The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey

Driving away, Cait leaned back to shout through the glass partition – why had we stopped there? Dawid replied angrily, then spat. ‘He says he wanted to buy a sheep or a goat from them,’ translated Cait. ‘But they were asking too much. He’s annoyed, says the coloureds always try and rob the Bushmen.’ So this was no hunt, but a shopping expedition. If the National Park management were claiming that the Xhomani were no longer ‘real Bushmen’, that they had lost their ancient skills and their place in the Kalahari’s delicate ecological balance, Dawid seemed to be proving them right. When he next asked Andrew to stop the vehicle – by a particularly large dune – it was again neither to hunt nor gather but just to have another smoke. This time all the men and women – looking Bushmanlike enough with their xais, bare torsos and bows carried over the shoulder in the traditional way – climbed the dune, obviously relieved to be out of the truck, and sat up on the ridge, where there was a breeze, rolling newspaper zols (joints) and chatting quietly, completely ignoring us and seemingly impervious to the searing sun.

We got out of the car too. Cait caught my sour expression and smiled wryly: ‘There’s always another agenda with the Bushmen. It always happens like this – you arrange to do something and then the next thing you know you’re driving up and down the road giving this person a lift, waiting while that person goes off to buy some dope, then going back to pick up somebody else’s stuff and take it to some other place, until eventually you forget what it was you originally set out to do. They don’t often get a chance to be driven around, so when it comes they make the most of it. We’re just the taxi drivers. They tell you whatever you want to hear, then take total advantage.’