The Lost World of the Kalahari Read Free

gracefully he would make one welcome. In fact, the oldest of the old Basutos once told me one could not do better than use the Bushman’s own greeting, raising one’s open right hand high above the head, and calling out in a loud voice: ‘ Tshjamm : Good day! I saw you looming up afar and I am dying of hunger.’ Europeans so often use a diminutive for that which they want to endear. But with the Bushman this mechanism is reversed. The pitiless destructive forces sent against him by fate seemed to mock his proportions until he sought perhaps to appease his sense of insecurity with a wishful vision of a physical superlative he has never possessed. So, in his rock-paintings the Bushman depicts himself in battle as a giant against other giants to such a degree that, were it not for his ‘ Qhwai-xkhwe ’, he would be hardly distinguishable from his towering enemies.
    But, I was told, this little man before all else was a hunter. He kept no cattle, sheep, or goats except in rare instances where he had been in prolonged contact with foreigners. He did not cultivate the land and therefore grew no food. Although everywhere his women and children dug the earth with their deft grubbing sticks for edible bulbs and roots and, in season, harvested veld and bush for berries and fruit, their lives and happiness depended mainly on the meat which he provided. He hunted in the first place with bow and arrow and spear. The heads of his arrows were dipped in a poison compounded from the grubs, roots, and glands of the reptiles of the land and he himself had such a respect for the properties of his own poison that he never went anywhere without the appropriate antidote in a little skin wallet tied securely to his person. My grandfather and aunt said that he was so natural a botanist and so expert an organic chemist that he used different poisons on different animals, the strongest for the eland and the lion, and less powerful variants for the smaller game. His arrows were made of flint or bone until he came to barter for iron with those about to become his enemies.
    As an archer he was without equal. My grandfather said he could hit a moving buck at 150 yards, adding that he would not have liked to expose any part of himself in battle to a Bushman archer under a hundred and fifty yards’ range. But he not only hunted with bow and arrow. In the rivers and streams he constructed traps beautifully woven out of reeds and buttressed with young karee wood or harde-kool (the ‘Hard-Coal’ wood my ancestors used in their nomadic smithy fires), and so caught basketfuls of our lovely golden bream, or fat olive-green barbel with its neck and huge head of bone and moustaches like those of ‘a soldier of the Victorian Queen’, Hongroise-pomaded point and all. The baskets at the end of the traps were like the eelbaskets of Europe but never so bleakly utilitarian. They were woven of alternate white and black plaits not because they were better that way but, my aunt said with great emphasis, because the Bushman wanted to make them pretty. Hard-by among the singing reeds he dug pits with a cunningly-covered spike in the centre in order to trap the nocturnal hippopotamus whose sweet lard meant more to him than foie-gras to any gourmet.
    When my grandfather first crossed the Orange River, or the Great River as the Bushman and we who were born close always called it, there were still many of those big game pits left. The trekkers, or covered-wagon pioneers of my people, kept patrols of horsemen scouting well ahead of the lumbering convoys to look out for these holes and, on a signal, someone would go to the front of the large span of oxen and lifting the lead rope from the horns of the two guide-oxen, march carefully at their head. My grandfather often said he wished he had a dollar for every mile he had led his span by the head through the veld. Once in very early childhood, on one of our spring hunting and fishing