The Lost World of the Kalahari (6 page)

Yet there is ample evidence from the past that the Bushman was not always so aggressive. Tradition among many of the weaker tribes of Southern Africa speaks of him as a generous host and loyal friend. When the first stragglers, fleeing from the vast black hordes pushing down from the north appeared, destitute and afraid in his midst, he gave them asylum. What added to his bitterness was that, almost without exception, the stragglers, when succoured and confident, united with other black men to dispossess and exterminate him. Again even my own people, when they could begin to recollect the terrible past with some tranquillity, spoke of him as a trustworthy man of his word. I was told for instance, that in the early days the farmers on the frontier would often hand over hundreds of sheep to the Bushmen who would vanish to graze them in the interior where the Europeans themselves dared not go. Many months later they would return with the flock grown into fine condition and every head accounted for. And all for the reward of a little tobacco which the Bushman loved to smoke.

Nor until invasion made him so does he appear to have been a particularly quarrelsome and aggressive person. In his own society there were no traditions, legends, or stories of great warfare. He seems to have been singularly peaceful, and such skirmishes as he had with close neighbours were rarely more than outbursts of his lively temper. Indeed he loved his ease and fun so much that he did not suffer quarrelsome people in his company unduly, and if they proved impervious to correction he quickly combined with his friends to remove them.

There is evidence, too, that he kept faith under fire, recognized a system of parley, and respected, even under the most provocative circumstances, messengers of truce. Finally, even his bitterest enemies were forced reluctantly to admit his immense courage, and to pay belated tribute to the untarnished dignity with which the unwashed little body fought to the end. For me, one of the saddest of all the many tragic things about the Bushman's fate is that no one of stature outside the conflict was moved to defend him. There was no contemporary recognition of his qualities which might have consoled him even if it could not prevent his end. In time the Hottentot and other native races found formidable champions to plead their causes. The little Bushman, with a few exceptions from frontier farmers of my race and one distinguished minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, had no noteworthy champions. The missionaries who came flocking to my country filled with abhorrence of slavery and fired with the new ideas regarding ‘the dignity of man' that were setting Europe aflame, hardly gave him a thought. Even the Society for the Protection of Aborigines which should have been the first to succour the Bushman – for who was aboriginal if he was not? – ironically sponsored missions that made pets of his most ruthless enemies and so contributed to his doom. From first to last he appears to have been abandoned until it must have seemed to him as if he had been abandoned as well by God. Indeed, he fought out his fate in the great ocean of land that had borne him with a depth of loneliness and anguish of spirit akin to that of the Ancient Mariner:

I have no intention of going into great detail about the terrible pattern of history woven tightly round the Bushman from the time we landed in Africa up to my grandfather's day a hundred and twenty-five years ago. But some particulars are needed to show how the subject seized my emotions as a child. All the odds were against the little man and my sympathies have always been with those who fight back, without losing heart, though all the gods and life itself seem against them. Our aboriginal hearts know no neutrality: we are all born either Greeks or Trojans. As a boy of six I helped, in my imagination, to man the walls of the doomed city in the Great Plain, for I was born a Trojan. From the start I was on the Bushman's side, and the moment I was old enough to contemplate the full spectacle of our conflict with the little hunter I found myself in passionate revolt against the consequences of the past.

I know it is useless to abstract people and events from the context of their own time. Perhaps one of the most prolific sources of error in contemporary thinking rises precisely from the popular habit of lifting history out of its proper context, and bending it to the values of another age and day. In this way history is never allowed to be itself but is given such a vicarious and negative extension that whole nations, classes, and groups of individuals never really live their immediate present but go on repeating a discredited pattern of the past. Nowhere is such a negative entanglement with history greater than in my own country. On one side, there are those of my countrymen who have made a determined effort to suppress and falsify the history of the Afrikaner people in order to show our forefathers establishing themselves as saviours in Africa. On the other side they are presented as a race of human monsters from which has sprung a monstrous generation in the present. Neither is right. But I am certain we shall never be free of the destructive aspects of our history until we can honestly look our past in the face and truly see ourselves for what we were: ordinary in our human fallibility, with much that was dishonourable and inadequate in our behaviour as well as a good deal that was brave, upright, and lovable. Both black and white peoples could begin so healing an exercise in no better way than by pondering upon the ills we all inflicted on the first little man of Africa. There our mutual records could not be blacker.

While the giant hordes of black races in the far north had already fallen on the Bushman and were driving deeper into the heart of his ancient land along the east and west coasts as well as down the centre of Africa, we landed at the Cape of Good Hope and seized him in the rear. From that moment it was a war of encroachment from all points of the compass with gathering retaliation on the Bushman's part. He asked for no quarter and was given none. He himself would go with gay defiance into the weighted battle, his quiver full of arrows and another supply handy in a band around his head, from which he deftly sent arrows whistling like a wild pigeon's wing with incredible rapidity at his enemies. They were terrified of his arrows. The old Basutos, who only finished their war of extermination in my grandfather's day, said that a wound from one of the Bushman's arrows unnerved the bravest of their warriors. The terrible pain caused by the poison made them hack with spears and knives at their wounds, slicing through veins and arteries in their panic and merely hastening their own end. This sort of scene is depicted in some of the greatest paintings of the Bushman twilight hour. My own people, thanks to their horses and guns, usually managed to keep out of range and fell only when ambushed. When they stormed the Bushman in his kranses and caves they usually moved behind a screen made of their saddle-cloths and thick duffle coats. The Bushman never had a chance against them. His only hope lay in a compassion against which the hearts of the Europeans and the brutal hour were firmly shut. Yet even when surrounded and cut down by hosts armed with shields, clubs, and assegais, or shot at from a safe distance by guns in the hands of a race of unequalled marksmen, he never asked for mercy. Wounded and bleeding he fought to the last. Shot through one arm, Stow says, the Bushman would instantly use his knee or foot to enable him to draw his bow with the uninjured one. If his last arrow was spent he still struggled as best he could until, finding the moment of his end had come, he would hasten to cover his head so that his enemies should not see the agony of dying expressed upon his face. On all sides his enemies had just enough generosity to admit that he died royally. The same instinct which made Charles the First on his last grey morning in Whitehall ask for an extra shirt so that he might not shiver with cold and be thought by the crowd to be afraid, came to crown also the Bushman's end. What, indeed, could be prouder than the Bushman's reply to young Martin du Plessis, a boy of fourteen who was sent into a great cave in a mountain near my home (blatantly miscalled ‘Genadeberg', Mountain of Mercy) where the Bushman was surrounded in his last stronghold by a powerful commando? The boy, almost in tears, besought him to surrender, promising to walk out in front of him as a live shield against any treacherous bullets. At last, impatient that his refusal was not accepted the Bushman scornfully said: ‘Go! Be gone! Tell your chief I have a strong heart! Go! Be gone! Tell him my last words are that not only is my quiver full of arrows but that I shall resist and defend myself as long as I have life left. Go! Go! Be gone!'

Again, what could have been more Spartan than his end among the rocks of the projecting shoulder of a great precipice in the Mountains of Snow in the Cape Province where, for the last time, he turned at bay with his kinsmen to face another murder commando. Bushmen, dead and dying, were piled high on a dizzy ledge, others in their death struggle had rolled over the edge and fallen into the deep crags and fissures that surrounded them. Still they resisted. At last only their leader remained, undaunted. Posting himself on the outermost point of the projecting ledge of the precipice where no man dared to follow him he defied his pursuers and plied his arrows with immense skill, all the time bearing what seemed to be a charmed life among the bullets flying about him. But inevitably the moment came when he held the last arrow in his bow. A feeling of compassion stirred the hearts of his pursuers. Someone called on him to surrender and promised him life. He sent his last arrow at the speaker with the scornful answer that 'a chief knew how to die but never to surrender to the race who had despoiled him'. Then, with a shout of bitter defiance, he turned round and jumped over the precipice to be shattered on the rocks far below.

But long before the Bushman made his last stand in the hills he was remorselessly driven from the great buck-bright plains below. For two hundred years and more, all along the steadily expanding European frontier, he was shot on sight and hunted down with horses, dogs, and guns with as great ardour as the lion and other carnivorous animals of the veld. Even a professed philanthropist like le Vaillant tells without shame how he and his attendants pursued and tried to kill a party of thirteen Bushmen merely because they were seen near the area where he kept his stock.

Wherever the Bushman struck back, as he did, with increasing bitterness and vindictiveness, my countrymen immediately banded together and went after him with their deadly guns and quick-footed horses. They would load the heavy muzzles with extra powder and special shot and, taking care to keep out of arrow-range, provoke the Bushmen to charge them. Then they would open fire with terrible effect. One leader, Commandant Nel, alone on one small sector of the long frontier, in the thirty years from 1793 to 1823, served on thirty-two expeditions against the Bushman. On those raids great numbers of little men and their women were killed and their children carried back as slaves to the farms of the men on commando. One of Nel's expeditions massacred no less than two hundred Bushmen and yet he himself seemed to have suffered no especial remorse for what he had done. Although he was in all other respects declared to be a God-fearing and benevolent man, he claimed ample justification for his deeds in the atrocities Bushmen had reputedly committed on farmers and their stock.

On the northern front the Bushman fared no better. I hope some day a historian from among my black countrymen will not shirk the full implications of their share in the over-all tragedy. The traveller Chapman, for example, has several detailed stories of how Leshulatibi, a Bantu chief in Ngamiland, persecuted the Bushman. On one occasion when two of the chief's horses were suffocated in a bog, he bound the two Bushmen slaves in charge of them to the dead animals and thrust them back into the morass. Later, when another group of Bushmen carried off some of his cattle and vanished into the desert, he waited some months for revenge. Then he sent envoys with presents of tobacco and by various sustained acts of kindness lulled their suspicions and persuaded them to come to a great feast. There they were overpowered and brought to where he was sitting on a veld stool. From there he personally supervised the cutting of their throats, embellishing their last moments, it is said, by every taunt and sarcasm that came to his sinister imagination.

But as a child what shocked me most was the realization of what we had done to the Bushman's children. If we pause to reflect, our justification for eliminating him is revealed as guiltladen hypocrisy in view of the extreme value we placed on his children. Everywhere they were in great demand as slaves because, when they survived captivity, they grew up into the most intelligent, adroit, and loyal of all the farmer servants. Even long after slavery was abolished and until the supply was dried up their service was exacted under a system of forced labour. From the earliest days, all along the frontier, the more desperate and adventurous characters among my countrymen added to their living by kidnapping Bushman children and selling them to the land- and labour-hungry farmers. Hardly a commando came back from an expedition without some children, and an early traveller speaks casually of seeing wagons full of children returning from a raid across the frontier. Many of the children died of the heart-ache, shock, and the suspension of the only rhythm their little lives had known. Many tried to escape and, if recaptured, were flogged heavily for their pains. Others, more fortunate, once clear of the settlers, would try furtively to signal by fires to their own people. If they saw no answering smoke in the land round about them, they would quickly extinguish the fire for fear of attracting the attention of their pursuers and move stealthily ever deeper into the interior. Then they would try to signal from another place. So it went on until they either found some people of their own race, or died of hunger, or were eaten by wild animals. Stow, who learned all this from Bushman survivors when the last act of the tragedy was barely over, suggests that far more children died than ever got through to safety. His description of their fate impressed me so deeply that sometimes as a boy, when I was alone on my pony below the hills at home where the Bushman had lived, I thought that the wind coming up behind me through the pass brought the fading voices of doomed lost children crying in the bleached grass between the ironstone boulders under an empty and unresponsive blue heaven.