The Lost World of the Kalahari (5 page)

His critics also make much of the theory that he was not the first man of our land. Our uneasy national conscience, of course, would be relieved if it could be proved that the Bushman was not the original inhabitant but merely another invader like the black man and ourselves. Since the world is full of specialists who will seize on the discovery of yet another prehistoric half-bone to demolish the theories of our beginnings as Samson did the jaw-bone of an ass to destroy the Philistines, they do not lack support. Other people and other cultures, they say, preceded the Bushman. Who knows that they may not well be right in a continent as old, vast, and inscrutable as Africa? But I myself, being neither scientist nor specialist, have never been tempted to carry the argument beyond acknowledgement of its possibility. The point for me is over-refined. Whoever may have come before the Bushman in my native land, he is unremembered and for all his magic is now at one with the abundant dust which stains the African West ever redder at dusk. For me always the fact of urgent practical consequences was that the Bushman, unlike any possible predecessors, was a remembered and remembering and living link with human origin in my native land. Alive and living he was accepted as the oldest inhabitant of the land.

When I was a child, no one among those who had known him doubted it. Many went further and said, as some specialists tend to agree today, that he was the hunter of Paleolithic Iberia and shared a common ancestor with the ancient Egyptians. Apart from the evidence of his ‘
Qhwai-xkhwe', tablier égyptien
, and painting, they quoted Herodotus' significant references to a ‘little people of adroit bow-and-arrow hunters' in the Libyan hinterland. They believed he was driven out of the Mediterranean and North African worlds many thousands of years ago by migratory hordes of stronger races from the east. Some even held firmly that he was the aboriginal of the Mediterranean world, the primordial prototype of the little man in European folklore, and not only the first man of Africa but the oldest form of human life left in the world. I know only for certain that whatever happened no living evidence can prove that the Bushman has not always been in Africa. Indeed, one of the oldest traditions of history in Africa proclaims the origin of races to be in the far north with a subsequent and protracted period of migration of men south. The pattern of the tradition may be confused with eddies and swirls of terrified peoples doubling back or fanning out round obstacles east and west until they reach the oceans. But the broad flow of humanity was inexorably south, like burning lava sinking slowly from violent eruption down a volcanic slope into a broad plain.

I have yet to meet the African race or tribe that can say: ‘Here, where you see our people now, we have been since the beginning of memory.' Everywhere tribal legend and history points to a remote beginning north and then a perilous descent into the blue and enigmatic south. There seems to have been only one exclusion from the tradition: the Bushman. In this, as in all else, he appears with ironic consistency to be the uncompromising outsider. Even the Hottentot, one of the oldest inhabitants in Africa and so close to the Bushman that my ancestors were, for long, confused into mistaking one for the other, is joined firmly in the common tradition. This is all the more remarkable considering the Hottentot had travelled so far ahead of the descending hordes that when the first Europeans landed at the Cape of Good Hope he was already in partial possession of the southern tip of the African continent and already beginning to feel his way back north along the East Coast. Centuries of destructive contact with Europe, sustained effort by missionaries to reshape his mind and spirit, and not a little intermarriage, did not shake the Hottentot's version of his beginnings somewhere in the far north. I came across an example of this once very early on in childhood.

When I was a child every day a very old man came to our home for food. As I sat in front of the old man in a patch of acacia shade which trembled like stricken water in the flaming dust of our white-walled courtyard crackling with noon-day fire I seem to remember someone saying behind me: ‘He must be a hundred and ten if he is a day.' To me, at that age, the thought of a whole year between one birthday and another was almost unendurable; that of a hundred and more, like the numbers of sparks of dust wherein we sat, unimaginable. But the heart of a child is naturally antique and I needed no arithmetic to know that history was alive and sanctified in the bent body and unbelievably creased and wrinkled face before me. He lived in a hut a mile away among the hundreds of black and coloured peoples excluded by law from our midst. Though he got up every day as soon as the sun was warm it took him from then until noon to get to us in time for the midday meal which my mother (‘the Little Lamb' as he and we all called her) ordered for him daily to the day of his death, out of her love for him and the indigenous past of her country that he represented. He himself was a Griqua and a descendant of one of the main branches of the Hottentot race. They were moving, in their nomadic way, in the vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope when my ancestors landed there, and were among the first to clash vainly with the Europeans as they began to push ruthlessly inland. This old man's mind was still clear and though he spoke no English he could repeat a hymn learnt, parrot-like, from a great missionary divine nearly a hundred years before. Although his brown slanted eyes were already blue with distance, and his voice blurred, he spoke with authority as one who never forgot that he was nephew of the last of the fantastic Griqua leaders who had appeared suddenly at the end of their ancient people's term of history crowding the scene with the desperate profusion and brilliance of dream figures in a traveller's uneasy sleep towards morning.

Children very early on in life learn to mistrust the addiction of their elders to masterful pronouncements in the obvious. Nevertheless, over and over again, because the matter had begun to work on my imagination, I would ask this old Griqua: ‘But, old father, please, where did the Griquas come from in the very beginning?'

He would invariably turn his head to the side, and slowly raise his hand to point to the north with so royal a gesture that, when I looked recently at a snapshot an elder brother had taken of him at the time, I was shocked to be reminded he had always been in rags. Then, calling on the first name of the god-hero of the Hottentots,
Heitse Eibib
, as Griquas invariably did when they were excited or anxious to emphasize the importance of what they were saying, and using in his address to me the ‘Sire' which his forefathers had picked up from the Huguenots centuries before, he would patiently repeat the old inherited story: ‘
Heitse
, small little sire, in the beginning the Griquas lived there far, far away. In the beginning, a long, long time ago the Griquas lived on the other side of a great water and a broad river behind high mountains that blew out smoke.'

‘Blew out smoke!' I would interrupt, unfailingly startled and excited by the magic evoked in the vision.

‘Yes! Small little sire, high mountains that blew out smoke and when angry made a noise like thunder and spat out fire.
Heitse!
I say to you that it was there that we came from in the beginning. I have spoken.'

‘But then, old father, please go on, how did you come from there?' I would plead rather desperately because this was how it always seemed to end, the trail of this strange people of copper-coloured skins petering out like an old spoor in the hungry dust. But then the wrinkled face would go dull with the weight of irrevocable Hottentot travail and he would mumble more to himself than to me: ‘It was a long, long ago that we left there in the beginning. And who is this old Griqua who sits here now dying of hunger?
Heitse
he is I. Please go and tell the Little Lamb he is I and I am here.'

He would then begin singing his one missionary hymn less, I suspect, for the comfort he usually sought but rather to drive away from his mind the phantom of nothingness which stood between the long beginning of his race and his shrinking present like one of the ghosts of Africa which, as we all knew, walked not at midnight but noon. He would hardly have reached the end of the first line: ‘Lord! How does the light fall towards the sea?' before I would interrupt again.

‘But the Bushman, old father, please where did he come from? From the same place?'

The word ‘Bushman' at once alarmed his memory. His voice sharpened and became firm with scorn. He spat into the brilliant dust. ‘The Bushman! That cursed thing!
Heitse!
He came from nowhere! He was like the tortoise and yellow-throated lizard and springbuck – just always there.'

So there, first, I had it. After the Hottentot and the terrible and yet so disarmingly lovable Griqua branch of his race, I spoke to Namaqua mixtures, Koranna, Herero, Ovambo, Mambakush, the many tribes of Bechuana, the Thaba'nchu Barolong, Basuto, Tambuki, Tembu, Batlapin; also to the great warrior races whose names break the silence of the past like the crack of a whip, Amaxosa, Amazulu, Amaswazi, Amangwane, Amampondo, and scores of other sub-divisions of the wonderful Bantu peoples of my native land. Yet one and all exclaimed: ‘The Bushman! Why he was just always there.'

Then, more impressive still, where tribal legend and story vanished into the turmoil and confusion of the terrible past, the cool objective evidence sealed in the earth firmly took over. Not far from my home eight feet below the surface of a great pan, as we call those shallow round depressions in earth and sand encountered all over South-Western Africa, the early prospectors for gold and diamonds once found characteristic Bushman beads made out of ostrich egg-shells. The accumulation of earth had been so gradual that numerous layers of shells of minute land animals which no longer exist were interspersed between the beads and the surface of the bed of the pan. The climate, too, had undergone a change since that remote day for it was clear from the composition of the dry pan that it had not always been enclosed in arid earth, but had been part of an immense system of vanished lakes. Again, in a bed of water-gravel deep in what centuries ago had been the course of the Vaal or Grey River, but fifty feet above the present level of the stream, Stow once uncovered unmistakable Bushman relics. I had only to remember how slowly water nibbled into stone to have some idea of the immense antiquity of the Bushman occupation of the land. The evidence was repeated all over the country, and as I grew up confirmed for me the belief to which I have clung gratefully ever since, that there is one thing of which no one can ever deprive the denied and rejected little hunter: the honour of being at the head of those men who have earned a cross for gallant and sustained conduct on active service of life in Africa, when the great campaign was blinder and the issue even more in doubt, than in this split atomic age.

B
arely
had the first Europeans landed at the Cape in 1652 with the intention of staying there for good, than they clashed with the Bushman. The Hottentot was there too, but warfare against the Hottentot was never quite so deadly. Perhaps the Hottentot was nearer to the invaders in Time, and therefore not entirely out of reach of their meagre understanding. The European values were so bound up with possession and other material issues that perhaps they found some common ground in the fact that the Hottentot had an objective idea of property and owned cattle on which he doted. However ruthless their suppression and pursuit of the Hottentot he was never entirely out of reach of some narrow compromise. But the Bushman apparently was beyond even the most elementary understanding. In the European sense of the word he owned nothing, and therefore was owed nothing. It never occurred to the invaders that he had, perhaps, some rudimentary rights by virtue of being in occupation. As they pushed steadily inland, took over the vital waters handed on to the Bushman by his long line of ancestors, killed off the game which had sustained him unfailingly through the centuries, plundered his honey, destroyed the pastures of his bees, dispersing the quick swarms, and systematically eliminated not only the natural amenities of his life but also the necessities of bare survival, they seem to have found it strange that he should be angry and embittered and in his turn should resist, kill, and plunder. In fact, one of the most striking ironies of the many ironic elements at this time is the hurt surprise of the Europeans that the little hunter did not fall flat on his face at their appearance, like Man Friday at the feet of Crusoe, and beg for the privilege of being their slave. Instead he chose to stand up and defend himself manfully. As I grew up I looked in vain for some flicker of conscience in regard to this sombre picture of our beginnings. If there was a conscience at work it was submerged in the labyrinthine basement of the Calvinistic spirit of my people, and can be detected only in storms of abuse and misrepresentation raised against the Bushman. For here in my native country, too, the ancient law of human nature holds good. First one must vilify in one's own spirit what one is about to destroy in others; and the greater the unadmitted doubt of the deed within, the greater the fanaticism of the action without. Ominously from the start, there was nothing too bad to be said about the Bushman. He was, for instance, not even a savage, he was no better than a wild animal and he used such intelligence as he possessed merely to make himself a more dangerous and efficient animal. He was dirty even beyond the bounds of savagery. This particular charge was pressed home with great zeal and heat and I have encountered it now so often, not only in regard to the bushman but also in regard to the other primitive peoples of Africa, that I could write an essay on its dubious role in our spirit. However, it is enough to say here that over and over again I found this reproach of physical dirt used as a smoke screen to hide the naked humanity of the little hunter from the hearts of those about to crush him with their own inhumanity. Even that was not enough. Other charges made against him were that he was cruel, treacherous, vindictive, utterly useless, and a subtle and incorrigible thief. There is no doubt that, in the moment of his final bitterness, deprived of his country, surrounded, doomed in time, and with such little life as was left to him abstracted from the long rhythm of his past, the Bushman did do many terrible things to confirm the accusations made against him. My grandfather, when he spoke of the raid organized to kill off the last of the Bushmen in the hills of the Great River, always said with regret: ‘We could have overlooked the theft of cattle or horses. We knew he, too, had to eat to live. But what we could not forgive was that after taking what he needed he hamstrung all the animals within reach out of spite, and then left them there, helpless, on the veld for us to shoot.' The old Basuto said much the same, adding that the Bushman was always lying in wait for small parties of his people to shoot them down with poisoned arrows or stab them with spears. Invariably he, too, ended with the half-regretful exclamation: ‘You see little master, he would not learn. He just wouldn't be tamed.'