‘where he can look one way and see us, and the other way to see our land, the park.’
In Afrikaans the word ‘Regopstaan’ means ‘stand up straight’. It is also a name for the meerkat, or suricate, a kind of small mongoose that lives in colonies and packs up together to fight off predators. An appropriate name for the old leader. During the drive Cait had told me that, shortly before his death, Regopstaan had bequeathed a prophecy to his people: ‘When the strangers come, then will come the big rains. And the Little People will dance. And when the Little People in the Kalahari dance, then the Little People around the world shall dance too.’
Cait, Dawid, Chris and Andrew sat silent and awkward in the dark interior of the Red House. Most of the people that had followed us in – Jakob, Leana, Rikki, Vetkat and the rest – began to drift away, back to their own huts. I got up to clear my head and walked outside, around the Red House’s crimson-coloured walls. In two places the red mud-daub was disrupted by the sculpted heads of gemsbok, painted – as in real life – with white faces striped black from eyes to muzzle and topped by long, rapier-like horns. One of the heads was life-size and had real horns. The other was a giant, the head alone measuring about three feet long and the horns made of wooden poles that stuck up towards the roof. It jutted out from the red wall like a buttress. Benjamin had told me that the gemsbok was a symbol of strength for the Bushmen. Perfectly adapted to desert life, they can go a month without water. They could also be vicious when provoked; safari guides are full of stories of gemsbok killing predators, and sometimes even people. Once, in the Etosha National Park in Namibia (which, like South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, had been a Bushman hunting ground until the 1970s), I saw a game warden try to rescue a gemsbok that had become stuck in the deep mud around a waterhole. Whenever he approached, the animal swiped its long horns in challenge, never letting him get closer than a few feet. After a few minutes it became so incensed by the warden’s presence that it heaved itself bodily from the mud and chased the man back into the cab of the truck, which it then raked and slashed with its horns. It seemed fitting that gemsbok heads should be mounted on the Red House – a symbol of the Bushmen’s defiance and endurance.
From one of the further shacks came the sound of quiet singing. An elderly woman, wearing only a skin kilt, was weaving her thin, ancient body to and fro in a dance. She swayed past me, dry aged breasts flapping against her bony chest, and stepped into the sheltered entrance of the Red House, whose roof was supported on wooden poles, like the extended front of a marquee. ‘Cait,’ she said quietly, ‘my mother.’ Cait looked up from the fire where she had been talking with Dawid and Chris: ‘Antas!’ she said, smiling, and got up. ‘My mother,’ repeated the old lady, though she must have been at least thirty years Cait’s senior. She took Cait’s hand and, still dancing and quietly singing, led her outside, to sit down on the sand. She then pushed the thin white woman gently back, until she lay stretched out, and began to move her hands in a circular motion in the air an inch above Cait’s lower belly. For perhaps ten minutes, Antas moved her hands above Cait’s stomach, singing all the while, then abruptly she stood up, ceased her song, and motioned for Cait to rise. When she was back on her feet, Antas hugged her around her middle, repeating the words ‘My mother, my mother’ and swayed off in the direction from which she had come. Cait looked over at me: ‘Time to go, I think.’
We made our good-byes. Dawid looked at Chris and I and made the gesture of a film camera in motion, holding one hand in front of his eyes to suggest the lens and rotating the other, before erupting into gently mocking, violently coughing mirth. We started up the Toyota and headed back out to the main dirt road that led to the national park, where we were camping.
‘What was that old woman doing, making you lie down and singing like that?’ I asked Cait.
Cait said nothing for a while. Then, as if having made a decision, told us quietly: ‘Just before you came out,’ she said, ‘I went to the doctor to see about some pains in my stomach. It turns out I’ve got a cancer. Nothing serious yet, but cancer all the same. You’re the first one outside the family I’ve told.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘So that old woman, Antas, I mean, nobody could have told her about it before she came over and did that thing on you, right?’
‘No,’ replied Cait, staring back at the road. ‘Nobody told her.’
We drove on in silence. I had heard before of the Bushmen’s reputation as great healers. Until now, this had not fascinated me as much as their wildness, their elusiveness.
Arriving back at our camp site, we found that ground squirrels had broken into our tents, and devoured the extra sacks of mealie meal that we were saving to give away on our departure. As we unzipped the tent and looked in, one of the creatures paddled its little legs through the white drifts of spilled meal and flopped through the hole it had made, so distended it could barely move. As we cleaned up the mess and the sun finally set, Andrew got a fire going, and the sickle moon rose over four steaks, grilling nicely.
We opened a bottle of wine and Cait took up the conversation we had let lapse in the car: ‘You just have to get used to strange things happening when you’re around Bushmen. When Regopstaan was alive, for instance, he used to tell me to watch out for praying mantises in my house down in Cape Town. If one appeared – and they didn’t very often – then I’d know he wanted to talk to me. I’d ring the national park office or the Kagga Kama reception – that’s the reserve half of them live on now – and someone would send a message down to him. When he eventually came on the line he’d say “What took you so long? I’ve been trying to get your attention for days.”’ Even the way she had stumbled into the story had been strange, Cait went on. She had been told all her life that there were no Bushmen left in South Africa. She had only found out about the Xhomani back in 1990 when the clan had ended up in court after being lured onto a ranch by a local entrepreneur called Lockie Henning, who had intended to set up a private game reserve and display the Xhomani as ‘show Bushmen’. The venture had failed and the entrepreneur had done a runner, leaving the Bushmen liable for the rent. The magistrate had let them off, seeing that they had been swindled themselves, but a news crew had then got hold of the story and driven up to interview the Xhomani. The resulting short documentary – which Cait had seen only by chance – had detailed their plight, how they had been expelled from the park that had once been their home and were now destitute, but had left it at that.
Another white farmer, Pieter de Waal, a wealthy wine grower from the vineyards near Cape Town – had also seen the documentary, and had been similarly inspired by the idea of creating a Bushman reserve. De Waal contacted the Xhomani and offered them jobs on a game farm he owned down in the mountains of the Karoo, midway between Cape Town and the Kalahari. There were old Bushman paintings in a cave on the property, he told Regopstaan, then still alive. It would be like a homecoming, Bushmen reclaiming an area from which their ancestors had disappeared. Feeling that any opportunity was better than none, the Xhomani had agreed, arranging to go there in shifts; half their number staying up in the Kalahari, the rest going down to Kagga Kama, and swapping over every few months, with De Waal providing the transport.
Cait went on. ‘By the time I managed to make contact with the Xhomani, most of them had already moved down to Kagga Kama. So I went there, met Regospstaan – who was very old by then, and Dawid, who wasn’t yet the leader – and asked if I could at least record their language, which I understood was dying out. I hoped that I could archive it for posterity.’ Cait paused, took a sip of wine. ‘Regopstaan told me to ask Dawid for a decision – as he was close to death and his son would soon be the leader. I did as he asked, and Dawid said yes, that would be fine, but I must do something in return. He said he wanted “a school, a lawyer, and a land to walk around in”. Just that. So that’s what’s been done. I organised the school with Pieter de Waal – though I hear it’s not functioning right now. The lawyer was less of a problem; I already knew Roger Chennels – who’s now representing their land
