by the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. If the Xhomani had a land claim, they said, then so had they. To complicate matters further, it seemed that much of the land which the lawyers said should be given to the Xhomani in compensation for what they had lost to the park, actually belonged to these Mier farmers, and stood to be forcibly purchased from them should the Bushmen win the claim. Land is everything in South Africa: the thought of giving up land to Bushmen, even with due compensation, was, said Cait, pure anathema to the Mier. They had resolved to fight the Xhomani land claim to the last.
But should the Xhomani win, however long that took to happen, they would set a political precedent for the other countries of the Kalahari, where Bushmen were still being dispossessed on a grand scale. She and the lawyer Roger Chennels were part of a growing movement to reverse this. That year for example, a new, Namibian-based Bushman NGO called WIMSA* had been formed with German and Scandinavian donor money. This organisation was paying the legal fees for the Xhomani land claim and financing a smaller NGO called SASI (South African San Institute) which now represented the Bushmen in South Africa. WIMSA had also announced its intention to campaign on behalf of Bushmen everywhere – South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, even Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. But it was the Xhomani land claim that needed to be won in order to set the necessary precedent. The tide of history – the centuries of dispossession and oppression – was finally turning. If ever there was a time to be chronicling events on the Kalahari, Cait assured me, it was now.
* Scarf.
* A big antelope of the Kalahari – also known as the South African oryx.
* Bushmen use slow-acting poisons, made from certain roots mixed with a crushed beetle larva, to bring down big animals. The lethal poison can take up to twenty-four hours to finally kill, during which time the hunter must either track it or make sure that he can return next day and find the carcass. The poison is rendered harmless when the flesh is cooked.
* Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa.
Late the following year – October 1997 – I arrived at the Red House, or Rooi Huis as the Xhomani called it, with notebook, camera and recording equipment, accompanied by Cait Andrew, Chris, a film-maker friend who wanted to make a documentary about the land claim, and a truck full of gifts with which to buy goodwill. We even had a driver – Andrew, a tall, bearded white South African, to pitch our tents, cook our food and ferry us around while we conducted our research among the Xhomani, who lived on the outskirts of Welkom, a bedraggled settlement of poor coloured farming folk some ten kilometres south of the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. ‘We’re here,’ said Cait, as we pulled up outside a red-daubed, open-fronted shack – the Red House. A barrage of yelling, runny-nosed, grinning children, some naked, some in ragged shorts, ran up shouting and laughing, as we got out, stiff from the long drive, and began to look about us. Chris went to the back of the Toyota to fetch his camera. Cait and I looked down at the kids. A small, greying man with a squashed nose and eyes lost behind deep, mischievous wrinkles, came hobbling over from the house with a spryness that seemed at odds with his pronounced limp. He wore a bizarre mixture of clothing: a blue jacket striped with spangly gold lamé, above a xai, or loincloth of animal skin, his legs, chest and stomach all bare. ‘This,’ announced Cait, ‘is Dawid Kruiper, head of the Xhomani clan.’ He shook my hand and hers, squinting ingratiatingly, and said, ‘Ja, Ja Mama’.
Some ten or so adults pushed through the staring wall of children, also proffering hands. Cait made the introductions. There was Jakob, a handsome man with a beard and slightly dreadlocked hair, clad only in a xai, his lined face betraying an age of perhaps fifty, though his body was that of a twenty-year-old. Leana, his wife, had obviously been a beauty with features as regular as a model’s under a cream-coloured scarf wrapped stylishly around her head. Her skin, darker than her husband’s, glowed, despite its scars and stretch marks. A tiny, slender and very pretty girl with the widest cheekbones I had ever seen, and a gap where her two front teeth should have been, turned out to be Oulet, Dawid’s daughter. Next to her stood her husband Rikki, dressed in torn old jeans, and a stained black T-shirt with ‘Chicago Bulls’ printed on it in red. Lean, wiry, his eyes deep-set and staring, he radiated a mad, haunted strength which contrasted directly with the gentle, good-looking slender youth standing next to him, whom Cait called Vetkat (‘fat cat’).
Cait took charge, detailing the men to unload the goods we had brought. Sacks of mealie meal (maize flour), boxes of rough tobacco, fresh red meat in bags of ice, boxes of tinned vegetables and, on Cait’s advice, a sizeable bag of dagga (marijuana): we had not come empty-handed. As the supplies were being stacked in a corner of the Red House, Dawid led us into its shady interior and motioned for us to sit around the cooled ashes of the central hearth. Here sat two others: Sanna, Dawid’s wife, whose face was a stiller, older version of the young woman Oulet’s, and Bukse, Dawid’s younger brother, who was small but very muscular, with a quick-looking, snub-nosed face. The rest of the clan followed us in and squatted around us in a circle, looking on with detached, polite interest, waiting for us to say why we had come.
Cait explained in Afrikaans. Chris and I were journalists, she said, her tone portentous, come to tell the world that the Bushmen were at last going to fight for what was theirs. As she spoke, Dawid looked at the ground, stealing occasional glances – at once shrewd and polite – at Chris and I. We were by no means the first journalists he had met. Many had come, asked questions, taken photographs, scribbled notes and pushed microphones and camera lenses into his tired old face. Yet here Dawid and his people still sat, landless squatters on the edge of a poor coloured village, most of whose inhabitants, though little more than paupers themselves, looked down on their Bushmen neighbours and regarded them as little better than dogs.
And what difference did I think I could make? I now had a commission, having managed to persuade a publisher to let me write a book on the Xhomani land claim and the plight of the other groups across the Kalahari. But it would be years in the writing, and even when it was published, it might not be of any help to them. In the meantime, there was no guarantee that any articles I wrote would see the light of day, let alone provoke some action. It seemed to me that Dawid, this shrewd, tough old Bushman who sat watching us, could sense all this, yet he said nothing, only nodded as Cait spoke, gazing at the ashes in the hearth while the other members of the clan looked on in silence. Feeling a fraud, I looked away from him and let my eyes wander around the interior of the hut, to a long shelf which ran along the smoke-blackened back wall. A number of objects were stored on it: folded animal hides, a row of battered, blackened pots, a pile of long, straight gemsbok horns and a large, framed photograph from the National Geographic, the picture which had brought me here to the Red House at the edge of the dunes. I now recognised the figures tending the ancient, ailing man – they were Dawid and his brother Bukse.
As Cait finished her speech, Dawid said something to Sanna, his wife. She got up and went into one of the shadowed corners, returning with a small skin pouch. Dawid reached in, pulled out a pinch of rough tobacco, a dried bud of marijuana, some torn newspaper, and rolled a joint. Lighting it, he passed it around once so that we all had a hit, then rose and asked us to stand at the entrance to the Red House, where it looked out over the dunes, northwards towards the park. In the middle distance stood a tall camel-thorn tree, its great tap-root presumably stretching deep down through the sand and
