The Lost World of the Kalahari (2 page)

One night, by the fireside, I seem to remember my grandfather and the oldest of my aunts saying that in a lean time the Bushman behind would shrink until it was much like any normal behind except for the satiny creases where his smooth buttocks joined his supple legs. But in a good hunting season it would stick out so much that you could stand a bottle of brandy with a tumbler on it! We all laughed at this, not derisively but with affectionate pride and wonder that our native earth should have produced so unique a little human body. Somehow, my heart and imagination were deeply concerned with this matter of the Bushman's shape. The Hottentots, who were very like him, much as I loved them could not excite my spirit as did the Bushman. They were too big. The Bushman was just right. There was magic in his build. Whenever my mother read us a fairytale with a little man performing wonders in it, he was immediately transformed in my imagination into a Bushman. Perhaps this life of ours, which begins as a quest of the child for the man, and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child, needs a clear image of some child-man, like the Bushman, wherein the two are firmly and lovingly joined in order that our confused hearts may stay at the centre of their brief round of departure and return.

But the Bushman's appetite, shape, and steatopygia were, though remarkable, by no means the only unique features of his body. His colour, I was told, was unlike that of any other of the many peoples of Africa, a lovely Provençal apricot yellow. The old Basutu I have quoted told me that one most remarkable thing about the Bushman was that although he wore no clothes his skin never burnt dark in the sun. He moved in the glare and glitter of Africa with a flame-like flicker of gold like a fresh young Mongol of the Central Mongolian plain. His cheeks, too, were high-boned like a Mongol's and his wide eyes so slanted that some of my ancestors spoke of him as a ‘Chinese-person'. There is a great plain between blue hills in South Africa called to this day the ‘Chinese Vlakte' after the Bushman hunters who once inhabited it. His eyes were of the deep brown I have mentioned, a brown not seen in any other eye except in those of the antelope. It was clear and shone like the brown of day on a rare dewy African morning, and was unbelievably penetrating and accurate. He could see things at a distance where other people could discern nothing, and his powers of vision have become part of the heroic legend in Africa. The shape of the face tended to be heart-like, his forehead broad, and chin sensitive and pointed. His ears were Pan-like, finely made and pointed. His hair was black and grew in thick round clusters which my countrymen called, with that aptitude for scornful metaphor they unfailingly exercised on his behalf, ‘pepper-corn hair'. His head was round, neatly and easily joined to a slender neck and throat on broad shoulders. His nose tended to be broad and flat, the lips full, and the teeth even and dazzlingly white. His hips were narrow and, as my aunt said, ‘Lord, verily it has been a beautiful thing to see him move!'

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Bushman was his originality. Even in the deepest and most intimate source of his physical being he was made differently from other men. The women were born with a natural little apron, the so-called
tablier égyptien
, over their genitals; the men were born, lived, and died with their sexual organs in a semi-erect position. The Bushman found dignity in this fact and made no attempt falsely to conceal it. Indeed he accepted it so completely as the most important difference between himself and other men that he gave his people the name of
‘Qhwai-xkhwe'
which openly proclaims this fact. The sound of natural relish that the word
‘Qhwai-xkhwe'
makes on his lips is a joy to hear, and the click of the complex consonants flashes on his tongue as he utters them like a sparkle of sun on a burst of flower from our sombre mountain gorse. He has even painted himself all over the rocks of Africa in naked silhouette plainly demonstrating this distinguishing feature of his race, not with the obscene intent which some European archaeologists have projected into him, but simply because his God, with care aforethought, in the great smithy of Africa had forged him naked and unashamed just like that.

Only one thing seems really to have worried the Bushman regarding his stature and that was his size. Often I have been impressed by the extraordinary energy of revolt I have encountered in the spirit of many little men and have seen something of its exacting consequences in their own and other lives. Nor have I forgotten how disastrously this revolt can be orchestrated in the complexes and policies of whole races. When a prisoner of war of the Japanese, I have been punished at times, I am certain, for no other reason than that I was often taller than those who had me in their power. Yet I have a suspicion that the Bushman's reaction to his smallness was of a different kind and brought about solely by his helplessness to repel the ruthless invasion of his country by men so much taller than he – men who seemed, in fact, so tall that he painted them on the rocks like giants! There was no doubt in the minds of those who had known him that his spirit was raw and vulnerable regading his size. According to my mother's elder sister, our favourite aunt (who could count up to ten in Bushman and utter his formal greeting for our delight although invariably she went dangerously purple in the process), it was fatal to remark on the Bushman's smallness in his presence. More, it was often perilous to show in one's bearing that one was aware of dealing with a person smaller than oneself.

Our old ‘Suto hands strongly supported my aunt with their own colourful illustrations. They said they had always been warned never to show any surprise if they unexpectedly came upon a Bushman in the veld in case he took it to imply they could have seen him sooner had he not been so small. When, unexpectedly, one ran into a Bushman the only wise thing to do was promptly to blame oneself for the surprise and say: ‘Please do not look so offended. Do you really imagine a big person like you could hide without being seen? Why we saw you from a long way off and came straight here!' Immediately the fire in those shining eyes would die down, the golden chest expand enormously and gracefully he would make one welcome. In fact, the oldest of the old Basutos once told me one could not do better than use the Bushman's own greeting, raising one's open right hand high above the head, and calling out in a loud voice: ‘
Tshjamm
: Good day! I saw you looming up afar and I am dying of hunger.' Europeans so often use a diminutive for that which they want to endear. But with the Bushman this mechanism is reversed. The pitiless destructive forces sent against him by fate seemed to mock his proportions until he sought perhaps to appease his sense of insecurity with a wishful vision of a physical superlative he has never possessed. So, in his rock-paintings the Bushman depicts himself in battle as a giant against other giants to such a degree that, were it not for his ‘
Qhwai-xkhwe
', he would be hardly distinguishable from his towering enemies.

But, I was told, this little man before all else was a hunter. He kept no cattle, sheep, or goats except in rare instances where he had been in prolonged contact with foreigners. He did not cultivate the land and therefore grew no food. Although everywhere his women and children dug the earth with their deft grubbing sticks for edible bulbs and roots and, in season, harvested veld and bush for berries and fruit, their lives and happiness depended mainly on the meat which he provided. He hunted in the first place with bow and arrow and spear. The heads of his arrows were dipped in a poison compounded from the grubs, roots, and glands of the reptiles of the land and he himself had such a respect for the properties of his own poison that he never went anywhere without the appropriate antidote in a little skin wallet tied securely to his person. My grandfather and aunt said that he was so natural a botanist and so expert an organic chemist that he used different poisons on different animals, the strongest for the eland and the lion, and less powerful variants for the smaller game. His arrows were made of flint or bone until he came to barter for iron with those about to become his enemies.

As an archer he was without equal. My grandfather said he could hit a moving buck at 150 yards, adding that he would not have liked to expose any part of himself in battle to a Bushman archer under a hundred and fifty yards' range. But he not only hunted with bow and arrow. In the rivers and streams he constructed traps beautifully woven out of reeds and buttressed with young karee wood or harde-kool (the ‘Hard-Coal' wood my ancestors used in their nomadic smithy fires), and so caught basketfuls of our lovely golden bream, or fat olive-green barbel with its neck and huge head of bone and moustaches like those of ‘a soldier of the Victorian Queen', Hongroise-pomaded point and all. The baskets at the end of the traps were like the eelbaskets of Europe but never so bleakly utilitarian. They were woven of alternate white and black plaits not because they were better that way but, my aunt said with great emphasis, because the Bushman wanted to make them pretty. Hard-by among the singing reeds he dug pits with a cunningly-covered spike in the centre in order to trap the nocturnal hippopotamus whose sweet lard meant more to him than foie-gras to any gourmet.

When my grandfather first crossed the Orange River, or the Great River as the Bushman and we who were born close always called it, there were still many of those big game pits left. The trekkers, or covered-wagon pioneers of my people, kept patrols of horsemen scouting well ahead of the lumbering convoys to look out for these holes and, on a signal, someone would go to the front of the large span of oxen and lifting the lead rope from the horns of the two guide-oxen, march carefully at their head. My grandfather often said he wished he had a dollar for every mile he had led his span by the head through the veld. Once in very early childhood, on one of our spring hunting and fishing excursions in the deep bed of the Great River, I saw some of those holes. The spikes in the centre and the top-cover were gone but I remember the sensation of wonder that came over me as one of the elder men said: ‘That's how he did it! That's how fat old tannie sea-cow found her way into the pot.' ‘Old tannie sea-cow' was our endearing way of naming the hippopotamus, so called because it was there in the surf of the sea to welcome my people when they first landed in Africa. Between the sea and the Great River of my childhood lay hundreds of difficult miles, and it was impossible to find a place of water and reeds not associated in local legend and story with the sea-cow. However, long before this day of which I am speaking, ‘Fat little old aunt sea-cow' had vanished like the Bushman, who had so admired her waistline and so loved her lard.

In the tracks between water-holes and rivers the Bushman spread snares of tough home-made rope. The snares according to my grandfather were made of several kinds but the favourite was the classical hangman's noose. The noose was spread round the rim of a hole delicately covered over with grass and sand. Its end was tied to a tense spring made of the fiercely resilient stem of blue bush wood. This stem was doubled over into the sand and so triggered that, however deft a buck's toe or crafty a leopard's paw, the merest touch would release the spring. The noose would instantly be jerked tight and the straightened stem hang the lively animal by paw or throat in the air.

So skilful and confident a hunter did the Bushman become that he did not hesitate to match himself in the open against the biggest and the thickest-skinned animals. For instance, my grandfather said he would provoke the male by darting in and out of a herd of elephant, or teasing the smaller crashes of rhinoceroses, relying only on his knowledge of their ways and his own supple limbs for survival. He would contrive to do this until an angry elephant bull or some never very enlightened rhinoceros father would charge out to deal with him. Twisting and turning and shrieking a charm of magic words, the Bushman would flee until the animal was involved in a baffling pursuit. Then a companion would run up behind unperceived to attack the only place where such a rampant animal was vulnerable to Stone-Age weapons. Smartly he would slice through the tendons above the heel. The animal now helpless on its haunches, the Bushman would close in to finish him off with spears and knives.

On top of his great daring and resource as a hunter, he was also subtle. That was a quality stressed by all those who had known him. He never seems to have attempted to accomplish by force what could be achieved by wit. The emphasis in his own natural spirit was on skill rather than violence. I can remember my grandfather saying with a note of admiration if not envy strangely alive on his pious Calvinist tongue: ‘Yes! he was clever, diabolically clever.' The Bushman would, for example, use the lion as his hunting dog. When his normal methods of hunting failed him he would frighten the game in the direction of a hungry lion. He would let the lion kill and eat enough only to still its hunger, but not enough to make it lazy. Then the Bushman would drive the lion off with smoke and fire, and move in to eat the rest of the kill. In this way he would follow a favourite lion about from kill to kill and it was extraordinary how he and the lion came to respect their strange partnership. My grandfather said there was something uncanny about it. He remembered, too, his father telling him that when they first felt their way into the country across the Great River they found that all the lions were man-eaters. The many thousands of dead bodies left on the veld after a generation of massacre and counter-massacre by Korannas, Griquas, Mantatees, Zulu, Matabele, and Barolong had given the lions such a taste for human flesh that they ignored the herds of game whenever it was possible to go after human prey. Yet oddly enough they never seemed to go after the Bushman. It was said that the Bushmen smeared themselves with an ointment whose smell so offended the lion's sensitive nose that it would not come near them. But whatever the reason the Bushman would come and go fearlessly and unscathed through lion-country wherein a man armed with a gun was barely safe.