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This was how the land claim had been conceived: the Xhomani were to demand the restoration of their hunting and gathering rights inside the park, as well as the right to visit ancestral graves there. In addition, they demanded that they be given land outside the park that they could live on. But then the problems started: not just opposition from the park, and from the local Mier farmers. The Xhomani were also having trouble being recognised as Bushmen. When they had been kicked out of the park back in the 1970s, Cait explained, they had had to obtain Pass Books – identification documents that defined people by race (all non-whites were required to have these). When the race officials in Upington, the nearest administration centre, had asked them what race they were, the Xhomani had said ‘Bushman’. Not possible, the officials had replied; there were no Bushmen left in South Africa. ‘So, they had to register as coloured, and it’s haunted them ever since. It’s one of the justifications that the parks people use for not letting them back in – they say that they aren’t real Bushmen and that therefore their claim can’t be legal.’
There was a further irony to this. By being registered as coloured the Xhomani had been lumped in with the Mier, the group that represented the largest obstacle to the Xhomani’s land claim after the National Parks Board. The Mier leader, said Cait, was a guy called Piet Smith, who was also the Nationalist Party MP for the region. According to Cait, he had stated that Bushmen would receive Mier land only over his dead body.
While Cait had been speaking, a young woman had come and joined our circle. A friend of Andrew’s, Belinda, we had met her briefly the night before, as we were driving in: Andrew had stopped the vehicle and introduced us. She had been on her way back from a visit to the Bushmen, she had told us, shaking hands through the car window. Andrew had told us a little about her, that she was the first coloured manager that the park had ever employed – an attempt by the Afrikaner parks management to embrace the New South Africa.
She took a seat next to me and I asked her if she had been spending much time with the Bushmen.
‘Not really, no. I only met them for the first time a few days ago. But what about you? What are you doing in the Kalahari?’
Taking a deep breath I told her. By the time I’d finished my story it was after midnight and Cait, Andrew and Chris had all sought their tents. Belinda stood up to go. ‘These Bushmen,’ she said, stretching. ‘I don’t know what it is. I came here for peace and quiet, and already I can see how political the whole thing is. Well, goodnight. Come and say howzit to me tomorrow when you’re back from the Bushmen – my house is just through the gate beyond the administration building. Anyone can show you the way. I’d like to know how it went.’
Next day we awoke to an oven-hot dawn, too stifling to linger in the tent or sleeping bag for more than a few moments. Outside, a white-hot sky presaged a day of pounding discomfort: perhaps building up for a rain.
Before driving out of the park to visit the Bushmen again, we took a pass along one of the dry riverbeds inside the National Park, the old Xhomani hunting ground. Now, at the parched, dead end of the dry season, only the drought-proof creatures were in evidence. Springbok – slender gazelles with short, lyre-shaped horns, a red-brown stripe on their flanks and huge, liquid eyes fringed with luxuriant black lashes that seemed heavily daubed with mascara – drifted along the roadside. From afar, their colours and delicate shapes blended perfectly with the yellow grasses and shimmering haze above the sand. Seen closer to they seemed to glide across the land, so fluid was their gait. Every now and then one of them would leap six feet into the air, arch its back so that the white hairs along its spine raised themselves like a crest, and touch all four hooves together before landing back on the ground. Known as ‘pronking’, this was apparently a response to predators – though we could not see any.
Alongside the springbok were smaller groups of more massive gemsbok, inelegant, gawky blue-black wildebeest and large, reddish-coloured hartebeest, all goggling brown eyes and crumpled, strangely foreshortened horns. They stood still in the heat, seemingly stunned by the hammering sun, not even foraging for the patches of yellow grass that stood here and there along the riverbeds. As we neared the park gate, we came upon a lone male wildebeest standing stock still at the edge of a flat, white piece of bare ground surrounding a small waterhole. Only his tail moved, flicking at the flies that buzzed around its hindquarters. Three lions lay at the waterhole – two lionesses and a young male just entering his prime. All three had coats bleached almost white by the fierce sun. Their eyes were fixed on the wildebeest, and his on them. The lions looked relaxed, but ready to spring into lethal action at any moment. The wildebeest could not move forward towards the water he needed, nor could he turn and go, in case the big cats pursued him; in his weakened, dehydrated state, he might not outrun them. The lions, lying just too far off for a successful sprint, also could not move, for that might trigger a flight that they in their turn might not outrun. So predators and prey waited, immobile, patient, the sun beating savagely upon them while the flies buzzed and bit. A contest of patience and endurance.
Back at the Red House, when we told Dawid what we had seen, he laughed, gestured towards the fences that surrounded the little settlement and shrugged. Next to him Ou Anna, his ancient, wrinkled aunt (and the late Regopstaan’s sister), chimed in: ‘Life here is still good. We have the sand, the sunshine. Sometimes the white people come and help us. But there in the park – that, that is life.’
Chris and I wanted to know if it would be possible to organise a hunting and gathering foray for the Xhomani, which we could perhaps film, maybe on one of the surrounding farms, which were still semi-wild. Cait said that there was an old coloured farmer some kilometres to the south who was known to be better disposed towards the Bushmen than others in the area and who sometimes allowed them on his land. She consulted Dawid, who said he thought the man might be persuaded, for a fee, to let them try their luck across his dunes. After a brief, shouted exchange with the rest of the clan, the senior men, Dawid and Jakob, along with Dawid’s youngest son Pien, a tautly muscled youth in his early twenties, squeezed themselves into the back of the Toyota, along with Sanna, Leana, Dawid’s daughter Oulet and assorted kids. The men brought bows and the women digging sticks and skin bags. The back of the vehicle was stifling hot, but everyone squashed themselves in cheerily, elated at the prospect of an unexpected outing, laughing and joking in rapid-fire Afrikaans and clicking Nama.
The farmer, who lived in a two-roomed concrete block cottage with a battered old car and donkey cart parked in the yard, turned out to be amenable: for two hundred rand, he said, Dawid and his people could spend the afternoon on his land, and catch or gather whatever they could find, as long as it wasn’t a sheep. We paid, then drove up into the dunes. Around us the veld had been reduced to bare sand. Goats and sheep had stripped every low-growing bush almost to the ground. Clumps of desiccated grass and leafless thorn clung to the few sheltered hollows between the dunes. Yet still there was life – from one of these hollows a small steenbok went skipping away in front of us to the accompaniment of shouts and howls from the back. Did Dawid want to stop and hunt, we asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Drive on.’
We sighted a shack standing by itself in the hot dunes; a strange, crumpled construction, consisting of a sawn-in-half truck supporting a large tent of woven grasses. Outside, in its scant shade, squatted two Mier shepherds: middle-aged, sun-shrivelled men with bodies lean and gnarled as biltong* inside loose-fitting blue overalls, battered felt hats pulled down over their eyes. They showed no surprise at our approach, nor when Dawid told us to stop and we pulled up outside their shack.
Getting out of the suffocating vehicle was sweet relief – though the outside air was hardly cool. The two shepherds greeted Dawid familiarly. He squatted down in the shade next to them, pulled his tobacco pouch from his little skin shoulder-bag, and rolled up a cigarette with a torn piece of newspaper, making a perfectly symmetrical, fat cone that he licked smooth with one long stroke of the tongue before lighting it from a match offered wordlessly by one of the shepherds. Then, as we whites hovered in the background, the three men began to talk, asking each other how they were, how their families were, how the sheep had been. Was there still grazing? Were jackals or leopards stealing the stock?
This was obviously going to take some time, so I drifted over to the shade of a small thorn tree where two gaunt, droop-headed horses, a grey and a dark bay, stood swishing and stamping at the flies. Above my head, hanging from one of the spiky branches, I suddenly noticed the freshly skinned body of a young goat, dead eyes staring from a peeled face down which dripped blood and clear fluid. It gave off the rich, sickly smell of meat left out too long in the sun. Flies crawled up and down it, clustering at the eyes and nostrils. I left the tree and wandered back towards Dawid and the two shepherds, who were still conversing quietly. Cait, Andrew and Chris had also gravitated towards the trio. It looked as though they had finished their smoke. Abruptly, Dawid got up, and bid a quick, curt good-bye.
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.’
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