* Thanks to Brian Thomas Swimme and Thomas Berry for their inspirational framing of “The Universe Story” and for this more fitting alternative term to “the Big Bang.”
* There is no single satisfactory name for the indigenous click-language-speaking hunter-gatherers of southern Africa. Each tribe names itself in a different but closely related language. Outsiders have called them variously “Bushmen,” “San,” “Khoisan,” and “Baswara,” but there is no Bushman term for all the tribes taken collectively. While scholars favor the composite “Khoisan,” surviving groups in Namibia and Botswana tend to use the term “Bushmen,” in the way that “black” has been appropriated with pride in the United States. In this book, I use “San” and “Bushmen” interchangeably.
** For the genetic, linguistic, geographic, and archaeological evidence for this, see chapters 5 and 6.
“But how do you know when a path has no heart, don Juan?”
“Before you embark on it you ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path.”
“But how will I know for sure whether a path has a heart or not?”
“Anybody would know that. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.”
— CARLOS CASTAñEDA, The Teachings of Don Juan
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. ELIOT, Four Quarters, “Little Gidding”
The truth of the quest is not a true doctrine resulting from an intentionalist investigation of objects, but a balanced state of existence… [formed in the process of the quest].
— ERIC VOEGELIN, In Search of Order
The Journey Home
My search for a way forward took me back to beginnings — my birthplace and the likely birthplace of humanity, southern Africa. My hometown, Port Elizabeth, is a small coastal city on the eastern corner of the southern tip of Africa. Here, at the foot of this great continent, two ocean currents meet and mix: the icy Benguela sweeping up from Antarctica along the Skeleton Coast of West Africa, and the warm, hazy Mozambique flowing down from the tropics along the east coast. Their confluence creates one of the richest collections of coastal and ocean ecosystems on earth. Rocky ledges and tidal pools support a wealth of shellfish, with whales, seals, dolphins, and great white sharks cruising offshore. North and east of Port Elizabeth begins a dramatic geological feature, the Great Rift, which runs most of the length of the continent. This epic mountainous escarpment separates the rain forests of the west from drier, more open savanna to the east — what South Africans call the veldt* — the game-filled, tree-dotted parkland around whose lakes, rivers, and coastlines our earliest ancestors thrived. This forms what the South African historian Noel Mostert calls the “hemispheric seam” of the planet, a primordial frontier separating east and west, from which early hominids emerged.
In 1998 I returned to Port Elizabeth, the site of luminous childhood experiences that started me on my quest long before I understood what “politics” meant. I had been at the University of Hawai‘i for two decades, teaching and researching, trying to get the largest, clearest picture of the crises that seemed to grip the heart of our civilization. In the process I had come to some shocking realizations. The first was that the collective impact of globalizing industrial capitalism was destroying wilderness ecosystems and causing the extinction of living species at a rate unprecedented since the earth’s last great mass extinction. We were applying our African-incubated genius to an act of destruction equivalent to the impact of the gigantic asteroid that collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago. The second was that this situation was the result of choices we made centuries ago, choices we remake daily when pledging our allegiance to political and economic institutions promising growth in material wealth at all costs.
My studies in political philosophy had made it clear that the intellectual foundations of our current way of life had long since been demolished. But the institutions those philosophies led to — the bureaucratic nation-state, the multinational corporation, the global marketplace, the mechanized factory producing cheap goods, and competitive, self-centered individualism — all continued reproducing and expanding with the crazy vitality of a cancer. Their sheer overwhelming presence paralyzed political imagination, trapping us in a tyranny of “what exists.” The first step out of this impasse seemed intuitively obvious: to go back to “what was,” to imaginatively reconstruct the simplest, earliest form of human society, in order to rethink “what could and should be.” Later I came to think of this movement back to go forward as a fundamental aspect of creative renewal — an “eternal primal return.”
Personal reasons also drove me back. Until that point I had approached the consciousness of early human societies through texts, libraries, and universities. I felt an urgent need to fix this contradiction, to balance some of the thousands of hours spent indoors with my face turned away from the world, sitting at a desk, staring at books and computer screens. I was hungry for strong, simple experiences of what it meant to be a fully embodied human being in a southern African wilderness. Finally, I was close to burnout and just plain homesick.
The Port Elizabeth airport had barely changed since I was a child. Its single, small terminal building sat in the bush near a rocky wild coastline. As soon as I stepped out of the plane, I took in a deep breath, thick with the smells of salt spray and coastal vegetation, and savored the thrill of being home again. The coastal terrace of southern Africa gets rain throughout the year and is covered with tough, small-leafed, flowering bush — the aromatic fynbos or “fine bush” of the Southern Cape. This small area is so ancient and so unique that it constitutes one of the earth’s six plant kingdoms, with one of the largest concentrations of biodiversity anywhere.1 Forest- and bush-covered mountain ranges follow much of the coastline, providing a noble backdrop to enormous curving bays of surf-pounded white sand beaches. Clear rivers and streams, stained amber by forest vegetation,
