The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey

There was a muffled noise from within and Benjamin’s head appeared, his sharp, handsome features bleared with sleep and, I realised later when near enough to smell his breath, with liquor. He crawled out, his good, store-bought clothes rumpled from being slept in. He yawned, looked at us vaguely, as if surprised to find us there. Then a pretty young woman with seductive almond eyes, and an ostrich-eggshell necklace draped over her breasts, ducked out of the opening in the beehive hut behind him, saw us, giggled, and darted away out of sight. Benjamin watched her go, stretching his lower back and obviously making an effort to collect his thoughts.

He nodded at us, looking irritated: ‘OK, yes. I’ll be with you now, now.’ He went to a tree at the edge of the huts and hidden by the thick trunk, urinated in a loud, splashing stream before returning and ducking back inside the hut’s low doorway to reappear a few moments later with his hunting kit. A bow of light-coloured wood, a quiver of arrows made from a hollowed-out root, a digging stick and a short spear, all hanging conveniently over his right shoulder in a bag made from a whole steenbok skin. He went over to another hut, banged on it, and roused a smaller, even slighter-built young man, similarly bleary and clad in T-shirt, jeans and running shoes. This, said Benjamin, was his co-hunter Xau; he turned to the smaller man and said something in Ju/’Hoansi, then looked back at us: ‘Let’s go.’

A moment later we were trotting awkwardly behind the two fit, fleet men, out of the village and into the tall grasses. Despite having just been roused from drunken sleep, they moved fast and fluidly, in deceptively small steps, seeming almost to glide above the ground, so smooth was their stride. Benjamin and Xau cast what seemed only the most cursory glances at the ground as they walked. Every few yards we would come upon a narrow track of red or yellow dust criss-crossed with hoof and paw prints. ‘See,’ Benjamin stopped and pointed. ‘That steenbok, we want him.’ Following his gaze I nodded sagely, though I couldn’t distinguish one track from the next. ‘This morning,’ I said hesitatingly, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to take you away from your wife. I know you’ve been away in Baraka …’

Benjamin looked at me blankly, then away, stifling a grin. ‘That’, he said, ‘was not my wife.’ He turned quickly and walked on.

A moment later he stopped short, crouched and turned his head, motioning for us to get down too. ‘See’, he whispered, pointing ahead. Through a gap in the thicket I saw a small antelope head turn in our direction for a brief second – all flickering ears, limpid, deep brown eyes and little, straight horns – then, reassured that there was no danger, it dipped to graze again. It was a steenbok, a notoriously shy, alert, nervous antelope and we were very close, not twenty yards away.

Xau crept noiselessly up to Benjamin and, using a fluent, silent language of the hands, enquired what he should do. Benjamin replied in the same way, the fingers of one hand making precise gestures against the palm of the other, and Xau crawled off to the left, making a slight noise that caused the antelope to look his way – away from us.

Slowly, so slowly it almost hurt to watch, Benjamin reached back into his shoulder bag for the bow and quiver. Unscrewing the quiver’s cap of stiffened hide he noiselessly shook out an arrow – sticky and dark below its small steel tip with a poison made from mashed beetle larvae mixed with saliva. He fitted the arrow to his bow string and rose to a half-standing position. One swift movement lifted the bow and poised the arrow to eye level. Leaning forward from the hips, Benjamin looked directly down the shaft at the antelope, who still grazed blithe and unaware. Up arced the arrow, soundlessly covering the intervening yards between us and the steenbok to hiss into the grass behind it. The head and neck flew up, making – for a brief second – a frozen, alarmed silhouette. Then it took off, disappearing into the trees in three great bounds. Benjamin shrugged, smiling a little sheepishly, and went to retrieve his arrow.

Much later, as the morning heated up towards humid noon, we sighted a group of red hartebeest in a glade of sour plum trees. Large, the size of horses, they are one of Africa’s oddest-looking antelope. Their extremely narrow faces taper to barely two inches across at the muzzle. Their eyes stick out and their short horns jut forward in a strange, double-kink. At Benjamin’s whispered order, we crouched down a second time. ‘They’ll come this way. We must wait.’ Next to us, a large, talcum-powder white mushroom was growing from a red termite mound. Benjamin reached out and picked it, breaking the white flesh into long sections which he silently offered us. They tasted of lightly smoked cheese, and we munched for a minute or two in happy silence. Then the hunters’ faces registered sudden alarm, and with curt gestures they told us to lie flat. Hoofbeats, growing louder. I raised my head and saw the heads and horns of two hartebeest rising and dipping at a canter straight down the trail on which we were crouched.

The first animal burst through the grasses right on top of us and, seeing us, plunged to a halt and reared. Benjamin leapt to his feet and let fly his arrow. There was a blur of hooves, red-coloured hide and dust; the beasts wheeled and were gone. ‘Did you hit it?’ I was shouting with excitement. Benjamin leant down in the grass and came up with the arrow in his hand. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. Xau let fly a torrent of abuse. Laughing, Benjamin translated: ‘He says I am shit!’

By now the heat was mounting – the animals would start lying up in the shade. To continue hunting would probably be fruitless. Benjamin turned us north, back to Makuri. After a few minutes, I asked, ‘So how often do you manage a kill?’

He sighed. ‘A big animal, with bows and arrows like this? Maybe one time in a month.’

‘So what do you live on the rest of the time?’

‘Roots, berries, wild fruits …’ Benjamin’s voice trailed off, then became suddenly vehement. ‘We need money – not just for food. There are many problems here, man, many. There are cattle herders from Botswana – the Herero – coming in here, and nothing to stop them because we have no power, no money. And the young people going to the town to drink and not learning the skills because they say that this life is finished. Yes, we need money.’ He paused. ‘Maybe people like you – tourists – might come here and see our life. There is money in this, I think?’

So, as we walked, we hatched a plan. When I returned to Windhoek and after that to London, I would try to find a safari company that would be prepared to work with the Ju’/Hoansi, bringing clients to experience what we had just experienced – but who would offer the Bushmen a share of the profits rather than just pay them to work as trackers and guides. I knew a company called Footprints, in Windhoek, who sometimes took people up to this region – Benjamin had himself mentioned them earlier, as if planting the seed in my mind. When I got back to the city I would go and talk to them, I promised. Then, for the contact in Britain, I thought of Safari Drive, the company who had lent us the vehicle. They had the contacts, moved in the circles that could attract moneyed clients, and were good people. Walking back along the trail I agreed with Benjamin that next summer – the Namibian winter – we would try and set up a prototype trip, get Safari Drive to organise some clients from England, and together we concocted a happy future.

Back at Makuri, we found a big white Toyota Land Cruiser parked outside the circle of huts. Three white people – a young, dark-haired man and two women in their later thirties – stood talking to old man /Kaece. They looked irritated. As we walked up the narrow trail in the now stifling late-morning heat, the young white man turned, saw us and said half-angrily, half-jokingly, in an accent that sounded American or Canadian: ‘Benjamin! Where the fuck have you been? We’ve been looking for you for hours. Get in the car!’

Without a word Benjamin left us, went off to his hut, came out with a small holdall, and got into the car where the three whites were now waiting, gunning the engine impatiently. They hadn’t introduced themselves, but I guessed that they must be from Baraka – the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-operative field headquarters where Benjamin had told us he worked. A few minutes later they were gone, Benjamin giving us a quick wave from the back seat as the Land Cruiser disappeared round a bend in the rutted track.

Immediately old man /Kaece and young Xau turned on us and began demanding money, thrusting out their hands and jutting their chins aggressively. The two men – one old, one young – shared a clear family resemblance: the same sharp neat nose, the same eyes that were half mischievous, half soulful. Benjamin, though taller, had also shared this look. Were they all related? I reached into the pocket of my shorts, took out some notes and counted out into the old man’s hand the price I had agreed with Benjamin the evening before – ten Namibian dollars for the night’s camping, ten for Xau and ten for Benjamin. I hoped Xau would give Benjamin his share.

Placated, the younger man drifted back to his hut, but /Kaece took my arm and led me to his hut where his wife sat, scraping the flesh from the inside of a tortoise shell. Seeing us, she rose, a tiny frail figure, with an old duk

(#ulink_4196a7db-933f-5f2d-9155-f97b727a4870) round her head, several strings of white ostrich-eggshell beads around her wattled old neck, and a beaded steenbok skin knotted at one shoulder. A small dark nipple peeked cheekily out of a tear in the hide. She took off one of the necklaces and offered it to Kristin, while /Kaece said ‘Twenty, twenty’, in Afrikaans. A few minutes later we had bought not only the necklace, but the tortoise shell, a beautiful hunting bow with a set of poison arrows in a quiver, a digging stick, a skin bag to put game in, two sticks for making fire, and a short stabbing spear. A small crowd gathered, each with something to sell. Unable to resist, we saw our roll of notes shrink and vanish. When there was no money left, the people lost interest and melted away among the huts again, leaving us alone.

Standing there with all our newly-bought artifacts, Kristin and I felt suddenly self-conscious, glutted, almost ashamed. We turned and began the walk back to camp. The hunt had been the true fulfilment of a dream. Benjamin had made us feel accepted, respected, welcome. Yet his sudden disappearance and our subsequent fleecing had revealed, with brutal honesty, what we actually represented here: money.

We lay the rest of the day under the great baobab, watching the heavy, sweet-smelling blossoms glide earthward from the high, misshapen branches, plotting how to carry out the promise I had made. As evening fell we heard voices again, and a flurry of children broke upon the camp in a small, joyous wave. Their parents followed, led by old man /Kaece: about twenty adults in all, the men mostly in ragged shop-bought clothes, the women more traditional and neater in a mixture of skins, head scarves and Western dresses with Bushman touches; a fringe of coloured beads tagged onto the hem, or necklaces of ostrich eggshell, black porcupine quills or red wood draped round their necks and hanging over their printed cotton dresses. Most had babies, either slung around their back in a hide sling or a piece of old cloth, or else balanced at the hip, the nipple of a free-hanging breast plugged firmly in their mouths. The children flew back from us in a little flock, and formed a bright-eyed phalanx in the twilight under the great tree.

Using gestures, old man /Kaece told us that we should build another fire to the right of the tree, where the clearing was wider. We did so, lit the wood and sat down with the people in a circle, the adults talking casually among themselves, pulling out little pipes made of bone or hollowed-out rifle bullets. After first asking us through sign language if we had any tobacco, they disappointedly stuffed the pipes from their own small hoards, before relaxing again, laughing and joking. The children snuggled in close to their parents, staring in silence at the rising flames, whose heat, on that summer evening, was enough to raise a sweat even from several yards away.

Old man /Kaece’s wife began to sing. Her first, quavering alto note pierced the air above the fire’s crackle and silenced the happy chatter. She began to clap, alone at first, then slowly being joined by the other women around the fire. One moment there was a sporadic melody, a few hand-claps among the general talk, the next the night was alive with rhythm and song, the fire roofed with sound. As the song swelled, old man /Kaece rose stiffly to his feet and, in the flickering circle between the singers and the fire began, slowly, to dance. A shuffling forward step, a stamp, a pause, a sudden crouch, knees bent, like a hunter surprised by the sudden sight of his quarry. And then, through subtle shifts of posture and expression, he became the quarry. Tossing his head, stamping a foot that, through movement and shadow-light, was transformed into a hoof. Snorting once, twice, as if blowing flies away from his nose, /Kaece was – in that flickering firelight – unmistakably a gemsbok.

(#ulink_ab8bb834-472f-5c1d-a024-379f24246863) A dignified, powerful bull, wary yet confident of his physical power, veteran of fights against other bulls and against those predators unwise enough to try and hunt him. One by one, the other men rose and followed /Kaece’s circular progress, each man becoming beast as the dance took him.

As the song changed, the men transformed themselves into other creatures – ostriches, giraffes, lions. Sometimes /Kaece or one of the other men sat down to rest while the others danced on. Sometimes the children would rise and try a few steps or the youngest women would lay their infants aside and dance opposite each other, bobbing their bodies, dipping their heads, rolling their eyes and looking at each other sideways on – like doves courting on the ground. Hours passed, until our palms became sore from clapping and, on a final downbeat everyone brought their hands spontaneously together, and the dance was done.

‘Ah, so you’ve been at Makuri?’, asked Nigel, the white ranger in charge of Tsumkwe’s Nature Conservation Department office, when we dropped in there on our way back to civilisation. Thin, sunburnt, and gnarled by the harsh Namibian climate, his gruff exterior was belied by the kindly twinkle to his eye. In his shorts he looked like a lanky, overgrown schoolboy.

‘How’s /Kaece doing, the old skelm [rascal]? Did he get all your money? Benjamin took you hunting, eh? Now that’s a treat, man. Real bow and arrow stuff, eh? Jasus, I wish I got time to do that.’

I told him about the tourism plan Benjamin and I had dreamt up. Would he – or at least, his department – support such a venture?

‘Eco-tourism with the Bushmen, eh? You won’t be the first to try it, I’m telling you. Bet Benjamin didn’t tell you that, did he? Well, good luck to you. Something has to work, eh? Ja,’ he grinned, ‘I can see you’ve got the Bushman bug. You can always tell when the Bushies have got hold of someone. You’re finished, man. Toast. Done. Hey, do you like painting?’

To our surprise he took us home to his shabby government-issue house, gave us cups of tea and showed us a collection of surprisingly good, if unfinished, wildlife paintings: a hook-beaked, grey-feathered goshawk; a brooding, hungry leopard; sketches of a spiral-horned kudu. ‘Ja, once the Bushmen get into you man, that’s it. I should know. Spend half my time trying to keep them out of jail. Maybe I should give you some background. Do you like Baroque music?’

So, as Vivaldi’s lute and mandolin concertos poured out of his dusty stereo speakers, and the Namibian sun beat down outside, Nigel filled us in. The situation with the Ju’/Hoansi was complicated. Their area – officially known as Eastern Bushmanland – was the last place in Namibia where Bushmen could hunt and gather at will. But as Benjamin had told us, an aggressive cattle-owning tribe called the Herero was moving in. They were not Namibian Hereros, as most people in that tribe were, but had arrived a few years back from Botswana. They were the descendants of warriors who had fought the Germans back in the 1900s, when Namibia was still a fledgling colony, and who had, after their inevitable defeat, been driven out into the waterless Kalahari to die. A small number had made it to the natural springs near Ghanzi in Botswana and established a Herero population there. The present German government, anxious to atone for its century-old war crime, had now repatriated five thousand of these Botswana Herero in Namibia.

But, said Nigel, slurping his tea, they had not been welcomed by their fellow tribespeople, whose grazing was already over-stretched and who felt they could not accommodate the cattle that the newcomers had brought with them over the border. So the Botswana lot had been placed in a refugee camp at Gam, south of Bushmanland, there to wait while the Namibian government decided what to do with them. It was from Gam that the Herero families were filtering into the Ju’/Hoansi territory. ‘You can hardly blame them,’ admitted Nigel; ‘They’re desperate for land, poor sods. But they kill all the game as they come and they treat the Bushmen like shit. No, man, it’s a bad scene. You get your tourism thing working if you can. The Bushmen need all the help they can get. And not just here – it’s the same story right across the Kalahari.’

Back in Windhoek we found that, by some fortuitous coincidence, Charles Norwood, one of the Safari Drive owners, had flown in unexpectedly on business. We went straight down to his hotel, told him all that had happened and he, infected by our excitement, accompanied us next day to a meeting at the Footprints office, and from there to the Nyae Nyae Foundation (the headquarters, despite its confusingly different name, of the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-op, for whom Benjamin worked). Hearing our proposal, Wendy Viall, the good-hearted South African lady in charge, agreed, in principle, to the plan. We would come back the following year, to make the prototype trip. Footprints would act as the local operator and, assuming the idea caught on, they would then continue to bring clients in, giving /Kaece and his people at Makuri a proper profit-share. Allan, the Footprints guy, talked about giving them as much as 60 per cent.

The following year, I found myself and a friend, Tom, driving hard for two days to rendezvous with Benjamin at Baraka, the Windhoek office of the Nyae Nyae Foundation having radioed him to say that we were coming. When we arrived at the remote, dusty field headquarters, a collection of outsize rondavels and workshops surrounded by an endlessness of dry wilderness, Benjamin seemed impressed that we had made it, and happy to see me. Sadly, he could not get away from his work in order to accompany us, as he had hoped, but he had arranged for three of Makuri’s best hunters to take us out: Bo, a fiftyish, stick-thin man; another in his mid-thirties called Fanzi; and Xau, a lad of eighteen or so who Bo was training as a hunter. Bo, said Benjamin, was known as the finest hunter in the whole district and Fanzi was not far off in skill. There would be a language barrier but, as Benjamin reassured us: ‘They will make sure you don’t die. Just follow them and you’ll be OK.’

It was the dry season again, and the bush was parched and waterless. Elephants had moved into the area, and were hanging around the waterholes that the villagers used. We had encountered a small group of them a quarter-mile or so from the big baobab when we bumped in down the slow dirt track. Elephant spoor was all round the house-sized tree. For this reason, as the stars came out and the temperature began to plummet towards zero, the three hunters told Benjamin that it would be best to hunt eastward, away from the waterholes. It was too dangerous to risk an encounter with the elephants on foot. As Benjamin translated this to me, a question formed in my mind. What about other dangerous game like lions? The previous year, Nigel, the wildlife officer in Tsumkwe, had told me that there were several prides in the area. How did the hunters propose to make sure we avoided them, and what should we do if we ran into one by chance?

‘You won’t,’ said Benjamin.

‘How do you know?’

‘The healers, doctors in the village, ask the lions where they are and then they tell the hunters not to go that way.’

‘What do you mean they ask the lions? How can they ask the lions?’

Benjamin looked down, appearing not to want to answer. Tom stirred the pot full of pasta and soya mince, looking on. At last Benjamin spoke, sounding uncomfortable. ‘Sometimes they can ask the lions.’

With that he turned back to the three hunters, veering the conversation away to talk about a number of kudu that had moved into the area between Makuri and Baraka. But the enigmatic words lingered, tantalisingly, in the night air. Healers that talked to lions.

The next day we followed the three hard, athletic men as they made several unsuccessful stalks at the kudu herd that were – just as they had predicted – browsing the bush east of Makuri. Then they abruptly changed spoor, and brought us, after another long walk, upon the corpse of a wildebeest. How had they known it was there? Had this been what we had been searching for all along – maybe a beast they had shot with a poison arrow the day before

(#ulink_6a89dd24-1431-5e7a-90db-0103badd8844)?

Fanzi, Bo and Xau walked straight up to the swollen, cow-sized carcass and, grabbing it by the horns and tail, wrestled its stiff, bloated form out into the open and onto its back. They stripped to the waist and produced small, home-made knives from their game bags. With a surgeon’s precision, Bo slit the belly, releasing a belch of rotting gas that made Tom and I gag even where we sat a few yards off. Out spilled yellow-white, reeking intestines heavy with dung, which Fanzi rolled away to one side. Then, using his knife, Bo severed the great muscles, tendons and ligaments of haunch and shoulder, rotating the four great joints so that they dislocated neatly and easily from their bright, white sockets. Fanzi, meanwhile, squeezed the dung from the intestines, and placed these, along with the large, feathery tripes, on the lower branches of a sapling, where they hung like a line of soiled laundry drying in the sun. Xau, equally busy, hefted the heavy joints away and placed them on the lower branches of a sturdy thorn, so that they should not be dirtied with sand.

Next came the liver. As soon as it had been cut out, the three men stopped work, made a quick fire by rubbing two sticks together on a wad of dry grass and, grinning and chatting happily, ate this, the hunter’s portion. Then, the liver consumed, the three hunters produced their hollowed-out bone and old rifle-shell pipes and we all settled down to a serious smoke.

Our small gift of tobacco had closed the gap between us a little. Until now the hunters had communicated with us only insofar as to occasionally look back and check we were still with them. At no point had any of them looked us in the eye. Now, after that first smoke, every few minutes, one of the three hunters would glance up from his bloody work and give us a shy smile. After half an hour, Xau looked up enquiringly and ran a reddened finger along the blade of his knife, followed by a dismissive gesture. Tom, quick to understand, grabbed his bag, rooted inside for a moment and handed over his own pen-knife. Snapping it open, Xau began to cut the flesh, hanging it next to the other meat on the branches in long, festive-looking red strips, letting them dry in the desiccated air. They blackened, shrivelled and shrank with incredible speed, the moisture in them evaporating almost as one watched.

The wildebeest had long ceased to be recognisable as an animal. Even the horned head, split open with little hand-axes like the ones that had adorned the walls of my parents’ London house, now lay in pieces, the brains and the tongue drying alongside the shredded muscles and organs. The hide had been left lying in the sun, little pools of blood in its folds attracting dainty blue butterflies who drifted down to drink. They flew upwards in a cloud as the three men grabbed the hide and cut it into strips and sections and fashioned it, ingeniously, into three knapsacks, sewn together with the stripped fibres of a dry, green reed-like plant (sansevieria) that grew nearby. The half-dried, much-reduced, meat strips were then stuffed into the newly made bags – the wildebeest would be taken back to Makuri in its own hide.

The haunches and forequarters, too heavy to carry back this time, were stashed in the spiky branches of a thorn tree, out of reach of predators and scavengers, to be collected later. Then Bo squatted down and made a small depression in the sand, filling it with two inches of water from my canteen. He washed the knives in it quickly, handing Tom’s back cleaner than it had been before. And after a quick rub-down with sand, the three men, up to their elbows in blood and dung for the past two hours, had shed all trace of their work. Shouldering the hide knapsacks and impaling the racks of ribs on their digging sticks, they set off, single file, on the trek home, leaving only a pile of dung, already drying into fibres, where the wildebeest had lain.

It was a long walk, and hot. The hunters stopped often to ease their shoulders from the weight and their faces from the flies that buzzed incessantly around the bloody loads. Tom and I offered tobacco and water around until both ran out. At the next stop Fanzi, pointing to a small, leafless twig poking up from the cracked earth, began hacking at the soil with his digging stick. A minute later he had unearthed a large, round tuber which, when cut, revealed white flesh dripping with water.

As we sat there, eating the succulent tuber, letting the moisture drip down our throats, there came a sharp, shrill cry from above. We looked up: two eagles were chasing a white goshawk out of their section of sky. Lighter and more agile, the goshawk spiralled up and out of reach into the dazzling blue, the heavier eagles flapping below in slow but unrelenting pursuit. We watched, silent, until all three had dwindled to mere dots, their fading, high-pitched cries floating down to where we sat on the dry earth. Bo, hefting his heavy, fly-blown load once more, creaked to his feet, and caught my eye. He smiled – his mouth turned down ironically at the corners – and pointed to himself, ‘Boesman,’ he said in Afrikaans, and shook his head, laughing.