The Lost World of the Kalahari (4 page)

I remember when I first stood in the broken circle of stone on top of the highest hill, the permanent waters were pointed out to me. In the east, renowned for its bream and barbel and flashing with light lay ‘The Long Pool', and not far behind it rose the ridge of red-rock on the edge of a pan of water at a place called ‘Setting Sun'. In the north, fifteen miles away, a long hill which rose to the horizon against a sky so polished and shining that its reflection stood upside down upon the hill's summit, marked the water called ‘The Fountain of the Shooting', so named after some forgotten incident of our turbulent history. To the west, twenty-five miles away a pinnacle of rock threw a clear shadow on the edge of the land's sudden drop into the deep bed of the Great River. Between me and the shadow rose a spire of devout poplar on the rim of the famous water, ‘Great Fountain'; to the south-west, a bare three miles away, but blue already with distance, was a cloud of green curling over the place called ‘Three Fountains'; and due south was a glitter of the water dammed close to ‘The Merchant's Fountain'. There were other waters in the vicinity as well.

Watching the gipsy swing and flicker of the brilliant buck that remained in the plains mingling with the respectable huddles of imported sheep and cattle in their foreign wool and calico, the view was enough even for a child to realize how well the land had suited the little hunter. And yet there were other places that suited him better still. Wherever possible he preferred to make his home under some huge overhanging rocks, the more inaccessible the better; or best of all within the many caves such as those found not far from my home in the foothills of the Mountains of the Night, the gorges of the Great River, and other cataclysmic rifts in the Dragon ranges.

There the Bushman felt at his safest. There his culture had its greatest continuity and flowering, and there he came to produce the purest form of a truly organic art the continent has yet known. There too, when he had leisure from hunting and hunger, he made his music. No African music, so I was told from all sides, could compare with Bushman music. He had drums, rattles, stringed instruments from a single-stringed fiddle to a harp with four strings. For sounding boxes he clamped the shell of the small veld tortoises on his single-stringed instruments; and for the equivalent of cello and bass violin he used the shell of our big dark mountain tortoises. To this day I am moved by the thought that a tortoise, also, was the inspiration of our European surrealist violins and cellos. For wind instruments the Bushman had flutes made out of a lesser bamboo that grew in our plains and river backwaters, and he played also, I was told, a double pipe like the authentic pipes of Pan. He had no bells but he made a mould of stiff leather shaped like a bell with a stone clapper inside, tied it to his ankles and wrists, and so beat time to the music of his orchestras. He loved music for all occasions, even for games, and if there is truth in the suggestion that a culture expresses itself most creatively in stimulating in men the instinct to play, then this little man with his variety of games and complex music puts many other so-called ‘superior' cultures to shame.

But, above all, music served his dancing. He was born a dancer and had a dance for everything. He danced birth; he danced adolescence; he danced his marriage and many another event of life and spirit; he danced the sun leaping into the sky; he danced for the moon under the moon, and finally he danced out the agony of dying. From all I was told it seemed that he came alive in a different way when the sun went down, for he sang and danced the night through with a passion and energy which we could not hope to imitate. In that respect too, I noticed he remained with us. Every night when our coloured servants withdrew to the far side of the stream which, by law, divided us after dark, instead of going to the rest which they had amply earned they would invariably gather and dance and sing with a glitter that shone like burnt silver in the darkness around my bed. They would dance till the early hours of the morning even though they knew the difficulties wherein it landed them. I believe in that way alone they could endure our exacting presence and keep alive in their blood the natural Bushman which our wilful way of living inhibited in them by day.

In those caves and underneath those overhanging rocks too, the Bushman told some of the greatest of his stories. I shall have to deal with this aspect of his spirit more fully later, so that it is enough to stress here how mistaken is the common assumption that literature exists only where there is a system of writing. Literature, surely, exists wherever the living word is spoken. All Africans, and the Bushman in particular, possess a great spoken literature of their own. To our everlasting reproach, we know only the merest fragment of this meaningful activity in the little hunter's spirit, but there is no doubt that stories and story-telling were one of the great rewarding loves of his life. The proof of it is with me still in such stories as I know, as it was there in the light which burned suddenly in the dim accepting eyes of the old people who had once known the Bushman when I begged them to recall him telling his stories, even though the theme was sometimes beyond their power of recall.

But above all, on those walls of stone and among those rocks the Bushman engraved and painted. In this he was truly unique and assumed his full adult stature. All the races of Africa had some music, some dancing, and their own special scheme of ‘literature'. But none appear to have had this astonishing gift of painting. The Bushman seems to have discovered this rare visual talent very early in his history, how early it is impossible accurately to say. The estimates which experts have made of the age of the oldest of his paintings in Southern Africa vary from 8000
B.C.
to
A.D.
1300, but there is circumstantial evidence to suppose that he may have been a painter long before then. Indeed, there is a growing feeling that he and the ancient Egyptians, who alone of the peoples attached to Africa practised the visual arts so extensively, with the palaeolithic painter of the caves of the Dordogne and the Iberian peninsula, were of the same origins. This feeling exists not merely because of the remarkable resemblances of subject matter and manner between the paintings in the Iberian, Egyptian, and Southern African worlds, but for other reasons as well. I have already mentioned the delicate matter of his ‘
Qhwai-xkhwe
' and the
tablier égyptien
of his women. The
tablier égyptien
was so-called because the anatomical phenomenon to which it referred was a noted feature of the shape of the women of ancient Egypt and is referred to in records of the Second Dynasty. The Bushman's steatopygia too was shared by the same people and I myself have noticed in copies of the paintings in the caves of Lascaux the presence of men with his shape and his ‘
Qhwai-xkhwe
'. But however remote his discovery of painting and however widespread its practice, he appears never to have painted more consistently and better than he did in my part of Africa. Much of his painting has been thoughtlessly destroyed or has crumbled away from weather and time. Yet there is so much left that, to this day, it is not difficult to imagine its scale before we and the black man broke into the Bushman world. I myself from childhood have followed his progress as a painter from the Cape of Good Hope for about 1,500 miles north into the hills of Rhodesia, and then west from the eastern spurs of the Dragon ranges and stormy Outeniquas for close on another 1,500 miles to the skeleton coast of the Atlantic sea-board. Vast as that area is it is not the whole of his painter's story, but it is enough to indicate the size of his practice.

I love my own time too much and would not have chosen to live in any other even if that had been possible. Yet, if forced to an alternative I would choose to be the first European in Africa free to see, before we laid our blind, violent hands upon it, the vast land glowing from end to end in the blue of its Madonna days like some fabulous art gallery with newly restored and freshly painted Bushman canvases of smooth stone and honey-coloured rock. For so, apparently, it existed for many centuries. As fast as a painting faded it was either restored or a new theme painted over it. At the same time entirely new pictures were continually added to the great store. It is astonishing how in this late hour, they burn within the aubergine shadows of cave and overhang of cliff and krans, and what power they still possess to provoke an almost unbearable nostalgia for the vanished painter and for the spirit that possessed him. True, their fire is dying and the ruby coals are blown silver with the ashes of time. But underneath there is enough authentic flame to show the Bushman and his chosen companions on the enigmatic spoor as, with the mystery of life upon them, they spied out on the far side of the desert a land of promise for the wandering hosts of God.

In the earliest of these paintings the subjects are almost all animal. Where space is small the animals are painted singly like the miniature head of a great classic antelope beauty I once saw staring with Byzantine eyes out of a frame of saffron rock on the edge of an old game track in the remote bush. Or, where there is room enough, in battalions as in the cave above the White Kei river which contains a painting of a troop of 150 springbuck each one individually appraised and respectfully portrayed. ‘Little old aunt sea-cow'; the long-limbed giraffe with its shapely neck and ladylike droop of shoulder; the elegant blue crane on a mannequin leg; the Hammerhead messenger of death; pythons of a length and stature no more seen; the rhinoceros, angry like a pricked toro with the rosette of blood that comes to it in adolescence vivid on the flank; the elephant, Titan of his world; mantis, incorrigible and indestructible; the lion, royal and unafraid; the leopard prince; the ostrich, great bird cruelly earthbound for a Promethean sin; the crafty jackal; the star-like lynx and other lesser breeds of cats without the law; the hyaena, the werewolf being the half-light of his world; all varieties of buck and antelope; ‘the people who sit upon their heels'; these and many more of what the Bushman called not beasts, birds, and insects but ‘persons of the early race', are there still accurately observed, inwardly shared and appreciated. Indeed, I know one painting where a frightened herd of running eland is shown with such a gift of movement that when I first experienced its impact I had the illusion, with all the vividness of reality, of seeing them charging across the rock and away over the side of the hill.

However, gradually the Bushman himself came to figure in the animal scene. Subjects became more complex and the theme more fully orchestrated. He is there as child, husband, hunter, and fighter, his women always in close support. His domestic life and fighting intrude. The bees and honey appear and he begins to dance. Now an inner vision emerges to join in the demands of the outer. Mysterious shapes in profile, human below, bird or beast above, like the gods of ancient Egypt, stand watching the everyday scene from a corner on the rock, deeply in a cave, or walk catfooted along a ledge on the brink of an abyss. At places of reeds and rushes mysterious shapes appear, upside down, beneath the rare water. Somewhere in a cool gorge on the edge of a waste sparkling like broken glass in the hissing sun, a white lady, self-possessed, with a flower in her long hand, walks with a high step down a steep wall. Suddenly tall black men are splashed, like giant exclamation marks of printer's ink, all over the northern canvases. The Bushman raises himself to gianthood to meet them. The struggle becomes more desperate. Raid and counter-raid and massacre multiply; the security, inner security, and sense of sharing that for so long sanctified the stone, vanishes. The pools of blood on the rocks steadily grow bigger. A new invader with a gun intrudes on another far frieze of the canvas. In the Mountains of the Night hard by the Great River, paintings of an enemy in red coats and riflemen on horses are briefly seen. Then abruptly the antique art vanishes from the ancient land.

I wish I could present it in greater detail but I have Bushman proportions to observe, and only enough is permitted here to give answer to the question posed in the beginning: what sort of a person was the Bushman? His paintings show him clearly to be illuminated with spirit; the lamp may have been antique but the oil is authentic and timeless, and the flame was well and tenderly lit. Indeed, his capacity for love shows up like fire on a hill at night. He alone of all the races of Africa, was so much of its earth and innermost being that he tried constantly to glorify it by adorning its stones and decorating its rocks with painting. We other races went through Africa like locusts, devouring and stripping the land for what we could get out of it. The Bushman was there solely because he belonged to it. Accordingly he endeavoured in many ways to express this feeling of belonging, which is love, but the greatest of them was in the manner of his painting.

The significance of all this of course, did not escape the attention of his enemies. I repeat, their justification for exterminating him was always that he was no better than an animal. Whenever they captured him they called the process of bending him to their will ‘taming' him, just as if he were really a wild animal. As a child over and over again I would hear the old people exclaim, the unpleasant ones with a terrifying bitterness and the others with an unwilling note of real regret: ‘But you see he just would not be tamed!' Everything we did to him was excused on the grounds that he was a grossly inferior person impeding the progress of greatly superior races. As I see it nothing throws that excuse more firmly back into the narrow lap of our conscience than his painting. An attempt even has been made to prove that he was not, after an, the painter of the caves and art engraver of the iron-stone plates of my country. We are told they were the work of another people suppressed in their turn by the Bushman. This is argued with an obstinacy that would seem inexplicable did one not know how great and complex must be the private stirring of unrecognized conscience behind the specialized clamour. But apart from the mass of circumstantial evidence, there is the weight of European and Bantu tradition; eyewitness accounts of persons who knew the Bushman; and, to me most important of all, the Bushman's word. The great-hearted and dedicated Stow to whom we owe so much of the little organized knowledge we have of the Bushman, collected much moving evidence from old survivors who, whenever he showed them one of his superb copies of cave paintings, expressed great delight and called them ‘their paintings', ‘their own paintings', the paintings of ‘their nation'. Stow also tells how the last of the Bushman painters was shot down in a raid in the Basuto hills and picked up dead with a zebra thong round his middle to which were attached ten little horns each filled with different coloured paint. The anecdote stirred me deeply when I first read it because there seemed to be a significant validity between it and an experience of my own childhood. Someone in my grandparents' family came back as a youth from a raid against the Bushman in the hills of the Great River with an account of how he had seen one of the dead with a dozen similar little horns strapped to his middle.