The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey - Rupert Isaacson

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Pietermaritzburg, Natal – a small, handsome city of red-brick and wrought-iron colonial buildings – I found myself in the midst of a riot. Chris Hani, the head of the South African Communist Party, which had strong links to the ANC, had been shot dead a few days before by a white supremacist. A nationwide series of ‘mourning and protest marches’ was planned and, though I had seen the warnings on television, I forgot and ended up driving downtown on the scheduled day, intent on picking up my poste restante mail. The streets, usually jammed with commuter traffic, were strangely empty. Turning into Longmarket Street, I felt a little glow of satisfaction at being able to park directly outside the ornate, pedimented entrance to the post office. I stopped the car and got out, slamming the door. Then I heard it. ‘HAAAA!’

      I looked around and saw, some two hundred yards up the wide street, a wall of armed Zulu youth approaching at a run. Smoke and licks of flame billowed out from the buildings as they came. ‘HAAAA!’, the shout went up again, and in a flash I remembered the news warning. How could I have been so stupid? I had about thirty seconds in which to make a decision. The car, as bad luck would have it, was having battery problems, so I set off down the street at a sprint, but after just a few paces a door opened on my right and a hand beckoned. It was a bakery-cum-takeaway-shop whose staff had for some reason decided to ignore the news warning and open for business. There was no time for explanations, only to duck down with my saviours behind the counter. The first wave of the crowd swept by, roaring. I risked a look over the top of the counter, just in time to see the shop’s large, plate-glass window explode inwards. Shattered glass, stones, bricks and broken wood flew everywhere. Something sharp hit me on the shoulder, tearing my shirt and leaving a light gash on the skin. I ducked down again, then thought of the car with my laptop in the boot. I got up tentatively from behind the counter and walked out into the crowd of young men, all in their late teens and early twenties, who were milling about, as if deciding what to do. This was the second wave; few of them were armed, as the first, most destructive rank of rioters had been. These second-rankers were less angry, more bent on mischief. It showed in their smiles and the alert, slow-walking set of their bodies. A small group of young men with more initiative than the rest were looting a clothing store on the other side of the street, and that drew most of the crowd’s attention. However, standing around my car was a small knot of youths. Walking up to them I had the odd sensation of watching myself from outside my own body. ‘Morning, morning,’ I said, cheerily, stepping between two gangly teenagers dressed in expensive-looking sweatshirts. They did nothing, merely stood by as I unlocked the door, got in and fired up the engine first time. Waving jauntily, I slipped the clutch, rolled slowly forward and – to my amazement, and probably theirs – the youths stepped aside to let me go.

      The volume of people, however, forced me to follow the direction of the crowd. After a couple of minutes, I was back among the first wave of rioters. Here, the street was in mayhem. Most of the youths were brandishing spears, ox-hide shields and kerries and shouting and smashing shop windows – some of them were throwing molotovs into the interiors. I was noticed almost immediately. A tall youth, holding a large rock in both hands, was staring around, looking for something to do with it. When he heard the car engine and turned to see a whitey sitting right in front of him in a car, his eyes opened wide and he made ready to smash the rock through the windscreen on top of me. I looked up at him, making pleading gestures with my hands. The car was still. We locked eyes for a couple of seconds, then abruptly he lowered the rock and gestured with his thumb down the street, shouting ‘Go!’

      I sped off, a couple of rocks bouncing loudly but harmlessly off the car roof, but the end of the street was blocked by a wall of young men, making a human chain, presumably waiting for the riot police (and news cameras) to arrive. A shower of rocks greeted my approach, though only one connected, hitting the car bonnet and rolling off. I slowed down, searched for someone to make eye contact with, found a gaze in the human chain and held it with my own, taking my hands off the wheel and making the same pleading gestures as before. It worked. After a moment’s hesitation, in which another two rocks hit the car, the man – who was older than the others, perhaps in his mid-thirties – slipped his arm from the man next to him, made a space in the line and gestured for me to go through. I saw him mouth the words, ‘Quickly, quickly’. The ranks behind grudgingly made way, striking the car with hands, weapons and shouting ‘Kill the Boer! One Settler One Bullet!’ But they let me through. Once on the other side I floored it until I was out of the town centre and making for the suburb where I was staying, listening to the noise of police sirens and helicopters heading back towards the trouble. Later that day, I learned that several people had been killed by the mob.

      So many violent incidents followed that year of 1993 that they began to blur into one another. By the time my year was up I had not only failed, for the third time now, to get to the Kalahari, I had not even managed to make contact with my coloured Loxton relatives. Instead, I returned home to London exhausted, feeling that I had run out of luck, doubtful if I would ever return to the land of my fathers.

      

      Eighteen months later, however, I was back, this time to write a guidebook covering the three countries just to the north of South Africa: Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. By then, 1995, the memory of those violent times in South Africa had faded a little, and my determination to find the Bushmen had reasserted itself. After all, the three countries I had to cover encompassed most of the Kalahari.

      This time I was not travelling alone, but with my girlfriend, Kristin, a Californian. By a happy accident we managed to borrow a Land-Rover, the vehicle necessary for penetrating Bushman country. There were to be no detours this time. We picked up the vehicle in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, just around the corner from the Ausspanplatz, the town square where, as a boy, my grandfather Robbie had earned pennies by holding the horses of the farmers when they came to town. Two sweaty driving days later, we arrived at the tiny outpost town of Tsumkwe in Eastern Bushmanland, gateway to the ‘deep Kalahari’.

      I had been told, during that previous trip to South Africa, that if you drove about fifteen kilometres from Tsumkwe, you would see some big baobabs rising above the thorns to the south. A track would then appear, leading off towards them. And somewhere at the end of that track were villages of the Ju’/Hoansi Bushmen, who still lived almost entirely the traditional way, by hunting and gathering. We drove through Tsumkwe and out to the east, following these instructions. Sure enough, after twenty minutes or so, several great baobabs rose above the bush away to the right; vast, grey, building-sized trees topped with strangely foreshortened branches. The track appeared. We turned down it. The bush crowded in on either side of the vehicle, wild and lushly green from a season of good rain, swallowing us instantaneously.

      We made camp under the largest of the great baobabs, an obese monster almost a hundred feet high, got a fire going and put some water on to boil. Looking around at the surrounding bush, which hereabouts was open woodland, we saw the grass standing tall and green in the little glades and clearings. Everything was in leaf, in flower. Fleshy blooms drifted down from the stunted branches of the baobab, making a faint plop as they landed on the sandy ground below. The blossoms had a strong scent, like over-ripe melon. And then there was a crunch of feet on dead leaves. We turned. Two Bushmen had walked into the clearing.

       3 Under the Big Tree

      In front walked a lean young man, wearing jeans and a torn white T-shirt, and whose sharp, finely drawn features made one think of a little hawk. Behind him came a shorter, grizzle-headed grandfather with a small, patchy goatee, dressed only in a skin loincloth. Above this curved a rounded belly – though not of fat. Rather it was as if the stomach, under its hard abdominal wall, had been stretched and trained to accommodate great feasts when times were good, as they seemed to be now, with the bush green and abundant with wild fruits. Both men had the golden, honey-coloured skin of full-blooded Bushmen. They stood facing us under the vast tree, silent, as

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