The Last Train to Zona Verde Read online

  That was what compelled me to travel through a desiccated landscape from Tsumkwe to the Ju/’hoansi village on this very hot day.

  Some Ju/’hoansi men were drying and curing slashed hunks of meat — thicker than mere strips; great black sinewy belts of it — that looked more like old leather than flesh, turning it into the jerky known all over southern Africa as biltong. They had food and water on their minds.

  The settlement of shacks and shelters was up a narrow road of sand so soft and deep our vehicle plowed and butted it clumsily into heaps like a tipped-forward and wobbling wheelbarrow. We became stuck several times, the useless wheels scouring deeper ruts until the axles rested against the road. The sand was hot, too, as I found out when I knelt in it to push against the back bumper. I thought of walking the rest of the way to the settlement, but the driver, who was himself a town-dwelling Ju/’hoansi, and calm, urged me to be patient. After a while, the vehicle was plowing the sand again, and we swayed and slewed into the village.

  A dozen small people wearing skins and beads rushed to greet us, all smiles.

  But at the far side of the village, a group of five children, none older than ten or twelve, barefoot, dressed in conventional clothes, were sorting an array of plastic buckets and tin basins. In Tsumkwe, most children of that age, many of them Ju/’hoansi, would have been in school this morning, in blue-and-white uniforms, wearing shoes, scribbling in copybooks.

  “They are going for water,” one of the men said through an interpreter, whose name was John.

  As he spoke, the children shouldered their containers and set off through the low thornbush. I noticed that the man who had spoken was dressed in a traditional leather breechclout, called a chuana, and handsewn leather sandals, and that he carried a wooden staff. The water-seeking Ju/’hoansi children wore castoff Western clothes that are found all over sub-Saharan Africa. The boys had on torn shirts and shorts, the two small girls pink and blue dresses. Far from seeming like hunter-gatherers, they looked like urchins in any rural African village. And like most African urchins they were skinny and overworked.

  “Where’s the water — is there a creek nearby?” I asked.

  “No water! The children are going two kilometers for water!” I could see grievance on the man’s face as he spoke in his language. “The government promised us a water pipe three years ago, but it hasn’t come.”

  The drought had lasted for years. Weather was often blamed for Africa’s troubles, but “what is the use of ascribing any catastrophe to nature?” Rebecca West asked herself in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and answered, “Nearly always man’s inherent malignity comes in and uses the opportunities it offers to create a graver catastrophe.”

  Chickens were pecking in the sand near us, and a little distance away a crudely made shed looked more substantial than the shelters of tree branches and thatch I had seen in the black-and-white photo plates in anthropology books. This was not a seasonal camp but seemed more like a permanent settlement, and to say it was a poor one was an understatement.

  I asked about the belts of meat blackening in the sun, about thirty pounds of it draped on a wooden rack.

  “It is elephant meat.”

  “You killed an elephant? Tell me how.”

  This made the Ju/’hoansi man laugh. “No, no,” he said. “We don’t kill elephants.”

  “Where did the meat come from?”

  “From a trophy hunter.”

  “A Ju/’hoansi man?” I knew it could not have been. No village hunter anywhere here was interested in killing an elephant or a lion or a buffalo as a trophy. “Who was it?”

  “Hunter!”

  “From where?”

  “White man!”

  I wanted to know the word he’d used. It was !hû — white person. Trying it out, I said I was a !hû, and they agreed, yes, but I was also a ju-s-a-!gaa — a red man, and they confirmed what Lorna Marshall had discovered and explained, that black Africans are called ju-s-a-djo — black people.

  “And what are you — red or black or white?”

  “We are Ju/’hoansi!” And he gave the name the emphasis of its true aboriginal meaning: We are Real People!

  “Was this a big elephant?”

  “Very big,” the man said, flinging his arms out, “with big tusks.”

  “Why don’t the trophy hunters kill small, weak elephants?” I asked, another leading question — but he knew I was testing him.

  “The big one with tusks is the only elephant they want.”

  As the Ju/’hoansi man led me around the compound, the interpreter and some women followed us. The women, young and old, also wearing animal skins and shell and ostrich egg beads as ornaments, were bare-breasted, and one carried a child in a sling.

  “Look, Mr. Paul,” John, the interpreter, said — and by the way, this dapper Ju/’hoansi man was wearing a T-shirt, sunglasses, and blue jeans, with sturdy shoes on his feet. As he walked he jingled his car keys, which were chained to a plastic tag. “He wants to show you this hook.”

  The Ju/’hoansi man in the leather clout snatched a pole resting against a stump. A long stiff wire was attached to one end of the pole and a wicked-looking hook to the other end. Shaking it, thrusting it, he explained how it was used to capture any small animal that had retreated into a hole in the ground. The hook was pushed into the hole — sometimes to its entire length, which was seven or eight feet — until the animal was spiked and yanked out bleeding.

  “What animal are you after?”

  “The springhare.”

  “Are there many here?”

  “No. Just a few.” The man looked downcast, and I had the impression there were no springhares at all to catch, because the pole looked lethal but unused — no blood on the hook—perhaps just a curiosity to show to a credulous visitor like me.

  Jingling his keys again, John said, “Mr. Paul, you want to go for a bush walk?”

  “Not now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  I had seen an old man standing in the shade of a tree, holding a sturdy, well-strung bow. He wore an apron of animal skin and had been watching us making the rounds of the drying meat and the weapons. He was slight but sinewy, as they all were. I was attracted by his stance — not leaning against the tree but standing lightly on his feet under its boughs, dappled by the filtered sunlight, just staring at us, unmoving, as though we were no more than unheeding animals, browsing in his compound.

  “I want to talk to him,” I said.

  I am making this sound sober and deliberate, and there might be an unintentional note of ponderous solemnity in these descriptions. It was a very hot morning, over a hundred degrees once again. I was writing notes and asking questions at the same time, and all the while tramping through the sand. This seems to have all the bitter ingredients of a hard day. But it was not hard at all. I was happy.

  I was happier than I could remember being when so far from home. Happiness had removed all obstacles. I hardly noticed the heat, I was excited, I wasn’t hungry. The fulfillment of an old dream can be that way if the reality matches the dream. Some people who have dreamed of the pyramids and finally manage to travel to Giza are disappointed at the sight of them. “I hadn’t realized they were so small,” a man once said to me in Egypt, because the pyramids had towered in his imagination. But most people are blown away by their first sight of the Grand Canyon; their first experience of the Balinese Monkey Dance, the Ketjak; their first glimpse of a breaching humpback whale. That was how I felt. Being among these people exceeded my dream. And maybe happiness is the wrong word; perhaps what I felt was bliss bordering on rapture.

  “Please ask that man if I can speak to him.”

  When the man was asked, he didn’t change his posture or his expression, nor did he blink, and I was afraid the answer would be no.

  “He will speak to you.”

  A stranger, whether black or white, among these people was called ju dole — a bad or harmful person. “The strange is potentially harmful in !Kung thin
king,” wrote Lorna Marshall. Strange places, strange people, and strange situations make the Ju/’hoansi apprehensive. Yet as a peaceable people they have ways of dealing with the alien and the odd. First they put down their weapons before greeting a stranger, because they believe that approaching someone while armed might provoke trouble. They are polite even toward a person who is obnoxiously ju dole; they maintain restraint, modesty, and deference.

  So the old man, observing the ritual courtesies of his people, could not reasonably refuse to talk to me, although he had kept himself away from the eager group that had welcomed me, and looked wary and oblique as I approached him.

  He was a ju n!a, an old person, and this expression, like mzee in Swahili and bambo in Chichewa, is a term of respect, meaning “elder” or “father.” The elderly in Africa, men more than women, are generally accorded a special status — age demands deference. But the age of a person who has lived a hard life is always difficult to reckon; an elder in such a society might be no more than forty or fifty. I had the impression that this man was much older than that, and that he might be willing to share kukummi — talk, stories, history.

  His name was Dambó. He did not know how old he was. John translated for me.

  “Seventy or eighty,” Dambó said, and admitted he was guessing. This excited me further. If he was seventy, he would have been nine in 1950, the year the Marshalls first came and found the culture intact, unviolated. He might have memories of the old ways.

  “Did the Christian missionaries come here?”

  “Yes,” Dambó said, “long ago. I was myself a Christian for a while.” He shrugged as he spoke. “But I gave it up.”

  “What about the mantis. Do you believe in the power of the mantis?”

  I asked because the green praying mantis is one of the dominant creatures in the stories collected by Bleek and Lloyd; the mantis is a supernatural being, called /Kaggen, who was a creator and, through the dazzle of his dreams, a bringer of fire and tools. The mantis was also creator of the /Xam people, the group to which Bleek’s convict informants belonged, and this creator was not always an insect but sometimes an old man. Nothing in the /Xam or Ju/’hoansi (to whom the /Xam are related) mythology is simple. In this it resembles many of the world’s mythologies, full of transformation, where animals become people or cohabit with them. In Hindu mythology, a deity might give birth to an elephant, as in the case of Ganesh, the four-armed, one-tusked, elephant-headed god whose mother is the voluptuous Parvati (but even that is not the whole story). And the Ju/’hoansi believe, as do many other peoples on earth, that humans were once animals, and still retain the characteristics of wild creatures. And the other way around: certain animals can be tricky and selfish like humans, because their ancestors were human.

  “The beasts of prey were once people,” a Bushman told Lucy Lloyd, and she entered this in a notebook, which remained in the archives until Neil Bennun transcribed and published it. The rest of the fragment Bennun found is tantalizing. “[The people] became beasts of prey because of the Lynx and the Anteater — they were the ones responsible. They cursed each other because of the little Springbok’s doings. They cursed each other.

  “All things were once people.”

  The Anteater made laws that ended immortality for most creatures, but not /Kaggen (the mantis), who survived as a hero, a trickster, and a shape-shifter, because /Kaggen was immortal.

  “Yes, I know this mantis,” Dambó said. He called it by its Ju/’hoansi name, G//auan — the “//” sound was the giddyup click.

  “Please tell me about the mantis,” I asked, through John.

  “It is a devil,” Dambó said. “It brings illness.”

  “But is it always bad?”

  “It is strong. It knows everything.”

  “It’s just a small insect,” I said, in the way I might bait a Hindu by saying that Ganesh was just a jolly elephant with one tusk who often rode or danced on a mouse.

  “The mantis can kill anything,” Dambó said.

  “You could kill it if you wanted to, with that stick,” I said, because in addition to his bow, Dambó had a short staff jammed into his woven belt, and the thing had a thickened top like the knobkerries that Zulus and Boers used for whacking people on the head.

  “If you kill the mantis, you will be in trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “You will get sick. You will die.”

  This was interesting, because here we were in the bush, where wildebeest, warthogs, jackals, and hyenas were common, and lions and cheetahs, though rarer, might turn up too, not to mention the snakes that thrived in this hot desert: the mamba, the python, the puff adder. A hyena had prowled around the Ju/’hoansi shelters the previous night, probably attracted by the hanging elephant meat. But the fragile-looking praying mantis was feared more than any of these.

  “Do the young people here know about the mantis?”

  “The young people here don’t know anything of this,” Dambó said.

  Some of the youths were watching us talk, and five women sat apart from them, the youngest a shy, elfin-faced girl of sixteen or so, the others much older, one of them a crone and partially blind. Another young woman joined them, and this one carried a dazed infant in a sling.

  Dambó, too, had poor vision — pale, clotted, unfocused eyes that were glazed and weepy. His skin was smooth and lined like glove leather. His narrow twisted mustache gave him a look of almost dandified elegance.

  “Have you traveled far from here?” I asked.

  “I went to Windhoek once,” he said, and when I prodded him he added, “Some years ago.”

  He was as vague about the time he’d been there as he was about his age. The Ju/’hoansi observe the seasons but not the years — and only the recent dry or rainy seasons. Years have no meaning, history has no meaning; the past is simply gone and largely unremembered.

  “What did you think when you saw Windhoek?”

  “I liked it. It was very good. It was so big.”

  “What did you like most about the city?”

  “The best part” — and for the first time in this little talk he smiled and showed his small darkened teeth — “you don’t have to worry about getting food. There is plenty of food.” He continued smiling at the memory of meals in distant Windhoek. “There is everything to eat.”

  I asked for details — how and why he had made the long trip — but he was unforthcoming. I had the impression that it might have been political. He was ju n!a, an elder, and since elders were held in high esteem, his visit might have been part of a government initiative. In spite of the fact that the Ju/’hoansi were marginalized, advocates for their development worked in affirmative action programs, put in place by Namibia’s first prime minister, Sam Nujoma, who had taken an interest in uplifting the Ju/’hoansi after independence. Delegations from rural villages made numerous visits to the capital; Dambó might have been a member of one of these groups, reporting a grievance, offering testimony, or giving an opinion. Such a group would be comfortably housed and well fed. But all that was in the past. Windhoek for him was a place where no one went hungry, unlike here, where finding food was always difficult.

  Then he volunteered another memory, that among his travels, as a small boy he had been to Rundu. This town, due north, on the Namibia-Angola border, was several hundred miles away, and there was no direct road, only a bush track through the semidesert and the wilderness of Kaudom, now a remote game park.

  “We went on foot and by truck,” he said, and I worked out that “small boy” meant he might have been eight or nine. It could have been 1950 or earlier, when, as all the anthropologists testified, the foraging and hunting culture had been intact, the people ignored, unchanged, still following the old ways.

  “Dambó, what do you remember of Rundu?”

  “I saw a white man.”

  I seemed to hear the word !hû. I verified this and asked him why he used this particular word and not the one for red man, which
I thought was interchangeable.

  He said, “He was white like you. We call you white because your skin is white.”

  “You were a small boy then. Had you seen a white man before that?”

  “Never.”

  “What did you think when you saw the man?”

  “I was with my father. My father took me to Rundu. He explained everything to me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “My father said, ‘The white people are the people you have to work for.’ ”

  Forced labor, amounting to blackbirding, was common as late as the 1960s, with many instances of white Afrikaner farmers raiding Ju/’hoansi settlements and forcing the men into their trucks to work their farms, keeping them in harsh servitude, if not semi-slavery, as harshly treated farm workers. By putting pressure on the Pretoria government, Laurence Marshall helped put a stop to this brutal practice.

  “When your father said that you had to work for them, how did you feel?”

  “We were afraid of the white people.”

  “Were you afraid because they would force you onto their farms?”

  He thought hard before he answered, and finally said, “They were not good people for us.”

  “Did you think the white people might hurt you?”

  “We thought, ‘They will kill us.’ ” His face was grayish in the shadows, and he gazed into the middle distance with his glazed and clotted eyes. He said, “Herero people were also killing San people.”

  Also true. The animosity had a long history, certainly since pre-colonial times and probably much further back. Early-nineteenth-century explorers had described the pitched battles between the two peoples. As the Herero had been pastoral and the San hunter-gatherers, the two modes of life inevitably came into conflict. The Herero driving their cattle before them had encroached on traditional Bushman lands, and the intrusion had resulted in submission, exploitation, and bloodshed.

  “Are the Herero your enemies now?”

  “No. We have no enemies now.”

  “Everything’s peaceful?”