The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey - Rupert Isaacson

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reason, as the stars came out and the temperature began to plummet towards zero, the three hunters told Benjamin that it would be best to hunt eastward, away from the waterholes. It was too dangerous to risk an encounter with the elephants on foot. As Benjamin translated this to me, a question formed in my mind. What about other dangerous game like lions? The previous year, Nigel, the wildlife officer in Tsumkwe, had told me that there were several prides in the area. How did the hunters propose to make sure we avoided them, and what should we do if we ran into one by chance?

      ‘You won’t,’ said Benjamin.

      ‘How do you know?’

      ‘The healers, doctors in the village, ask the lions where they are and then they tell the hunters not to go that way.’

      ‘What do you mean they ask the lions? How can they ask the lions?’

      Benjamin looked down, appearing not to want to answer. Tom stirred the pot full of pasta and soya mince, looking on. At last Benjamin spoke, sounding uncomfortable. ‘Sometimes they can ask the lions.’

      With that he turned back to the three hunters, veering the conversation away to talk about a number of kudu that had moved into the area between Makuri and Baraka. But the enigmatic words lingered, tantalisingly, in the night air. Healers that talked to lions.

      Fanzi, Bo and Xau walked straight up to the swollen, cow-sized carcass and, grabbing it by the horns and tail, wrestled its stiff, bloated form out into the open and onto its back. They stripped to the waist and produced small, home-made knives from their game bags. With a surgeon’s precision, Bo slit the belly, releasing a belch of rotting gas that made Tom and I gag even where we sat a few yards off. Out spilled yellow-white, reeking intestines heavy with dung, which Fanzi rolled away to one side. Then, using his knife, Bo severed the great muscles, tendons and ligaments of haunch and shoulder, rotating the four great joints so that they dislocated neatly and easily from their bright, white sockets. Fanzi, meanwhile, squeezed the dung from the intestines, and placed these, along with the large, feathery tripes, on the lower branches of a sapling, where they hung like a line of soiled laundry drying in the sun. Xau, equally busy, hefted the heavy joints away and placed them on the lower branches of a sturdy thorn, so that they should not be dirtied with sand.

      Next came the liver. As soon as it had been cut out, the three men stopped work, made a quick fire by rubbing two sticks together on a wad of dry grass and, grinning and chatting happily, ate this, the hunter’s portion. Then, the liver consumed, the three hunters produced their hollowed-out bone and old rifle-shell pipes and we all settled down to a serious smoke.

      Our small gift of tobacco had closed the gap between us a little. Until now the hunters had communicated with us only insofar as to occasionally look back and check we were still with them. At no point had any of them looked us in the eye. Now, after that first smoke, every few minutes, one of the three hunters would glance up from his bloody work and give us a shy smile. After half an hour, Xau looked up enquiringly and ran a reddened finger along the blade of his knife, followed by a dismissive gesture. Tom, quick to understand, grabbed his bag, rooted inside for a moment and handed over his own pen-knife. Snapping it open, Xau began to cut the flesh, hanging it next to the other meat on the branches in long, festive-looking red strips, letting them dry in the desiccated air. They blackened, shrivelled and shrank with incredible speed, the moisture in them evaporating almost as one watched.

      The wildebeest had long ceased to be recognisable as an animal. Even the horned head, split open with little hand-axes like the ones that had adorned the walls of my parents’ London house, now lay in pieces, the brains and the tongue drying alongside the shredded muscles and organs. The hide had been left lying in the sun, little pools of blood in its folds attracting dainty blue butterflies who drifted down to drink. They flew upwards in a cloud as the three men grabbed the hide and cut it into strips and sections and fashioned it, ingeniously, into three knapsacks, sewn together with the stripped fibres of a dry, green reed-like plant (sansevieria) that grew nearby. The half-dried, much-reduced, meat strips were then stuffed into the newly made bags – the wildebeest would be taken back to Makuri in its own hide.

      The haunches and forequarters, too heavy to carry back this time, were stashed in the spiky branches of a thorn tree, out of reach of predators and scavengers, to be collected later. Then Bo squatted down and made a small depression in the sand, filling it with two inches of water from my canteen. He washed the knives in it quickly, handing Tom’s back cleaner than it had been before. And after a quick rub-down with sand, the three men, up to their elbows in blood and dung for the past two hours, had shed all trace of their work. Shouldering the hide knapsacks and impaling the racks of ribs on their digging sticks, they set off, single file, on the trek home, leaving only a pile of dung, already drying into fibres, where the wildebeest had lain.

      It was a long walk, and hot. The hunters stopped often to ease their shoulders from the weight and their faces from the flies that buzzed incessantly around the bloody loads. Tom and I offered tobacco and water around until both ran out. At the next stop Fanzi, pointing to a small, leafless twig poking up from the cracked earth, began hacking at the soil with his digging stick. A minute later he had unearthed a large, round tuber which, when cut, revealed white flesh dripping with water.

      As we sat there, eating the succulent tuber, letting the moisture drip down our throats, there came a sharp, shrill cry from above. We looked up: two eagles were chasing a white goshawk out of their section of sky. Lighter and more agile, the goshawk spiralled up and out of reach into the dazzling blue, the heavier eagles flapping below in slow but unrelenting pursuit. We watched, silent, until all three had dwindled to mere dots, their fading, high-pitched cries floating down to where we sat on the dry earth. Bo, hefting his heavy, fly-blown load once more, creaked to his feet, and caught my eye. He smiled – his mouth turned down ironically at the corners – and pointed to himself, ‘Boesman,’ he said in Afrikaans, and shook his head, laughing.

      That night, and the two that followed, the village feasted but still there was plenty of meat left over. The hunters, having provided food for the month, rested. We spent the remaining days playing with the children who turned up shyly each morning beneath our tree, or going out with the women to forage for wild foods. They showed us how well-stocked the Kalahari is with edibles, even in the parched dry season, leading us through the seemingly barren bush, and stooping every few minutes to pluck, dig, pick up foods until their skin aprons and ragged cotton skirts were filled with sweet moretlwa berries, tart, lemony baobab fruit, wild onions, tubers that looked like sweet potatoes, even nuts encased in dried piles of last year’s elephant dung. Sometimes they would make Tom and I climb on each other’s shoulders to pick caramel-tasting acacia gum from where it had bubbled out and dried between the forked branches of the thorn trees.

      Back home, I published a piece on the trip in the Daily Telegraph, but the anticipated reaction did not come. No tourists rang up, anxious to book their own Bushman adventure. In fact, over the course of that year, 1996, things became decidedly worse for Bushmen right across the Kalahari. The Herero cattle herders trickled steadily into Nyae Nyae unopposed, slowly dispossessing the Ju’/Hoansi as they came. In Botswana, the government began a campaign of forcibly removing Bushmen from the vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve – an area the size of Switzerland that had been set aside specifically for the Bushmen in the early 1960s – and herding them into permanent settlements outside the reserve’s borders. Meanwhile, in central northern Namibia, the Hai//om Bushmen, who had been ejected from the vast Etosha National Park back in the 1970s, became so desperate at their landless state that they staged a demonstration outside the gates of the national park and were tear-gassed and put in jail.

      A fledgling Bushman political organisation – called, aptly enough, First People of the Kalahari

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