The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

1. Among the Unreal People

IN THE HOT FLAT BUSH in far northeast Namibia I crossed a bulging termite mound of smooth, ant-chewed sand, and with just the slightest elevation of this swelling under my foot soles the landscape opened in a majestic fan, like the fluttered pages of a whole unread book.

I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely known in Afrikaans as Boesmanland (Bushman Land) — pouch-breasted women laughing among themselves, an infant with a head like a fuzzy fruit bobbing in one woman’s sling, men in leather clouts clutching spears and bows, nine of us altogether — and I was thinking, as I’d thought for years traveling the earth among humankind: The best of them are bare-assed.

Happy again, back in Africa, the kingdom of light, I was stamping out a new path, on foot in this ancient landscape, delighting in “a palpable imaginable visitable past — in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries.” I was ducking among thornbushes with slender, golden-skinned people who were the earth’s oldest folk, boasting a traceable lineage to the dark backward and abysm of time in the Upper Pleistocene, thirty-five thousand years or so ago, the proven ancestors of us all, the true aristocrats of the planet.

The snort of a startled animal out of sight stopped us. Then its hindquarters swishing through brush. Then the leaping clop of its hooves on loose stones.

“Kudu,” one of the men whispered, bowing to listen to its departure without glancing aside, as though saying the familiar first name of someone he knew. He spoke again, and while I didn’t understand, I listened as if to new music; his language was preposterous and euphonious.

That morning in Tsumkwe, the nearest town — but not a town, just a sun-scorched crossroads with many hovels and a few shade trees — I had heard on my shortwave radio: World financial markets are in turmoil, facing the worst crisis since the Second World War. The Eurozone countries are approaching meltdown as Greece is expected to collapse into bankruptcy, its government having turned down a $45 billion loan to write down its debt.

The people I was following were laughing. They were Khoisan-speaking, a subgroup of!Kung people who called themselves Ju/’hoansi — a clucking, hard-to-pronounce name meaning “Real People” or “Harmless People.” Traditional hunter-gatherers, they had no history of using money. Even now, pushed to the margins of so-called Bushman Land (they knew this part of it as Nyae Nyae) — and irregularly settled, with some cattle and crops — these people seldom saw money and hardly used the decaying stuff. They still supplemented their diet by hunting and grubbing and foraging — and accepting pitiful handouts. They probably did not think about money, or if they did, they knew they would never have any. As the Greeks rioted, howling against their government, and Italians cried poverty in the streets of Rome, and the Portuguese and the Spanish stared hollow-eyed at bankruptcy, and the news was of failure, worthless currencies, and austerity measures, the Ju/’hoansi were indestructible in all their old ways, or seemed so to me in my ignorance.

The young woman in front of me dropped to her knees in the sand. She had the lovely, elfin, somewhat Asiatic face — but also suggesting the face of an extraterrestrial — that most San people possess. That is to say, pedomorphic, the innocent and fetching face of a child. She traced her fingers around a threadlike vine sprouting from the sand, crouched, leaned on one elbow, and began digging. With each scoop and handful of sand her eyes brightened, her breasts shook, and her nipples trembled against the earth, one of the minor titillations of this excursion. Within a minute she extracted a finger-shaped tuber from the dark, strangely moist hole she’d made and cradled it in her hand. As she flicked dust from the root, it paled beneath her fingertips. Smiling, she offered the first bite to me.

“Nano,” she said, and the word was translated as “potato.”

It had the crunch, the mouthfeel, the sweetish earthen taste of raw carrot. I passed it back and it was shared equally, a nibble each, nine bites. In the forests, deserts, and hillsides across the world, foraging people like the Ju/’hoansi are scrupulous about sharing food; it is this sharing in their communal life that binds them together.

Ahead of us, kneeling on scattered nut shells and the leaf litter of a thornbush, two of the men, facing each other on the ground, were taking turns spinning a two-foot-long stick between their palms — chafing this spindle which, very shortly, raised a puff of smoke from the friction of its bottom end in a darkening piece of soft wood. The stick they call male; the dimpled wood block on the bottom, female. Sparks glowed from the hot drilled block, and one of the men coaxed more sparks, lifting the glowing, gently smoking wood, blowing on it with lips framed in a kissing expression. He scattered shells and dead leaves on it, then a handful of twigs. We had fire.

Strikes in Greece have cut off power in many cities, and the government is expected to default on its debt, plunging Europe into deepening uncertainty, putting the fate of the euro in doubt. The ripple effect could endanger the viability of American banks. Rock-throwing mobs protesting mounting austerity measures have begun looting shops in Athens …

It was like news from another planet, a dark, chaotic one, not this dazzling place of small mild people, smiling in the shadows of low bush, the women unearthing more roots with their digging sticks, one reclining in a patch of speckled shade, nursing her contentedly suckling baby.

They were spared the muddled and weirdly orphic metaphors of the failing market — The subprime crisis was only the tip of the iceberg for an economic meltdown and Loans could not stop the hemorrhaging of stock prices and The red ink in Spain’s regional governments surged 22 percent to almost $18 billion and New York City’s economy faces an extreme downside risk from Europe’s debt crisis, because its banks hold over $1 trillion of assets — and the mocking realization that money was just colorful crumpled paper, hardly different from a candy wrapper, the market itself little more than a casino. For the tenth straight day … The panic, the anger, the impotence of the people confined in stagnating cities like caged monkeys. Should Greece default on its debt, it will find itself in a death spiral.

As the fire crackled, more roots were passed around.

“Look, Mister Bawl …”

One crouching man with homemade twine of split and twisted vines had fashioned a snare, pegging it to the spring of a bent-over branch, and with tiptoeing fingers on the sand he showed me how the snare snatched at the plodding feet of a unwary bird, a guinea hen perhaps — they were numerous here — one that they would pluck and roast on the fire. They indicated the poisonous plants and talked about the beetles they crushed and applied to their arrowheads to make them deadly, the leaves they used to ease their stomachs, the twigs for purifying a wound, for soothing a rash.

These Real People, the Ju/’hoansi, had been persecuted, harried, massacred, and driven off from the moment the first whites came ashore in Africa in 1652. The whites were Jan van Riebeeck, his wife and child, and his small party of Dutchmen, who named the land Groot Schur, Good Hope, where they settled to plant vegetables for a “refreshment station” to provision Dutch ships heading to East Asia.

Finicky on the subject of race, with the Dutch temperament for fine distinctions, they created a taxonomy to describe the indigenous people, designating the goat-herding Khoikhoi as “Hottentots” (mimicking the alveolar clicks in the way they spoke), the Bantu as “kaffirs” (unbelievers — the Dutch had gotten the word from the early Portuguese, who’d heard Arab traders use it), and the!Kung San as “Bushmen,” for their preferred habitat. It was the pastoral Khoikhoi who named the San — their belittling word for “cattleless” (with the sense of being backward). All were pushed aside in the land grab by the Dutch, and though each group fought back, the so-called!Kung San fairly quickly withdrew, but not fast enough. They were hunted for sport into the late nineteenth century by the Boers. But these supposedly benighted people — self-sufficient foragers and hunters, city haters, apparently living outside the world economy — would, I believed, have the last laugh.

Even later, when these Ju/’hoansi I was visiting had plucked off their beads and laid down their bows and arrows and digging sticks, exchanging the pretty skins they wore for ragged Western clothes — torn trousers, faded T-shirts, rubber flip-flops, skirts and blouses; castoffs sent in bales from Europe and the United States — even then the curtain did not come down. The Ju/’hoansi still seemed ancient and indestructible and knowing, thoroughly habituated to their life in the bush, dealing with the outer world by quietly smiling at its foolishness and incompetence.

That is what I saw. Or was it an illusion? Perhaps what they were showing me was a persuasive reenactment of the old ways, like Mohawks in a modern pageant, wearing beaded deerskin jackets and paddling birch-bark canoes on the Hudson River. Anyone who took the Ju/’hoansi behavior as typical, as some anthropologists had written, was perpetuating a myth that had been affectionately invented, a travesty in the real sense of the word, a mere change of clothes, romanticizing a life that was antique and lost forever.

It is true that the Ju/’hoansi had been scattered and resettled, had been plagued by alcoholism, and many of them degraded by town life. But the Ju/’hoansi had kept some of their culture. Their language was intact; they still had their folktales and their cosmology; they had retained and passed on their strategies for bush survival. Many still tracked game, still hunted, though not with poison-tipped arrows; some still supplemented their diet with roots; and they could make a fire by rubbing sticks together. Their kinship system — family, relationships, dependencies — remained unbroken.

Clothed in rags rather than skins, they seemed no less the Real People. But perhaps I saw what I needed to see. Their traditional skills intact, their heads (I guessed) buzzed with the old ways. They even had their own peculiar manner of walking. Unlike the city dweller, that slouching, foot-dragging person grinning into the middle distance, the Ju/’hoansi were alert. They never sauntered or sloped; they moved fast but silently, bodies erect, listening as they flew along, treading lightly on the balls of their feet, balletic in their flight, in what was less like walking than dancing through the bush.

They were temperamentally suited to dealing with the stern austerity of the semidesert climate and had a sympathetic understanding of the animals they hunted. But they had never been a match for the people who persecuted them, including the!Kung San and the Herero people as well as the whites. Some!Kung San who had the misfortune to live near towns had been poisoned and neutralized with bubbly oshikundu, the home-brewed beer that Namibians made from fermented sorghum and sold in villages and shebeens. (Shebeen, an Irish word meaning “bad ale,” was brought to southern Africa by migrants from Ireland and is used to describe the poorest drinking places.)

For their apparent gentleness, the complexity of their beliefs, and their ancient pedigree, foreign agencies and charities had taken a shine to the!Kung San. And so had anthropologists: the!Kung San were among the most intensively studied of Africa’s peoples. But those who patronized them had much more to learn from these people than they could teach them. They were above all a peaceable, egalitarian people who had thrived because of their tradition of sharing and living communally. Historically, they had withdrawn deeper into the bush rather than face being exterminated in a futile war. They were notably patient and consequently a contented people. They were here before anyone else — catching game, making fire, digging roots — and I was convinced that they would be here after the rest of the world destroyed itself.

They had always lived at the margin. Could any outsider in a charity-minded, money-collecting, old-clothes-dispensing organization, and the benevolent well-wishers who gave them material support, show them a better way to live? Circumstances — politics mainly — determined that the Ju/’hoansi be confined to one place, and though they were by custom nomadic they’d had to acquire farming and animal-rearing skills. But if they were historically hunter-gatherers, with a connection to the land they regarded as the living mother, wouldn’t they prevail that way?

Many Africans are people of regressed cultures, the scattered remnants of ancient realms that were demolished or subverted by slavers from Arabia and Europe — the kingdoms of Dahomey and the Congo, the vast fifteenth-century empire of southern Africa known as Monomatapa. Like the peasant folk of old Europe, a great number of Africans have lost or abandoned their traditional skills of thatching, iron-forging, wood-carving, food-gathering, farming, and the greatest skill of all, the mutual respect and fairness that help people rub along together in a congenial way. Within a few decades the majority of Africans will live in cities. Today, two hundred million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, the highest number of slum dwellers in the world, according to UN-Habitat’s “State of African Cities 2010 Report.” And “slum” is a rather misleading word for these futureless places — as I was to see — of stupefying disorder.

At the town nearest to the tiny Ju/’hoansi village, the crossroads of Tsumkwe, about thirty miles down the road, there were some amenities: a shop that sold canned goods and bread and hard candy, a gas pump, and the semblance of a street market — a row of seven improvised stalls selling used clothes, meat, homemade beer, and, at the last stall, hair extensions. The stallholders yawned in the heat; business was poor.

For years I had longed to visit the!Kung San people and wander around the country. And I had another reason. For a previous book of mine, Dark Star Safari, I had traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town down the right-hand side of Africa. This time, liking the symmetry of the enterprise, I wanted to resume my trip at Cape Town and, after seeing how that city had changed in ten years, travel north in a new direction, up the left-hand side until I found the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind.

But I had yet other reasons, just as pressing. The main one was physically to get away from people wasting my time with trivia. “I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Life Without Principle,” “so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”

In going away I wanted to frustrate the stalkers and pesterers, to be unobtainable and not to live at the beck and call of emailers and phoners and people saying “Hey, we’re on deadline!” — other people’s deadlines, not mine. To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, is bliss. I had earned this freedom: having recently finished a novel, and sick of sitting at my desk for a year and a half, I wanted to leave the house — and not just leave but go far away. “My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself but to discover myself in the objects I see,” Goethe wrote in his Italian Journey. “Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.”

Africa drew me onward because it is still so empty, so apparently unfinished and full of possibilities, which is why it attracts meddlers and analysts and voyeurs and amateur philanthropists. Much of it is still wild, and even in its hunger it is hopeful, perhaps an effect of its desperation. “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” “as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” Travel in Africa was also my way of opposing the increasing speed of technology — resisting it and dropping back, learning patience and studying the world that way.

Africa had changed, and, ten years on, so had I. The world had grown older too, and the nature of travel itself had continued to alter and accelerate. It is said that the known world has never been so well known or so easily within reach. In 2011, the year I was on the road, Namibia had a million foreign tourists, and South Africa had almost twice that number. But these visitors stayed on safe and well-trodden routes. Many places in South Africa rarely saw a tourist, and in Namibia tourists kept to the game parks and the coast, seldom daring the far north, the inhospitable borderland of Angola. As for the hardier travelers, the backpackers and wanderers, I had yet to meet one who had actually crossed the border into Angola.

While the known world is well traveled and distant places appear on the tourist itinerary (Bhutan, the Maldives, the Okavango Delta, Patagonia), there are places where no outsider goes. The rich travel to remote airstrips in Africa in chartered planes, with their own gourmet chefs and guides. The rest go on package tours or randomly backpack. Yet there are places that are slipping from view, inaccessible or too dangerous to travel to. Many bush tracks lead nowhere. And some countries are closed until further notice. Somalia, in a state of anarchy, is on no one’s itinerary except that of arms dealers. Zimbabwe, a tyranny, is unwelcoming. And others — the Congo is a good example — have no roads to speak of. But even if roads existed, much of the Congo is a hostile no-go area of militias, local chiefs, and warlords, just as it was when Henry Morton Stanley traversed it on foot and by river.

In the course of my planning I kept reading that militant Islamists were busy killing unbelievers or raising hell in Niger and Chad, and in Nigeria the so-called Boko Haram gangs — Muslims who could not abide the sight of Westernized Nigerians — were killing any man who wore pants and a shirt, or a woman in a dress. These groups were looking for soft targets — backpackers, wanderers, people like you and me.

So I left on this trip with a sense of foreboding. A man who has been on the road for fifty years is an easy mark: alone, past retirement age, and conspicuous in a country like Namibia where the average life expectancy is forty-three. I consoled myself by thinking that the unlikely sight of an old man traveling alone in Africa meant that anyone who saw me would laugh me off as a crank. Dressed as I was in faded clothes, with a $20 wristwatch and cheap sunglasses, carrying a small, plastic $20 cell phone — how could I be worth mugging?

I also suspected that this trip would be in the nature of a farewell. For many older writers, and some not so old, a spell in Africa was a valedictory trip. The last serious journey Joseph Conrad embarked on, his twenty-eight days piloting a boat up and down the Congo River, formed the basis of the powerful novella Heart of Darkness, which he wrote eight years after returning from Africa, describing the book as “experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.” After a lifetime of traveling, Evelyn Waugh spent the winter of 1959 in East and Central Africa and wrote an account of it in A Tourist in Africa. He died six years later. Both Laurens van der Post and Wilfred Thesiger spent their later years in African travel — van der Post in the Kalahari Desert, Thesiger in upcountry Kenya — and wrote about it. Hemingway’s ultimate safari, his last serious journey, was to East Africa in 1953–54, and though he shot himself six years afterward, his fictionalized version of the safari, True at First Light, edited by his son Patrick, was published posthumously in 1999. After V. S. Naipaul published his Masque of Africa, a lengthy interrogation of “the nature of African belief” through six African countries, he made it plain that it would be his last travel book.

Africa can be fierce, and some of it frankly scary, but as Naipaul’s experience showed, it can also be kind to an ailing and elderly traveler. You might expect people to say, “Go home, old man.” But no — in general, Africa turns no one away.

And so this, the greenest continent, would seem the perfect landscape for a valedictory trip, a way of paying respects to the natural world and to the violated Eden of our origins. “All the hungers of life are blankly stated there,” the English writer and traveler V. S. Pritchett wrote about Spain fifty years ago. But what he said could be an assessment of Africa too. “We see the primitive hungers we live by and yet, by a curious feat of stoicism, fatalism, and lethargy, the passions of human nature are sceptically contained.” In Africa we see human history turned upside down, and it is possible in Africa to see where we have gone wrong.

“Africa gives one back the necessary feeling that the world is vast, prodigious and noble,” wrote another traveler, and to this very region, Jon Manchip White, in The Land God Made in Anger. “In spite of what the pundits say, our planet is neither congested nor contemptible.”

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be. There are many endangered countries, or places whose futures are threatened. I think of the radioactive Ukraine, or anarchic Chechnya, or the overburdened Philippines, or tyrannized Belarus. Each of them could use a helping hand, but when the celebrity or ex-president or glamorous public figure wishes to make a charitable appearance it is nearly always in Africa, for the sake of the exotic — or is it the drama of high contrast in black and white, or its being hypnotically unintelligible? In Africa the traveler’s license is unlimited, and Africa itself magnifies the experience in a way no other place can.

When I was following the spirited, fleet-footed Ju/’hoansi people through the low sunlit bush of Nyae Nyae, I knew I was where I wanted to be. And that kind of traveling was a way of recovering my youth, because as a twenty-two-year-old teacher at a small school in rural Africa I had spent some of the happiest years of my life — years of freedom and friendship and great hope.

If I had a sense of foreboding about this trip, it was because travel into the unknown can also be like dying. After the anguish of the goodbyes and the departure itself, you seem to diminish, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance. In time, no one misses you except in the casual, mildly mocking way of “Whatever happened to old so-and-so, who threatened to beetle off to Africa?” You’re gone, no one can depend on you, and when you’re only a dim memory, a bitterness creeps into the recollection, in the way that the dead are often resented for being dead. What good are you, unobtainable and so far away?

And that makes you two ghosts, because in the distant country, too, you’re like a wraith, with your face pressed to the window of another culture, staring at other lives. And much of what you see, like the harmonious life in the bush, has another side.

It took me a while to understand that the window of Africa, like the window on a train rushing through the night, is a distorting mirror that partly reflects the viewer’s own face. Among the Ju/’hoansi I was indeed witnessing a reenactment, and I came to realize that the folk who called themselves the Real People were, alas, unreal. The heroic pagan world of golden-skinned Ju/’hoansi was an illusion. I had hoped to find that rarity in the world, a country of uncontaminated delight, but what I found was a desperate people, sad static unhoping souls, not indestructible, as I’d thought, but badly in need of rescue.