Last of the Baswara
Friday October 6th 2006
Angela MackaySize, in spite of his name, is diminutive. For his estimated 60-odd years he is agile, flexible, in constant motion. He is the Bushman guide who leads the walk into the Kalahari bush. Not 100 yards from the lodge with the unlikely swimming pool, he squats in the shade and takes out his firesticks.
One stick, a half-inch wide and a foot long, is marked with small burnt circles; the other, he sharpens. The stick with the burnt circles he balances on a knife, over a small bunch of dried grass. The sharpened stick he holds upright and begins to twirl rapidly between both palms in a spot where a new burnt circle begins to form. Slowly, slowly, a faint smoke rises. Ash falls on the knife blade - and after more twirling the hole deepens and more ash falls, ash that begins to glow. When enough smoking ash is on the knife, Size tips it into the grass, wraps it all into a ball, blowing gently - and there is a flame.
"Patience", says Elvis, the interpreter, "is important to make fire this way." Patience is vital to every aspect of this life, not only to light fires, but to find the fruits and tubers and medicines that are the backbone of survival.
Between them Size and Elvis find and explain plants that would otherwise pass as anonymous. A 4 inch (10cm) bunch of unremarkable leaves reveal, when unearthed with Size's digging stick, a tuber looking much like a potato, bitter to the taste, but a source of food and liquid to humans and animals.
Or there is the Poison Grub tree with its reddish-brown berries that the flea beetle feeds on and drops to the ground, a victim of the bush's poison. Parasitic larvae of the beetle are harvested, crushed and rubbed on hunting arrow-heads: 8-10 grubs provide enough poison to down a large animal that will die within a day. There is no known antidote.
Size scurries around collecting fresh shoots of what, in translation, is mother in law's tongue. Laying the shoots across a stick that he steadies with his foot, he scrapes off the green vegetable matter from the shoot until only the fibres remain. Once he has gathered a sizeable bunch of fibres, he begins rolling the fibres together on his leg. They twirl rapidly together. Once all the fibres are spliced and rolled, a tough string is formed. Indestructible.
Underfoot we crush dried devil's claw seed-pods with their vicious four-barbed "legs" that earn it its name. Ground up with water, the roots and tuber are a common treatment for kidney and stomach problems. Here is the Kalahari apple-leaf for healing cuts and bruises and the morobela, used to massage broken limbs into place.
Size cannot resist showing us a "wild carrot", which takes furious, long, hard digging by both him and Elvis. His arm buried completely up to his shoulder, Size strains and tugs until the long underground hole surrenders its scrawny prize.
This hole, like all the others, is carefully restored, the tuber thrown back and the soil pushed into the hole. A respectful response, it symbolises the profound connection between the man and the land.
Finally, he shows us a bird-trap, a celebration of delicacy. A small, pliant branch is bent over and attached with a fine rope like the one he recently made, to a circle of six twigs, pushed into the ground. With the lightest of touch he shows how the trap, under the basin berry bush, snaps into a noose the minute a bird comes seeking fruit fallen inside the lethal twig circle.
Size is one of a generation of Bushmen living between two worlds - a settled village and the "traditional" life as a hunter-gatherer. He spends long periods in the village, Kaudwane, with his wife, but periodically disappears for a few days in the endless scrublands of the eastern Kalahari, to gather medicines and hunt small game, like his ancestors before him.
We lack a common language, so I hesitate to ask him how this blending of the settled and the nomadic life works for him and his family.
These are politically tinged questions with strongly contested views on the fate of the Bushmen and the actions of a government that claims to have offered relocation as the only possible way to provide health and education services to a small population, thinly scattered throughout this vast territory. Opponents argue that the policy has destroyed the culture and contributed to alcoholism, depression, domestic violence and, ultimately, loss of dignity and identity.
Even selecting the correct term to for the people is full of pitfalls. Whether Bushman, San or BaSarwa (referring to a slave class in Setswana), each word is loaded with derogatory inference. I am told Size is happy with the word Bushman. Perhaps he is free of the rigours of political correctness.
However the relocation and social problems are resolved, what hangs in the balance is not just the understanding of survival, of plants and their purposes, and of the social fabric of semi-nomadic peoples. It is something more. It is about patience as a way of life.
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