to cry so much for it?’ And so it went on every time they asked me to show them the pictures.

  They loved also to play. I was told by Dabe they had a game of chequers that the men played on squares in the sand, but I never saw them do it. Once, when we had helped them to hunt for food, they played another game which we called ‘Bushman badminton’. The shuttle-cock was made of a single wing-tip feather of the giant bustard tied to a long leather lash and fastened to the heavy and rare marayamma nut. One man would fold the shuttle in the middle and hang it over the end of a long, pliable rod which he held in his right hand. He would then flick the shuttle high in the air, and all the other men equipped with rods of their own, would race for the spot on which it was descending, like a parachute, out of the blue. The whole object of the game was to be the first to catch the shuttle in the air with a sideways cut of the rod, hold it briefly for a moment and then flick it upwards in some unexpected direction. The game would sway backwards and forwards over grass, bush, and spiked thorns with great speed and skill, the women looking on from the shade, and the little boy with his unashamed ‘Qhwai-xkhwe’ imitating the movements of the men. Sometimes I, too, joined in to the great satisfaction and merriment of all because I played it so much less well, though I found it good exercise and fun. I did not realize until later that it had also been good tactics. Not being afraid to look the fool, apparently, helped greatly to give them confidence in me.

  Sometimes, too, they had a mimic war. The pantomime was based on some half-forgotten historical fact, but the only detail that was clear was that the war had started in the old Homeric way: some comely young Bushman archer from one group had ravished the apricot Helen of a middle-aged and prickly Menelaus in another, and enticed her to leave her home
and people with him. The result had been a war between the two groups, but a war with a difference. For no sooner was Helen reclaimed and the ravishing Bushman killed, than both sides were filled with fear and revulsion against their deed, as if suddenly among the acacias of their vast Kalahari garden the voice of God Himself had made the leaves tremble as He reprimanded them for their mutual sin. They instantly sat down to talk to one another and resolved that it must never happen again. Accordingly they divided the desert into two zones, promising never to cross the demarcation line between them. They, and Dabe too, assured me that none of them to this day would go from one zone to the other.

  ‘But how d’you know which zone is which?’ I asked, thinking of the thousands of square miles of identical sand, dune, and bush.

  They laughed at my innocence with that wonderful Bushman laugh which rises sheer from the stomach, a laugh you never hear among civilized people. Did I not know, they exclaimed when the explosion of merriment died down, that there was not a tree, expanse of sand, or bush that were alike? They knew the frontier tree by tree, and grass by grass. When these people performed their pantomime of the war, they divided into two teams facing each other on their knees in the sand, about fifteen yards apart. They would then taunt one another with the challenges and battle-cries of another age, the shouts and movements getting louder and more violent until at last they were twisting and turning with thrust, parry, counter-thrust, and evasive action as though indeed spears and arrows were raining down upon them. Though they never moved from their knees the gesture of heads and bodies, the expressions on their faces, and the cries of the wounded and dying, enabled me to re-live vividly the atmosphere of a battle of their past. I was reminded at once of a story Peter Scott had told me about the Eskimoes. After he had described some incident of the last war to them they had exclaimed with horror: ‘But do you Europeans actually go out and kill people you’ve never met?’ Our Bushmen, too, apparently felt they could not be tempted to go out and ‘kill people they had never met’. So they observed religiously the rule of their frontiers.

  The women, of course, had other games. They played a sort of rounders which was as graceful and compelling as any I have ever seen. They used the round tsamma melon as a ball. They would go round in circles about five yards from one another, the one who had the melon unexpectedly throwing it, without backward turn of the head, to the girl behind. She not only had to catch it but, as she caught it, she had to imitate the movement of the animal then being mentioned in the words of the tune they were singing. They sang in lovely clear voices, the pace and rhythm growing faster and the movements of the animal they were imitating getting more lively. I could always recognize the animal from this vivid abstract they made of his total movement. Towards the climax of the game they would be running fast and so easily that Xhooxham was like a kind of Atalanta running her fateful races in the Hesperides. This is as near as I could get to the idiom of the song from Dabe’s translation:

  I went out into the veld

  to look for melons;

  And on the way: what do you

  think I saw?

  I saw a blue Wildebeest

  But the blue Wildebeest just

  flicked his heels at

  me and ran away.

  I went on and on across

  the veld and what do you

  think I saw?

  I saw a Hartebeest, and called

  Out: ‘Oh! Hartebeest, come to me,’

  But it just flicked its

  heels and ran away.

  Then I saw a Gemsbok,

  and I cried: ‘Oh! Gemsbok, I am

  hungry, come to me.’

  But it just flicked its heels

  and ran away.

  So it went on, right through the rich variety of buck and four-hooved creatures of the desert until darkness or the day’s work called them away.

  Sometimes the women would sit together beside their shelters, in the long level light of the evening sun, their beads and necklaces like gold upon them. Each would hold a handful of long dry grass and they would all sing together, beating time with the grass, and stroking the stems with the tips of their fingers like the strings of a guitar. The melody was charged with all the inexpressible feelings that come to one at the going down of the sun over the great earth of Africa. They called the song the ‘Grass Song’ and with the difficulty of interpretation neither Dabe nor the singers could readily explain it. I can only recall the feeling and render the words inadequately:

  This grass in my hand before it was cut

  Cried in the wind for the rain to come:

  All day my heart cries in the sun

  For my hunter to come.

  They would sing this over and over again, the song becoming more charged and meaningful by repetition, as if the heart, too, was enjoined to a constant act of importunity, as in the New Testament injunction to prayer, in order to make life and its powers accessible to its deepest entreaties. The song put us all under a spell so that I was not surprised that often the young men, hearing its crescendo of longing, could contain themselves no longer. They would drop what they were doing and come out of the bush, their feet pounding the desert-sand like a drum, their hands stretched wide, and their chests heaving with emotion, crying as if the sound had been torn alive and bleeding from the centre of their being: ‘Oh, look, like the eagle, I come!’

  Also these Bushmen made music. Nxou was constantly at it and the instrument which he played was like a bow and most popular. In his hands it seemed to become a greater kind of bow, hunting meaning in the wasteland of sound, not with arrows of flint and iron but with darts of ordered notes flying out at the silence. All the men could play the instrument but none like Nxou. Over and over again I saw him come back tired from the hunt, throw down his kill and spears and arrows, and reach at once for his musical instrument. The women would sit for hours, the full look of peace upon them, listening to him. Even walking between one group of shelters and another he was constantly making his favourite music. Hardly a dawn came in which I did not shave to it, and one very early morning, in a temporary camp pitched while hunting far away, I heard it at a wonderful moment. It was still dark. I had just woken up, and was realizing with a quickening pulse that so clear and great was the view that I could see star after star rising over the rim of the desert. I have, of course, seen sun and moon rise countless times, though never, even at sea, witnessed such a rising of stars. At that moment suddenly Nxou began playing one of his endless journeying tunes. The rhythm, and the sound, and the pulse of far starlight, as well as the undulations of the great swell of darkness breaking into foam and spray on the rock of the Milky Way sounded so at one with each other that I reacted as I did when I first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; the full chorus of human voices rising undismayed to the final height of resolution in their discovery of a universal meaning in the tragedy of an individual fate.

  The thing that did surprise me, however, was that the Bushmen had no drums. They asserted the basic rhythm of their musical occasions by beating it out with an explosion of sound between half-cupped hands, or, as in their dancing, by pounding the earth constantly and vigorously with their feet. But they had a more evolved instrument, a four-stringed lyre exactly like the one we had seen broken at the foot of the Slippery Hills. Only the women played this, a young girl usually tapping the strings with a small stick and an elder woman conditioning the sound by deftly stroking the string, as the girl beat it, with her thumb.

  We found that this love of music was not peculiar to our own close group but characteristic of all these people in the desert, bearing out the tradition of the Bushman’s skill as a musician and his deep devotion to music. Once, far away from our sip-wells, while resting in the middle of a hunt in the heat of a terrible day, I heard cries for help. We all sat up, alarmed, and soon there came staggering through the bush a little group of Bushmen in grave difficulties. They had seen the smoke of the fire made for our noon-day tea and come straight to
it. They had had no water for many days and were weak and hungry, their eyes bright with a light I had last seen on the faces of my starving fellow prisoners in a Japanese prison of war camp. As they sat down in our shade a woman started scraping with a bone at the one desert bulb left, catching the scrapings in her hand and wringing some thick white drops from it straight into the mouth of a child with black, cracked lips. I tried it and it tasted like gall. They were still a day’s march from permanent water and though Ben and Dabe said they could have made it on their own, I doubted it. But the moment they had drunk from our water they produced a lyre and began to make music.

  ‘What is the music saying, Dabe?’ I asked.

  ‘It says, “thank you”, Master,’ he answered with a rare smile, waving his hands towards the sky and burning desert around us.

  We concluded music was as vital as water, food, and fire to them for we never found a group so poor or desperate that they did not have some musical instrument with them. And all their music, song, sense of rhythm, and movement achieved its greatest expression in their dancing. They passed their days and nights with purpose and energy, but dancing too played the same deep part in their lives, as attributed to the Bushman of old in legend and history.