Rupert Isaacson - The Healing Land - A Kalahari Journey

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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