The Last Train to Zona Verde (18 page)

“I saw my own brother in those pictures!” old Chief Tsamkxao #Oma exclaimed in the !Kung language when the lights went up. He was tearful with excitement, gesturing to the blank screen, clumsily passionate. “This is something like a dream. That was my brother when he was young!” He bowed to the visitors and touched his heart. “Thank you for this film. This is like a dream for me.”

The schoolchildren stared at the chief with what seemed a new curiosity, as though he himself were an artifact. And he was, in a sense, because he had been raised in the old way, in the bush, without school, but living by the assegai and the arrow. And consider: it was less than forty years ago, but from all appearances it could have been a thousand.

The next film was
A Rite of Passage
, which had been made by John Marshall in 1972. This riveted the children because it was not so remote from them. Many of their fathers would have participated in this ritual, the Rite of the First Kill, the occasion on which a boy in a hunting party kills his first large animal. Until that point, the boy would have killed only a bird or a rabbit, but killing a full-grown giraffe, a heavy antelope, a buffalo, or a wildebeest — a game animal killed for meat — was a matter of importance, a stage in the passage from boy to man.

A small group of Ju/’hoansi danced through the tall grass, seeking an animal, and /Ti!kay, the boy to be initiated, crept at the head of the column of hunters. The schoolchildren in the room watched closely, occasionally yelping in excitement.

“A mature wildebeest is seen in the tall grass,” John Marshall said, narrating his film, as the hunting party became alert and watchful.

The progress of the hunt and the chase and the kill, revealed by John Marshall in his voice-over, and the later testimony of his mother, Lorna, in her book on these people, described this first big kill as essential in proving manhood. A young man could not court a woman and marry her until he had slaughtered a powerful animal, and only then, when he had displayed his hunting prowess, could he undergo the Rite of the First Kill.

In the movie a full-grown wildebeest — horned, humpbacked, hairy-flanked — was flushed from the tall grass, pursued by the young, slim, spear-carrying /Ti!kay, the adults shadowing him in the chase. Out of sight of the camera the heavy animal was brought down by the boy’s spear and, to the rejoicing of the elders, finished off with stabs from his assegai. Just as quickly the animal was butchered, chopped into irregular bleeding chunks, its legs were hacked and jointed, and a dish of blobby wildebeest fat was set aside,

A fire was lit near the slabs of meat, and a lump of fatty flesh sizzled on it, while /Ti!kay the boy hunter underwent scarification, ritual knife cuts to his arms and chest and forehead. The boy’s father, Khan//, did the cutting — frowning but clearly proud — and these cuts were slathered and rubbed with the hot fat.

At this point in their viewing of the film, the schoolchildren screeched, because it was obviously painful to the boy, and just as obviously /Ti!kay endured it stoically. If the hunt had been a test of prowess, this scarification was a test of nerve. /Ti!kay was probably in his early teens, yet through this ordeal he was entering manhood.

The ritual of rubbing the charred meat and hot fat into the cuts, Lorna Marshall wrote, served “to insure that he will not be lazy, that his heart will say to him, ‘Why am I sitting here at my fire? Why am I not out hunting?’ ”

The wildebeest was a male, John Marshall said in his narration,
and therefore /Ti!kay was scarified on his right side. “When eventually he kills a large female animal he will be cut on his left side.”

Initiated this way, he had greater powers. The anointed scars gave him protection — made it easier for him to find an animal, and would make him invisible to animals. Perhaps more important than this, the ceremony gave him the right to marry, which would not necessarily happen soon, but was certain in the fullness of time; and on the big day, because hunting and marriage were linked, his bride would share an animal that he had recently killed. “The primary sources of physical life — sex and food,” Lorna Marshall wrote of this event. “Power as a male and worthiness and dignity are associated with hunting … The bride’s people can capture at once the sexual and the hunting powers of the young man.”

When the lights went on, the children were whispering to each other. The film about playing with the assegais seemed to have a greater effect than this film of hunting, butchering, ritual scarification, and pain.

“What did you think of this film?” the
UNESCO
man asked.

They stopped whispering, lapsed into silence, and simply watched the white man who was repeating his question.

They had spaniel eyes, long lashes, smooth serious faces, intense expressions.

“Was it interesting to you?”

They murmured yes, a rising hum.

“She has cuts!” one of the girls said, and pointed behind her to a girl who was wriggling timidly in her chair.

“And he has cuts!” another said, indicating a frowning boy.

The wriggling girl stood up and showed her facial scarring.

I asked what it meant.

“It is for protection.”

I asked how many of them had been cut in this way. About a third of them put their hands up, more girls than boys. It was curious to see this assembled group of schoolchildren, in their neatly pressed
and laundered uniforms, proudly acknowledging their ritual scarification, showing the slash marks on their faces and arms.

The session was just about over, but as my brief had been to talk about cultural preservation, I asked whether any of them had a story to tell — perhaps one they’d heard at home, in the village, or related by an elder. Several stood and told a short story, but the one that made the most impact was told by a tall, smiling, self-possessed girl, first in !Kung, her language, and then in English.

“Two men were out hunting,” she began in English, after she had made a great success of the story in !Kung — laughter all around. “They were deep in the bush, and it became night, and so they decided to sleep just there, under a tree. The first man fell asleep. But it was a cool night. The other man used a cheetah skin as a blanket, and he pulled it over himself. In the middle of the night, the first man woke up — eh! He saw the cheetah skin. He took his knife and stabbed at it, and slashed his friend’s leg.”

The students yelled with delight, as they had the first time they’d heard it in their own language.

“The friend began to cry out. When the man with the knife saw what he had done to his friend’s leg, he held his own face” — and the girl held her face and gestured madly — “and stabbed his eyes, he was so upset. So one was lame and the other was blind.”

The children howled at this irony, perhaps for the symmetry of it, perhaps for the sheer gory horror of it.

“Morning came.” The girl was smiling. She wasn’t done. “The blind one carried the crippled one on his shoulders back to the village.”

When the laughter died down, I asked, “Is there a moral to this story?”

“I don’t know.”

There was, I discovered, a Ju/’hoansi story called “The Beautiful Elephant Girl.” A folktale, it concerned the strange and sudden birth of the elephant girl, her meaningless murder by two brothers,
the butchering of her corpse and her whole body cannibalized, the setting aside of her blood, the mystical opening of an anthill as a refuge, the blood swelling to create a rebirth of the Elephant Girl, a magic gemsbok horn, the reappearance of the murderous brothers, and the revenge on them: “When the two brothers had entered the village, she took out her magical gemsbok horn and blew on it, saying, ‘These two brothers and their village shall be broken apart and ruined!’ The horn blew down the village, flattened it to the ground. Then the beautiful elephant girl walked home.”

This weird disjointed tale, characteristic of traditional Ju/’hoansi stories, was not greatly different from the short gory tale the schoolgirl had told. The only difference was that the girl was extemporizing, and amusing her friends; and “The Beautiful Elephant Girl” was a tale that had been told by an elder and transcribed by a team of bilingual Ju/’hoansi.

It was what I had advocated to the students that morning.

And that was how I learned about the transcription project in Tsumkwe, the Kalahari Peoples Fund, and the enormous number of foreigners who had contributed to keeping this culture alive, while the indigenous people were helped along and looked after.

The Ju/’hoan Transcription Group had been active in Tsumkwe since 2002, but the tales had been collected since 1971, some of them recorded almost forty years ago by the distinguished Harvard anthropologist Megan Biesele, and the stories (printed in both English and Ju/’hoan) were faithful translations of recordings that had been made in villages. Much of this work was supported by the Kalahari Peoples Fund (based in Austin, Texas), which dated to the 1970s and operated throughout the apartheid era, creating homegrown reading materials for the local schools. There was no government involvement in the fund; in fact, the Namibian educational authorities had always resisted mother-tongue instruction in this area.

The Village Schools Project had been created within the Kalahari Peoples Fund in order to lobby the Namibian Ministry of Education
to have the Ju/’hoan language used in schools and in printed materials. All of this information was available on the Kalahari Peoples Network, and the whole initiative was funded with foreign donations.

Over the years, the project had become more and more ambitious. The idea was to create a database of traditional stories, to codify the text by creating a user-friendly orthography for this phonetically complex language. Another goal was the updating of a Ju/’hoan dictionary. A Youth Transcription Group was started in order to pass on skills. This meant the training of transcribers to be computer savvy, the raising of money to buy equipment, and a collective effort to encourage anthropologists, volunteer teachers, writers, and aides to help run the center, guide the project, and see the work into print and onto the Internet.

Foreign aid! From afar came webmasters, tech assistants, linguists from Germany, donations of laptops and solar panels by foreign companies. After 2007 the Norwegian-funded Captain Kxao Kxami Community Centre became available, and now it had electricity and an Internet connection.

These aid givers from abroad engaged the whole community, starting with village-based students who would encourage elders to speak about the past and share stories. Some of the elders were healers, who would pass on their experiences of “psychic healing.” But the stories of local leaders who had participated in the struggle for Namibian independence were also recorded. The transcription group was a memory project, the oral history I had described in my talk—but I was a latecomer to this effort.

In the foreign-funded center with the foreign-funded equipment — computers, digital tape recorders, video cameras — the goal was “technological empowerment” — to protect the culture, produce educational materials for schools, and build an archive. The stated mission was for the Ju/’hoansi people to tell their own stories.

When I was asked to speak on “Preserving a Cultural Heritage,”
this is what I had in mind. It saddened me to think that so much in Africa had been lost — the skills of building and farming, the arts of carving and ornamenting, of music and dance, of storytelling. I had not realized that the preservation had already been under way for so many years, and that the whole Ju/’hoansi community and a large foreign community of supporters were also involved.

If these foreigners hadn’t done it, no one would have done it. And preserving this history was an important matter — as important as providing water or food. It was all a lesson to me: none of it would have happened if it had been left to the Namibian government, which seemed to regard Tsumkwe and the lands beyond the Vet Fence as beneath notice. Without the inspired meddling of outsiders, Tsumkwe would have subsided into its own dust in silence. Because of this foreign involvement it had pride in its language, an oral history, a growing archive of stories, and a place to meet and make plans.

In Tsumkwe I met an American, a man from Seattle, who had been teaching in Namibia for fifteen years, the past two in the school at the crossroads.

“Lots of challenges here,” he said, because I had asked. “Remoteness, drunkenness, teen pregnancy.” But he was not dismayed; he was hoping to stay a few more years.

I saw that I had been hasty in judging some efforts by outsiders. This was necessary and timely. Yet you cannot see such hope and high spirits in the young and not think: What will happen to them?

The next day I voiced my anxiety to one of the South Africans, who simply shrugged.

“They’ll go to the cities. To Grootfontein. To Windhoek.”

“What will they do there?” I asked.

“They’ll be servants. Domestic service.”

It sounded crueler in that accent:
dimisteek
.

At the end of my last day, the children in a large group made their way back to the school compound, which was at the far side of the
crossroads. They saw me watching from under a shade tree and called out, “Sir!”

I walked with them for a while and was heartened by their vitality — their humor, their teasing, their intelligence. Each of them carried a copybook with notes they’d taken at the event. When we parted, they called out, “Come back to Tsumkwe, sir!” and then they continued on their way, in the heat, attached to long shadows.

8
Among the Real People