The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson

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.’