A Million Years with You (7 page)

The baby seemed so young that I wondered if he was born at /Gam. In my limited Afrikaans I tried to ask. Like me, Kavasitjue didn't have enough Afrikaans to express herself clearly, but I believe she said he was born on the way to /Gam. That must have been fun, I thought but couldn't say, bearing your first child in the back of beyond with no woman to help you.

We then tried to talk about earrings. Hers were made of small beads. Mine were safety pins which I used to keep the pierced holes in my ears from closing. In my stumbling Afrikaans I tried to explain the safety pins, which wasn't easy, but Kavasitjue understood. She knew about ear holes closing.

Over the next few days our friendship blossomed. We had many a confusing conversation. She let me hold the baby. He was a joyous little guy—we laughed with him and with each other. I believe that thirty years later he became one of the owners of /Gam when, after Namibian independence, the vast Bushman lands were split up among white farmers, Bantu pastoralists, and World Wildlife, which took a large section for a tourist hotel and game reserve. /Gam was given to the Hereros. Herero people trace their lineage through their mothers, so because Kavasitjue was Herero, her son was also Herero, and thus may have been a good candidate for ownership. If any non-Bushman was to have /Gam, I hope he got it.

 

After we had been at /Gam for a while, I was given the name Kothonjoro. Such names often describe a personal characteristic, and I think mine means “one who laughs.” I believe that Kavasitjue gave me the name, but it was Philip who explained it to me. The reason I laughed—hence the reason for the name—was to hide that my heart was sad.

I was astonished. Kavasitjue had seen right through me. Without my boyfriend I was often plagued by sorrow, which I tried to hide by doing my best as a comic. The very last thing I'd expected to find in this unending wilderness was insight into my psyche from a brief acquaintance with a woman from a different culture whose mother tongue was Otjiherero. But it has since become my impression that many Bantu people, and also many other African people, are substantially more sensitive, perceptive, and intuitive than Western people, and thus are our superiors in almost every social exercise. So I treasured the name Kothonjoro, and kept it in my much happier heart.

 

The Bushmen at /Gam were Ju/wasi, one of the five groups of Bushmen in southern Africa, each of which speaks a somewhat different language. In !Kung, the language of the Ju/wasi,
ju
means person,
si
makes it plural, and
/wa
(sometimes spelled
h/oan
, but it sounds like
/wa
) means pure, as water is pure if nothing bad is in it. By this concept, a person is pure if he isn't carrying a weapon. For the first book I wrote, I translated
/wa
as
harmless
and used it in the title,
The Harmless People
.

White people did not meet that description, so everyone was wary of them with good reason, and the Ju/wasi at /Gam were wary of us. Even so, they were willing to talk with us, and from them we learned that /Gam had been their place, which is called a
n!ore
.
⁴
A
n!ore
is where a person has the right to live. We had been told (but didn't believe) that Bushmen were nomads, wandering here and there in search of food. We knew this was sure to be wrong, but we were later to learn how very wrong, as almost every Ju/wa person we came to know had a
n!ore
and virtually every
n!ore
was a source of water. Its owners spent the dry season there, just as the Ju/wasi at /Gam were doing.

In the area we were soon to study, an area of some six thousand square miles called Nyae Nyae, there were seven permanent and eight semipermanent water sources, each of which was the
n!ore
of a group of people. /Gam was the most important.

 

We stayed there for while, interviewing the Ju/wasi about various subjects, including places where we could find people living in the Old Way without interruption. Because any wilderness environment, particularly one as specialized as the Kalahari, is altered by domestic animals and plants, human life that is closely tied to the environment can be altered along with it. This could make a difference to hunter-gatherer activity. But how would we know? My dad decided that we must go deeper into the interior to look for people still living completely in the Old Way, a way that did not include domestic plants and animals, and we asked the Ju/wasi at /Gam to help us find them.

Perhaps two thousand such people lived in that vast interior, most of whom we came to know as our work there developed, but we might have met none of them had not a man named /Kwi and his wife, //Kushe, walked into our camp in single file one evening, /Kwi leading. They were barefoot and were dressed in purely Bushman clothing—/Kwi with a leather loincloth, //Kushe with a leather front apron, a leather back apron, a long string of beads made of ostrich eggshell, and a leather cape with the corners tied across her chest and a sinew string tied around her waist. This formed a pouch at her back where her baby could ride, but that day he was riding on his father's shoulders. He was a little boy named /Gao. As a necklace he wore a long sinew string, on which hung a single bead.

/Kwi and //Kushe sat on their heels by our fire. Through our interpreters, /Kwi told us that his wife no longer wanted to live at /Gam. She wanted to return to her
n!ore
, the place she came from, and if we wanted to go there, they would show us the way.

We accepted the offer. The next day we took down our camp, topped off the water in our fifty-gallon drums thanks to the generosity of the Tswanas, and made our grateful farewells. I was sad to leave Kavasitjue, and gave her two gifts, which, as I recall, were a scarf and a blanket. She started to thank me, then folded the gifts in her arms and said, “Too much thanks is like a curse. I sit here with my delights.” Then we got in the trucks and headed for that next place, //Kushe's place, which, we were later to learn, was Gautscha.

 

The trip wasn't easy, certainly not for /Kwi or //Kushe, who until we came had never seen a vehicle, let alone ridden in one. The trucks lurched and bounced as usual, and thornbushes crashed against their sides. //Kushe wanted to get out and walk, but our Bushman guides persuaded her not to. As I remember that journey, I think this was when the leading truck went over an aardvark's burrow of which there was no outward sign. The driver couldn't see it and the truck fell through. The crash broke a spring. I was concerned about the aardvark, but luckily for him, he wasn't in his burrow. We had to replace the broken spring, so we camped, and drove for most of the next day until /Kwi told us we were there.

5

G
AUTSCHA WAS AN ENORMOUS
clay pan of perhaps three hundred acres—a white, seasonal lake from which the rainwater had evaporated. On its eastern side were three baobab trees in full leaf, the biggest of them a hundred feet tall, thirty feet in diameter, and easily two thousand years old. On the northern and western sides of the pan, bushes and long, pale grass stretched to the horizon. We arrived at the southern side of the pan, and right in front of us was green grass, conspicuous among the miles of yellow grass. The grass was green because it grew beside the water hole.

 

/Kwi and //Kushe got out of the trucks and walked off into the bush. The two Bushman guides from Fritz Metzger's farm looked around uneasily. They were not Ju/wasi but belonged to another group entirely, and they were not sure how people so deep in the interior, so mindful of all the old customs, would receive them. The reason for this was demonstrated years later by an anthropologist named Polly Wiessner, who showed arrows made by one group of Bushmen to Bushmen of another group. They were not at all pleased by the sight, and said they'd be upset if they found such arrows on their land, as it would show that people of another group had been intruding. In those days, Bushmen were of necessity territorial, and the Bushmen from the farm were not sure of their welcome.

Nor were we, especially when no one seemed to be there. Some unseasonal rain had fallen, so we wondered if the people were off in the veldt, finding water in hollow trees. We waited for several hours, and thought of moving on to look for people elsewhere. But then two men came walking toward us. We told them our names and they told us theirs, which were /Gao and ≠Toma. We explained our presence, saying that we came in peace and wanted only to meet them. They listened. We asked their permission to camp and drink the water. They gave us permission. Then they showed us their encampment—a group of small, dome-shaped shelters made of branches thatched with grass, back in the bush in a grove of trees about two hundred feet from the water hole. We pitched our camp nearby. As we did this, the people came out of the bush a few at a time and went to their encampment.

That night, when we were at our fire and the Ju/wasi were at theirs, we heard them talking about us in soft voices. As we learned later, a young boy was telling the other people that our trucks sounded like lions roaring, but not ordinary lions. This had frightened him, he said. The moon rose out of the grass on the horizon and the people with us went to sleep. But beyond us, by their evening fires, the Ju/wasi kept on talking.

 

I try to imagine the courage of /Gao and ≠Toma at that first meeting. The Ju/wasi had no chiefs or headmen, but if we had been gorillas, these men would have been the silverbacks. About twenty-five people lived at Gautscha at the time, and all but these two men had hidden in the bush when they heard our vehicles. The two men must have been unsure, yet when they came to meet us, they left their weapons behind. Those people didn't call themselves Ju/wasi for nothing, and it was considered bad manners, and inflammatory too, to meet newcomers while carrying weapons. Most of the people encamped there had never seen white people or vehicles, but they certainly had heard about us, and what they had heard was both accurate and frightening, so it must have taken courage to approach us unarmed.

I was later to learn that Bushman men did not consider themselves to be courageous. Or, to put it differently, what seems courageous to us seemed normal to them. They did such things as hunt Cape buffalo weighing 1,500 pounds, using a small bow with a twenty-five-pound pull that shot a six-inch poisoned arrow. Cape buffalo are the world's most dangerous game, and are not at all compromised by a Bushman arrow, or not right away, as the poison takes several days to work. Hunting Cape buffalo with little poisoned arrows is not safe, but Bushmen did it anyway. A westerner hunts Cape buffalo with at least a .458-caliber rifle (the bullet is about four inches long) and considers himself to be the utmost in machismo and valor.

Bushman men didn't consider themselves brave or macho even when they drove off prowling lions, which they did without weapons, just by talking to them respectfully and showing them burning branches. And when white strangers appeared in roaring trucks, which these people had never seen or heard before, their men came out to deal with us too, appearing to be calm even though they might reasonably have thought we were dangerous. It was very much the Old Way.

 

Gautscha
means “place of buffalo.” But buffalo didn't live there and probably hadn't for about eight thousand years. True, they sometimes came during the rainy season, at which time the Ju/wa men hunted them, but Cape buffalo are not like the Kalahari antelopes and must live where they can find surface water and plenty of grazing. Gautscha had not met that description since a long-ago wet period when several huge prehistoric rivers—leaving riverbeds known as omarambas—drained into the Okavango River. These omarambas were perhaps forty miles west of Gautscha and had been dry for thousands of years.

So I believe that the name Gautscha was as prehistoric as the omarambas. We have places like that too, if not as ancient. Every town named Newton, for example, is now an old town, but the name will remain as long as people live there, which probably will not be as long as people had lived at Gautscha.

So if Gautscha is an ancient name, it's no wonder. As has been said, archaeologists were later to find encampments by seasonal lakes that had been occupied continuously since the Paleolithic. My family was to make many expeditions to Nyae Nyae, three of which I accompanied, always visiting Gautscha and the people we knew best, and at one point a young archaeologist came with us and found small stone tools scattered around the edge of the dry lakebed. He identified these tools as from the Wilton culture, which meant they had been lying there for perhaps six thousand years. The Ju/wasi knew about the stone tools but did not know who made them. Unfortunately the archaeologist stopped his investigation at the surface, so no one knows what might be underground. Other archaeologists investigated other long-occupied encampments, but not the one at Gautscha.

The Ju/wasi used a few stone tools but by then were making their arrow points of bone, which is more easily worked. However, after the Bantu migration from West Africa about five hundred years ago, when Bantu people settled around the edges of the Kalahari Basin (but, because of lack of water, not in the area of 250,000 square miles that attracted my father), the Ju/wasi and other Bushman groups began to trade items such as jackal skins for metal, then passed the metal around among themselves. They cold-hammered wire into arrowheads and sharpened small pieces of metal to make knives.

It might take a year for a piece of wire to travel from the early Bantu settlements into Gautscha, as we later learned. During our first expedition, my mom gave every woman enough cowrie shells to make a necklace. Before that, cowrie shells were unknown in the interior, but when we returned about eight months later, they were spread all over Nyae Nyae, the six-thousand-square-mile area we were investigating, owing to the fact that the Bushmen exchanged gifts. The population density of Nyae Nyae could be described as sparse—one person for every ten square miles—but even so, those shells had traveled.