The Last Train to Zona Verde (21 page)

Then he volunteered another memory, that among his travels, as a small boy he had been to Rundu. This town, due north, on the Namibia-Angola border, was several hundred miles away, and there was no direct road, only a bush track through the semidesert and the wilderness of Kaudom, now a remote game park.

“We went on foot and by truck,” he said, and I worked out that “small boy” meant he might have been eight or nine. It could have been 1950 or earlier, when, as all the anthropologists testified, the foraging and hunting culture had been intact, the people ignored, unchanged, still following the old ways.

“Dambó, what do you remember of Rundu?”

“I saw a white man.”

I seemed to hear the word
!hû
. I verified this and asked him why he used this particular word and not the one for red man, which I thought was interchangeable.

He said, “He was white like you. We call you white because your skin is white.”

“You were a small boy then. Had you seen a white man before that?”

“Never.”

“What did you think when you saw the man?”

“I was with my father. My father took me to Rundu. He explained everything to me.”

“What did he say?”

“My father said, ‘The white people are the people you have to work for.’ ”

Forced labor, amounting to blackbirding, was common as late as the 1960s, with many instances of white Afrikaner farmers raiding Ju/’hoansi settlements and forcing the men into their trucks to work their farms, keeping them in harsh servitude, if not semi-slavery, as harshly treated farm workers. By putting pressure on the Pretoria government, Laurence Marshall helped put a stop to this brutal practice.

“When your father said that you had to work for them, how did you feel?”

“We were afraid of the white people.”

“Were you afraid because they would force you onto their farms?”

He thought hard before he answered, and finally said, “They were not good people for us.”

“Did you think the white people might hurt you?”

“We thought, ‘They will kill us.’ ” His face was grayish in the shadows, and he gazed into the middle distance with his glazed and clotted eyes. He said, “Herero people were also killing San people.”

Also true. The animosity had a long history, certainly since pre-colonial times and probably much further back. Early-nineteenth-century explorers had described the pitched battles between the two peoples. As the Herero had been pastoral and the San hunter-gatherers, the two modes of life inevitably came into conflict. The
Herero driving their cattle before them had encroached on traditional Bushman lands, and the intrusion had resulted in submission, exploitation, and bloodshed.

“Are the Herero your enemies now?”

“No. We have no enemies now.”

“Everything’s peaceful?”

Standing stock-still seemed to be his way of taking exception to my generalization. He said, “We have problems.”

“Tell me some of your problems.”

“The main one in this village is water,” Dambó said. But “village” seemed a misnomer for the small cluster of huts and sheds in the immensity of low thorn scrub. “We have to walk so far to find water.”

“The children go for the water.” I had been struck by the small kids setting off with their buckets and basins on the hot weekday morning.

“That is the children’s work.”

“What about other problems?” I asked. “How do people get along?”

“We get along,” he said.

Practically all observers of the Ju/’hoansi spoke of their acceptance of adultery, because divorce was a simple matter. An adulterous partner was separated from the marriage and, suddenly single, allowed to continue without the taint of transgression.

So I asked Dambó about this, and he gave me a surprising answer.

“If your wife has sex with another man, you beat her,” he said. “You might beat the man, too. Or kill him.”

“Do such things happen here?”

“A few years ago a man killed his wife in this village.”

It seemed uncouth to ask for details, so I let it pass. Many of the violent crimes among the Ju/’hoansi were attributed to drunkenness, which was a scourge of Ju/’hoansi life today. According to one
recent researcher, as much as a third of a family’s income might be spent on alcohol.

Recalling the film
Rite of Passage
, which I had seen in Tsumkwe, I asked Dambó about his first kill. The memory of this successful hunt animated him, and though it was said that the Ju/’hoansi did not dwell in the past, and were unmoved by historical events, it was a different matter — if Dambó was an example — in the case of personal history, where ritual was involved.

“My first kill was an oryx,” he said. The usual name for this large antelope (
Oryx gazella
) is the gemsbok. A mature male can weigh over four hundred pounds, and its long sharp horns, like a pair of samurai swords, make the oryx more than a match for an attacking lion. Dambó raised his arm and said, “He was bigger than this.”

“And how big were you?”

“I was small.”

“How did you kill him?”

He hoisted his bow and made the gesture of nocking an arrow and letting it fly. He said, “Then I used my assegais.”

“What happened after you killed the oryx?”

“They cut my arm — see?” He showed me the ritual scars of the slashes on his forearm that his father had made and pressed with hot fat and oryx flesh.

We talked some more, and out of idle curiosity I wanted to ask about the Ju/’hoansi word for orgasm, which was
tain
. I had read (in Richard B. Lee’s
The Dobe Ju/’hoansi
) that
tain
was also the word used to describe the intense sweetness of wild honey. I resisted inquiring because I thought he might be offended, and rightly so, by something so indelicate. Otherwise, I was so happy talking to this old man I had not noticed the time. He seemed content to answer my questions, and perhaps because he was so venerable, no one was emboldened to interrupt.

But during a long pause in the conversation, John tapped his watch and mouthed the words “bush walk.”

Dambó stayed behind, frowning in the dappled shade, as we set off into the low thorn scrub in a long file of men and women wearing skins who seemed to dance through the bush. They pointed out the plants they used for medicine, the berries they ate, and the branches that were the hardest and straightest for arrow shafts.

The young elfin-faced woman found a vine and dug up a finger-shaped tuber from the dark, strangely moist hole she’d made and cradled it in her hand. As she flicked dust from the root, it paled beneath her fingertips, and, smiling, she offered the first bite to me. Then everyone shared it, as they shared everything.

Farther on, two men knelt in the leaf litter facing each other. They took turns spinning a two-foot-long stick between their palms, which raised a puff of smoke from the friction of its bottom end in a darkening piece of soft wood, and in the dust of the drilled block some sparks were lit. One man lifted the glowing, gently smoking wood and blew on it with lips framed in a kissing expression, and we had fire.

The women sat in the shade and watched, one of them nursing her baby, as an older man made, out of twisted vine and a bent-over branch, a snare for a guinea hen or any other unwary bird.

They named the trees, they identified a lizard and chased it, they called out to each other, they laughed. The sun beat down. The heat was tremendous and seemed life-giving, and everything was golden.

And though it was all a charade, my mood of happiness persisted.

Back at the clearing and the rack of drying elephant meat, the shelters and sheds looked more depressing and shantylike after the light and air of the bush walk. All the men and women had vanished, and soon others appeared, dressed in faded used clothes. But what I took to be a whole new crew were the same people, who had changed from their animal skins into Western clothes that had been handed out by foreign charities, T-shirts lettered
Tommy Hilfiger
and
Springfield Hockey
, and old pleated skirts and threadbare pink pajama tops with bunny rabbits printed on them.

They all hung back, looking a bit apprehensive, because they had a favor to ask.

John, the dapper interpreter and driver, said, “They are asking if you can take some of them to Tsumkwe. That one” — and he pointed to a thin teenage girl in a blue blouse and plaid skirt — “she is sick and wants to go to the clinic.”

“Tell them they can come with us,” I said. Five of them climbed into the Land Rover, the ailing girl helped by the others into the back seat, where she lay as if sorrowful, and she did not move even when farther down the road the vehicle became stuck in deep sand and we struggled to push it.

What I had seen, all of my happiness, my bliss bordering on rapture, was the result of witnessing a reenactment.

“Today, nobody lives in the old way,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote in 2006. “All Bushmen, unless they put on skins for a photographer, wear the clothing of the dominant cultures … and none live by hunting and gathering, although with these activities they sometimes supplement their meager diet, which today is often cornmeal provided by the Namibian government as a welfare ration.”

A German charitable organization, the Living Culture Foundation, sponsored some of these Ju/’hoansi villages as “Living Museums” (
Lebende Museen
). As the foundation elaborated on its website and in its brochures, “A Living Museum is an interesting and authentic way of presenting traditional culture,” and “guests can learn a lot about … the original way of living of the San.”

“The Living Culture Foundation’s three aims are to protect traditional culture, to encourage intercultural dialogue, and to fight poverty.” Toward the realization of the last aim, the foundation encouraged “the establishment of sustainable projects for the tourism industry, for example our ‘Living Museums.’ ”

In the mid-1930s, when the Ju/’hoansi were still known as Bushmen, a white South African named Donald Bain mounted a campaign to protect their way of life, put some of them on display at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, and promoted them (for their “Stone Age” reputation) as “living fossils.” What he managed to do, to realize his vision of the people, was not very different from the creation of the Living Museums.

What I saw — what visitors in general see — is a travesty in the precise meaning of the word: a parody, a dressing up in unnatural clothes. The Ju/’hoansi were costumed, misrepresenting themselves to cater to the imaginations of fantasists, of which I was one. It was like taking the reenactment at Plimoth Plantation, and its employees dressed as Pilgrims, for the reality of life south of Boston today. Ultimately, I saw the reality of Tsumkwe, and read more of the Ju/’hoansi’s travails, which were extreme. “Far from being ‘beautiful people living in a primeval paradise,’ ” one anthropologist has written, “they are in reality the most victimized and brutalized people in the bloody history that is southern Africa.”

If I was a latecomer to the world of the Ju/’hoansi, I was not alone. Anthropologists agree that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle ended in the 1970s, largely as a result of the South African army’s installing itself in Tsumkwe and recruiting Ju/’hoansi into its ranks to fight the Namibian nationalists. The South Africans spread money around; they doled out free food; they discouraged hunting in some areas and made it unlawful in others. Deprived of their traditional livelihood, the Ju/’hoansi moved closer to the growing town, and with their army money they bought food at the store and alcohol from the shebeens. And for the first time in tens of thousands of years they began to suffer from Western diseases — high blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments, and alcoholism.

The Kalahari Peoples Fund was started in 1973, the moving force behind it being the anthropologists and linguists who had observed the decline of the traditional lifestyle. In 1981 John Marshall and
Claire Ritchie started the Nyae Nyae Development Fund and began drilling boreholes to supply water to family compounds. One hope for the people’s survival lay in learning agricultural and stock-raising skills to become small farmers, as well as earning wages and doing occasional foraging. To that end, the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Cooperative was established.

At about the time the Ju/’hoansi had nearly abandoned hunting and gathering, a South African filmmaker shot
The Gods Must Be Crazy
in and around Tsumkwe, using Ju/’hoansi actors and celebrating the “living fossil” aspect of the people. This was in 1984, and though the gimmick of the film — the McGuffin — was a CocaCola can that was chucked from a plane into the unviolated Eden of Bushman Land, it was a time when in fact Western soft drinks and beer were freely available, when alcoholism and poverty were eating away at the culture.

The Ju/’hoansi lost their land in the cause of nature conservation, tourist safaris, and expanding game reserves where elephants (like the fillets and biltong of the one I had seen) were killed by wealthy foreigners. Robert Gordon, in
The Bushman Myth
— his subtitle,
The Making of a Namibian Underclass
, says it all — gives a detailed chronology of the loss of Ju/’hoansi lands and describes how tourism robs the people of their dignity, exploits and suppresses them, and leaves them manipulated and unprepared for new ways of life.

But there is near unanimity in the belief that the Ju/’hoansi no longer want the traditional lifestyle for themselves. “Is it right that we should still be wearing loincloths?” one elder asks, referring to a planned government game reserve for tourists in which the Ju/’hoansi would be part of the colorful foreground (described in Lee,
The Dobe Ju/’hoansi
)
:
“[Eating well] is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean our women should have to expose their stomachs and buttocks again by wearing skin clothing.”

In the aftermath of the anachronistic
The Gods Must Be Crazy
— which made anthropologists apoplectic with rage — John Marshall
compared the Ju/’hoansi, in the way they were stereotyped, to the conventional image of the Hollywood redskin. Almost thirty years ago he wrote, “Among the simplest and dangerous [misconceptions] is the widespread conviction that, somewhere in the Kalahari, Bushman people still live skillfully and peacefully by hunting and gathering. The danger lies in the belief that these mythical people both can and want to live their ancient life in isolation” (John Marshall and Claire Ritchie,
Where Are the Ju/’wasi of Nyae Nyae?
).