|
Kalahari
The Kalahari: a vast, dry grassland that stretches over large portions
of five countries within Southern Africa - Botswana, Namibia, South Africa,
Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola. Though often referred to as a desert, its
reserves of underground water allow for a fully vegetated landscape that
supports (in its natural state) large populations of wild game. Predominantly
flat, like the great Central Asian Steppe, the Kalahari is all about space and
silence, heat and distance. To visit it is to be utterly immersed in the wild.
In recent years, however, the drilling of deep water boreholes, and the
discovery of rich diamond deposits have opened up this previously little
explored region. Cattle ranching and mining have displaced both the wildlife
and the people who traditionally relied upon those animals for survival. The
Kalahari, always a harsh place to live, has become a theatre of human
suffering.
The Bushmen:
also known as KhoiSan, Basarwa or San. These people are the original
inhabitants of the Kalahari, indeed of Southern Africa. A race apart, they are
small of stature and golden-skinned with an oriental cast to their features
which prompted some early Portuguese explorers who encountered them to think
that they had arrived in China. Their languages are distinctive - containing
at least six vocal 'clicks', which punctuate the speech like rapid machine-gun
fire. Traditionally, they are hunter-gatherers. Unlike most other African (and
European) peoples, the Bushmen have no warrior tradition and no stratified
leadership. Healing, especially through the trance dance, lies at the centre
of their culture. Today, people of Bushman or KhoiSan descent often refer to
themselves as the 'First People.' This is based on fact: Black African (Bantu-speaking)
peoples did not arrive in Southern Africa until around the beginning of the
1st century Ad. Europeans did not arrive until the mid-17th century, and did
not penetrate the Kalahari until the 19th. The Bushmen, however, used to be
ubiquitous: cave paintings dating back to around 20-30,000 years have been
found right across the sub-continent. A steady process of dispossession and
genocide resulted after the first cattle-owning, warrior peoples showed up,
and this kept going until by the early 1900s Bushmen were confined to the
Kalahari area - where farming and herding were impracticable. That changed
with the advent of diamonds and deep-water borehole technology. We are now
witnessing the final stages of this slow genocide of Bushmen at the hands of
more aggressive, livestock-owning peoples.
If they go, we lose something very precious: I already stated that Bushman
rock paintings date back as far as 30,000 years. A growing number of
archeologists and paleantologists now feel that the Bushmen have been in
Southern Africa for at least 100,000 years. Some even feel that the Kalahari
fringe may be the real cradle of mankind - and East Africa (the place that has
hitherto held that title) may represent an evolutionary dead end. This is
backed up by a recent belief among some geneticists that all human beings
share a common DNA that can be traced back to a !Kung woman who live somewhere
in the Kalahari region around 50,000 years ago. Whatever the truth of these
theories, it is clear that the Bushmen and their non-violent, healing-based
culture, represents an authentic blueprint of a better kind of human life,
which we are now in danger of losing forever.
The Kalahari
and Me
I never meant to
get into this healing thing. When I began researching the book which ended up
being called The Healing Land, I thought I was going to write a very different
kind of work. It was going to be a journalistic report; I was going to find
the last clans of Bushman (or KhoiSan, to be politically correct)
hunter-gatherers still living the the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. I
was going to spend time with them, experience their culture, and at the same
time report on the human-rights abuses (land loss, rape, genocide, you name it…)
that they have been suffering since time immemorial, and their fledgling
attempts, in the form of political organizations and land claims, to right
these wrongs.
Instead, I got
hijacked by a man called Dawid Kruiper, traditional leader of the Xhomani
Bushmen - who led me little by little down the healing, frankly magical path I
have followed ever since. Although The Healing Land (Dawid's title, not mine)
does stay true to its original journalistic objective (it tells the story of
the Xhomani land claim in South Africa, the eviction of Bushmen from
Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve by their government, and the struggle
for autonomy among Namibia's Bushman clans), it became far more a book about
healing.
At the centre of
Bushman or KhoiSan culture is a concept called N/um (put a small click where
the / is). The word can mean power, wisdom, healing, strength, or any
combination of these words. It is also used - among clans scattered right
across the vast Kalahari - to mean the healing energy activated during the
trance, or healing dance. As old Dawid once told me: "We can lose the
land, the game, the wild foods even - but if we lose the dance, then we
disappear." And despite their ongoing persecution at the hands of both
black and white colonial Africans, this healing ability, this N/um, has often
given the Bushmen a value that has saved them from outright extinction.
Aggressive cattle-owning tribes such as the Batswana, Herero and Bakgalagadi,
as well as white ranchers, have taken the Bushman hunting grounds for their
livestock, their women as concubines, their children as slaves, and their men
as serfs - yet as one female healer from Botswana once laughingly told me:
"It is us they come to see if they are sick, in love, or cannot have a
baby."
But what was I
doing in the Kalahari? Why was I exploring the Bushman reality, past and
present? Old Dawid asked me this question one night on the dunes in South
Africa's Kalahari Gemsbok National Park - an area that until the early 1970s
had been his ancestral home, before he and his people were kicked out to make
way for tourists. So I told him about my odd background: born to Southern
African parents in London and brought up on a fund of stories about the place
we came from, that we had left behind - stories that included an elusive,
golden-skinned people who - my mother said - lived by hunting and never made
war and sang to the stars. The stories had resonated deep. "Ah",
said Dawid, holding up his hand. "So the mother had the vision before the
son…" The following morning he made me promise to bring her out to the
Kalahari, to be present at a trance dance, to be conducted by a particularly
powerful healer called Besa, in which Dawid would try to regain his own
healing strength, lost through years of alcohol abuse and despair. This
strength, he said, he needed if he was to see his clan - themselves riddled
with the same weaknesses - through the process of reclaiming their lost land.
What followed is
told in the book. The point of this website is not to retell the story but to
take those interested in knowing more a little deeper. There are stories
which I did not tell in The Healing Land, fearing that I was already
stretching the credulity of Western readers far enough, and that to include
every magical happening, every incident of healing, might come across as too
'New Agey", and therefore undermine the story, which would ultimately do
the Bushmen a disservice and in turn undermine their own struggle for
recognition both as healers and as people with basic human rights.
There are also links
to other informative works about the Bushmen and the Kalahari, to the websites
of the human rights NGOs (non government organizations) that are currently
campaigning on their behalf, a regularly updated news page on the political
situation in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, as well as news of old Dawid
and the rest of the Khomani clan. Finally there are also links to healing
organizations and practices which offer a chance to experience something,
within the Western framework, of what the Bushmen have been practicing since
time began.
I hope you enjoy
it.
Rupert
Isaacson, author of The Healing Land
http://www.thehealingland.com/kalahari.htm
|