The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

7. Ceremony at the Crossroads

IN ITS SMALLNESS, frying in the desert heat, torpid, disheveled Tsumkwe illustrated in the simplest manner a number of African economic and demographic dilemmas. In the nearby bush, village life was sustainable but oldfangled, and access to water was a problem. The irregularly settled town, growing larger by the year from people leaving the bush, was a picture of filth and futility and bad management. Tsumkwe had a police station, two churches, and a school. The school educated hundreds of students, but it was hard-up, the teachers were poorly compensated, the students needed to find money for fees, and what lay at the end of their education in this severely unemployed country?

The shanties of indigent newcomers to the place were scattered on one side of the crossroads, and on the other side, beyond the shops, were two stinking shebeens where drunken men squatted on the dirt floor, drooling over their home-brewed beer, while a haggard woman ladled more of it into tin cans from a plastic barrel. Outside under a tree, a man in rags, either drunk or exhausted, lay in a posture of crucifixion. Nearby were seven stalls made of rough planks. Two sold used clothes, and one sold new clothes. One offered vegetables, another milky tea and stale bread rolls for the schoolchildren. In a butcher’s shack the stallholder hacked with a machete at the black, flyblown leg of a goat. The last and most salubrious stall, labeled Real Hair, sold wigs and foot-long hair extensions. Near the shops was a shade tree under which a dozen women and about ten children sat in a friendly chatting group, some of them pounding ostrich shells into small discs, while others, using homemade tools, drilled holes in the middle, and still others threaded the punctured discs into bracelets and necklaces to sell to tourists.

But I saw no tourists in Tsumkwe; few travelers or stragglers made it to this distant and forlorn place. I now knew why: Tsumkwe lay 180 miles down a dusty gravel road through the bush that shimmered in the heat; and the nearest town, Grootfontein, was nothing much — a supermarket, a bank, a gas station, some back streets, and a sports club that, as Helena suggested, had a largely white membership and hosted weekend keggers and crapulosities.

To the north of Tsumkwe was the border of Angola and the Caprivi Strip, a narrow panhandle that protruded east neatly on the map and contained one road to the riverside border of Zambia. (This oddity was a concession to the German colonizers, who drew the border in 1890 and wanted access to the Zambezi River and what was then German East Africa.) To the west was desert, to the east about eighty miles more desert, and Botswana — some Ju/’hoansi settlements and the small town of Nokaneng, at the edge of the Okavango Delta, a lush water world rich in game where wealthy tourists, paying thousands of dollars a day, were flown in private planes to luxury camps. At one of these camps you could splash through the swamps on the backs of elephants, in what was one of Africa’s most expensive safaris.

Tsumkwe, a crossroads, had always been negligible. What we know of the place is due almost entirely to the writing of the Marshalls. In The Old Way, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas described how the waterhole was selected as the spot for a government agency to monitor the movements of cattle, to prevent poaching, to protect the area against incursions by diamond prospectors, and to allow the raiding by Boer farmers of Ju/’hoansi settlements for farm workers — treated as little more than slave labor. The government post was established in 1960, and the area was designated a “Homeland for Bushmen” in 1970. Tsumkwe got a police station and jail in 1975 when it was deemed a crime for local people to hunt or start bush fires.

The crossroads appeared more boldly on the map at the time the South African Defense Force built an army post there. This was in 1978, when the South African government, which administered South-West Africa as a colony of white domination, was vainly attempting to suppress the well-armed Namibian liberation struggle. Some!Kung were co-opted by the South African army, which used them as trackers and spotters and even as regular gun-toting recruits. After the success of the struggle, and Namibia’s independence in 1990, this apparent collaboration with the enemies of the nationalists tainted relations between the!Kung and the Namibian politicians who saw their desperate bid for employment as the treachery of counterrevolutionaries.

This being Namibia, the people in and around Tsumkwe were probably not particularly healthy. USE A CONDOM was painted in brightly colored foot-high letters in two languages on the outside wall of the Tsumkwe community center, and for anyone who missed the point or might be illiterate, a condom was also drawn on the wall, five feet long, like a large and flapping windsock.

The only sounds in the Ju/’hoansi villages were the crackle and screech of insects. At the Tsumkwe crossroads the prevailing sound was the shout and thump of rap music. Rap and hip-hop now dominate African pop music. Much of it is imported unchanged from the United States, some of it comes from Brazil or is adapted locally, all of it blasting at full volume from car radios or from inside bars, even in this tiny place.

Because it is predictably fogeyish — and useless in any case — to object to loud music, especially the music of the young, I merely wondered, in a sour and squinting way, about the appeal of this semiliterate music here. And not just here: rap music is played all over sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly every country has its own rap groups. When I inquired, I discovered that Namibia alone had more than twenty hip-hop singers or groups, with names such as Contract Killers, Snazzy, L’il D, and, in the small town I had just passed through, Otjiwarongo, a group called Krazie D. Obviously something in this music speaks to the urban African, who is typically unemployed, overlooked, idle, very poor, lonely, and alienated from village traditions and pieties.

Rap is the howl of the underclass, the music of menace, of hostility, of aggression. Intentionally offensive, much of the language is so obscene that it is unplayable on radio stations. So naturally you wonder what is in the heads of the young here who have adopted these songs as their anthems. Are they merely idle, their minds colonized by the alien lyrics? And along with the music is a whole style of dress. Any Tsumkwe youths who could afford to buy clothes wore brand-new rap-themed T-shirts and shorts. Faded ones were also available at the used-clothes stalls, courtesy of Americans who offloaded their kids’ old clothes, giving them to charities and perhaps never guessing that the T-shirt with the portrait of The Notorious B.I.G. or Heavy D or Snoop Dogg, or the one lettered Thug Life in homage to the murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, was just what they wanted. And they now had the music to match it. They had the words, too, and could say, with Caliban in The Tempest, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.”

In countries where baseball was unknown, the most common headgear was a baseball cap. Hip-hop music has inspired skateboarding, break dancing, and graffiti. A skateboard is unusable on an African road, but I sometimes saw break dancing in villages or townships, and it was a rare public wall in Africa that had not been tagged with graffiti. The sound of urban Africa is not the harmonious and hypnotic rhythm of a drum, but the shout of rap and its opposite, the hoarse hymn singing of evangelicals — both sorts heard in remote Tsumkwe.

The community center with the windsock-sized condom painted on the side was officially designated the Captain Kxao Kxami Community Learning and Development Centre. (To clarify, words like Kxao, #Oma,!Kung, and /’hoansi each convey a specific sound — a tsk, a click, a tongue-suck, or a cluck mimicking the clopping of a horse or the cheek-suck a rider uses to command a horse to giddyup — four distinct “velaric suction stops” that no written phonetic form can begin to approximate.) Far from being a Namibian government effort, the center had been built in 2006 with funds from the Namibia Association of Norway (NAMAS), which also supplied it with computers and an Internet connection. This Norwegian group was also deeply involved in village education and health projects. The Redbush Tea Company chipped in with money, and a charity in South Africa donated books. In 2009, the Texas chapter of the Explorers Club collected money to construct the seminar room where I was to deliver my talk.

On the face of it, Tsumkwe — solitary, remote, poor — was the classic example of a hard-up outpost in Africa, adopted by foreigners as a recipient of funds and the idealistic efforts of outsiders to improve education and health. The three churches there also played a role, though I did not discover how successful they were.

Tsumkwe had been neglected, if not ignored altogether, by the Namibian government, though two ministries — water and agriculture — had offices near the crossroads. For this reason, and its poverty and need, Tsumkwe had become a cause and a rallying point for the virtue industry, in which for a few days I was playing an active part. The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized. The Norwegians had been at it for thirty years, funneling money into the place and producing extensive and scholarly self-financed surveys of the hardships and goals of the local people.

And this was a lesson to me, because my first impression of Namibia, from the border to Windhoek and the coast, was of a place that did not need anyone from outside the country to tell the people how to live their lives, that Namibians themselves had set an example in development and decorum. But that was a snap judgment, from before I crossed the Vet Fence.

At the lodge in Tsumkwe, which was actually a little camp, Tony and I met the UNESCO people: Jaco, a South African; his coworker, Andrea; and Werner, a German, head of the Namibian archives in Windhoek. We each had a small cabin — Tony’s was next door to mine — and we observed the subdued routine of campers. Sunset was sudden, the nights were hot, and the generator went off at ten, plunging the whole place into darkness and silence. The first night, though, I heard a pattering that in seconds became a torrent of rain. A phantom downpour, it seemed. In the morning there was no sign of dampness anywhere, only pockmarked dust and withered plants.

We gathered at the Captain Kxao Kxami Community Learning and Development Centre in the morning for what was billed as the opening ceremony. The room filled with officials, chiefs and their retinues, advisers, people from the Ministry of Education, the governor of the region, the delegation from Windhoek — of which I was one — and some clergymen. There were about thirty of us altogether, the women in bright dresses, and all the men — except for me — wearing ties and dark suits.

We began by singing the Namibian national anthem (“Namibia, land of the brave / Freedom fight we have won …”) and the African Union anthem (“Let us all unite and celebrate together / The victories won for our liberation …”), and then the oldest of the clergymen led us in a prayer in the!Kung language and in Afrikaans. I caught the word “Moses,” and at the end, in English, “We all belong to God.”

This was followed by messages and remarks about the importance of Audio-Visual Heritage Day, though I wondered what meaning “audio-visual” had here; no one had mentioned that Tsumkwe was a place without television, without a movie theater, and with only irregular Internet access.

With great formality and chiefly protocol, the attendees were introduced, and the governor gave his keynote address.

“I must also welcome myself!” Governor Kamehozu of Otjozondjupa said teasingly, after his solemn welcome to the visitors. He went on, “This is one of the remotest areas of Namibia. But Tsumkwe has its own beauty, and we must take advantage of the opportunities our heavenly father has given us. We are lucky in many ways. Our elephants are bigger than elephants elsewhere. Our lions are also bigger …”

Speaker after speaker took the podium, making remarks, ponderously handing over historic photographs to the Namibian National Archives, declaiming messages of congratulation, reading introductions, until the closing homily of Chief Tsamkxao #Oma. I kept reminding myself in this hall — with windows too high to see through — that all this talk and ceremony was taking place at the end of a gravel road in a distant bush settlement at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.

That was just the morning I had feared, rarefied and overformal. But after lunch (sandwiches and fruit punch under the thorn tree) the event acquired greater meaning. In the first session students from the nearby school filled the room. They were only in their early teens, yet they looked well developed, and the heavy-bosomed schoolgirls seemed on the verge of womanhood. They were all polite, fluent in English, well behaved, and responsive, in their intensity reminding me of the hopeful, hard-working students I had taught almost fifty years ago in Malawi. They sat attentively in neat uniforms, as my own students had done, the girls in white blouses and dark skirts, the boys in white shirts and dark trousers.

I gave my talk. I explained — because they said they didn’t have a clue — the meaning of the words “audio” and “visual” and “heritage.” Then I launched into my assigned theme, “Preserving a Cultural Heritage.” My message to the students was simple enough: talk to the oldest people in the village; ask them about their experiences and skills and folktales; write them down. Gathered together, these stories were the history of the region. This was something I wished I had done long ago in Malawi. Though I had talked to villagers and written down some of their stories, I should have been more methodical, using a tape recorder, interviewing all the elders I could find. The ones who were over sixty, and there were many, would have had memories of the nineteenth century, of the earliest colonials, of their first glimpses of missionaries, travelers, and white settlers; they might have heard family stories of the Arab slave trade. Oral history of this kind was invaluable, and that, in brief, was my pep talk on cultural preservation.

Afterward, the lights were dimmed. John Marshall’s short film Children Throw Toy Assegais (1974) was shown. It was a glimpse into the recent past, six or seven boys, no more than ten years old, practicing the throwing of a shortened spearlike weapon, some of them succeeding in making the sharp thing penetrate a tree. The boys were gleeful, competing to see who would succeed as the best shot. The assegais were mere toys, but this play had a serious intention; when a boy grew older, his assegai would be a blade hafted to a throwing stick and used to kill animals. So it was not just competitive play — it was preparation for their lives as hunters.

None of the boys in the film wore more than a perfunctory wrap around his hips, and the sight of them half naked made the neatly uniformed schoolchildren giggle, if not in embarrassment, then in awkwardness. Although the Ju/’hoansi wore very little, they were averse to displaying their bodies to outsiders. Some of the women were prominently steatopygous — huge-buttocked — but “we were unable to observe to what extent steatopygia existed among the women in the Nyae Nyae area,” Lorna Marshall wrote, “because the women there flatly refused to take off their karosses [antelope-hide capes] from around their backs.” The schoolchildren watching the film squirmed because we outsiders were present, but they were excited, too, with this glimpse into their animated history.

“I saw my own brother in those pictures!” old Chief Tsamkxao #Oma exclaimed in the!Kung language when the lights went up. He was tearful with excitement, gesturing to the blank screen, clumsily passionate. “This is something like a dream. That was my brother when he was young!” He bowed to the visitors and touched his heart. “Thank you for this film. This is like a dream for me.”

The schoolchildren stared at the chief with what seemed a new curiosity, as though he himself were an artifact. And he was, in a sense, because he had been raised in the old way, in the bush, without school, but living by the assegai and the arrow. And consider: it was less than forty years ago, but from all appearances it could have been a thousand.

The next film was A Rite of Passage, which had been made by John Marshall in 1972. This riveted the children because it was not so remote from them. Many of their fathers would have participated in this ritual, the Rite of the First Kill, the occasion on which a boy in a hunting party kills his first large animal. Until that point, the boy would have killed only a bird or a rabbit, but killing a full-grown giraffe, a heavy antelope, a buffalo, or a wildebeest — a game animal killed for meat — was a matter of importance, a stage in the passage from boy to man.

A small group of Ju/’hoansi danced through the tall grass, seeking an animal, and /Ti!kay, the boy to be initiated, crept at the head of the column of hunters. The schoolchildren in the room watched closely, occasionally yelping in excitement.

“A mature wildebeest is seen in the tall grass,” John Marshall said, narrating his film, as the hunting party became alert and watchful.

The progress of the hunt and the chase and the kill, revealed by John Marshall in his voice-over, and the later testimony of his mother, Lorna, in her book on these people, described this first big kill as essential in proving manhood. A young man could not court a woman and marry her until he had slaughtered a powerful animal, and only then, when he had displayed his hunting prowess, could he undergo the Rite of the First Kill.

In the movie a full-grown wildebeest — horned, humpbacked, hairy-flanked — was flushed from the tall grass, pursued by the young, slim, spear-carrying /Ti!kay, the adults shadowing him in the chase. Out of sight of the camera the heavy animal was brought down by the boy’s spear and, to the rejoicing of the elders, finished off with stabs from his assegai. Just as quickly the animal was butchered, chopped into irregular bleeding chunks, its legs were hacked and jointed, and a dish of blobby wildebeest fat was set aside,

A fire was lit near the slabs of meat, and a lump of fatty flesh sizzled on it, while /Ti!kay the boy hunter underwent scarification, ritual knife cuts to his arms and chest and forehead. The boy’s father, Khan//, did the cutting — frowning but clearly proud — and these cuts were slathered and rubbed with the hot fat.

At this point in their viewing of the film, the schoolchildren screeched, because it was obviously painful to the boy, and just as obviously /Ti!kay endured it stoically. If the hunt had been a test of prowess, this scarification was a test of nerve. /Ti!kay was probably in his early teens, yet through this ordeal he was entering manhood.

The ritual of rubbing the charred meat and hot fat into the cuts, Lorna Marshall wrote, served “to insure that he will not be lazy, that his heart will say to him, ‘Why am I sitting here at my fire? Why am I not out hunting?’ ”

The wildebeest was a male, John Marshall said in his narration, and therefore /Ti!kay was scarified on his right side. “When eventually he kills a large female animal he will be cut on his left side.”

Initiated this way, he had greater powers. The anointed scars gave him protection — made it easier for him to find an animal, and would make him invisible to animals. Perhaps more important than this, the ceremony gave him the right to marry, which would not necessarily happen soon, but was certain in the fullness of time; and on the big day, because hunting and marriage were linked, his bride would share an animal that he had recently killed. “The primary sources of physical life — sex and food,” Lorna Marshall wrote of this event. “Power as a male and worthiness and dignity are associated with hunting … The bride’s people can capture at once the sexual and the hunting powers of the young man.”

When the lights went on, the children were whispering to each other. The film about playing with the assegais seemed to have a greater effect than this film of hunting, butchering, ritual scarification, and pain.

“What did you think of this film?” the UNESCO man asked.

They stopped whispering, lapsed into silence, and simply watched the white man who was repeating his question.

They had spaniel eyes, long lashes, smooth serious faces, intense expressions.

“Was it interesting to you?”

They murmured yes, a rising hum.

“She has cuts!” one of the girls said, and pointed behind her to a girl who was wriggling timidly in her chair.

“And he has cuts!” another said, indicating a frowning boy.

The wriggling girl stood up and showed her facial scarring.

I asked what it meant.

“It is for protection.”

I asked how many of them had been cut in this way. About a third of them put their hands up, more girls than boys. It was curious to see this assembled group of schoolchildren, in their neatly pressed and laundered uniforms, proudly acknowledging their ritual scarification, showing the slash marks on their faces and arms.

The session was just about over, but as my brief had been to talk about cultural preservation, I asked whether any of them had a story to tell — perhaps one they’d heard at home, in the village, or related by an elder. Several stood and told a short story, but the one that made the most impact was told by a tall, smiling, self-possessed girl, first in!Kung, her language, and then in English.

“Two men were out hunting,” she began in English, after she had made a great success of the story in!Kung — laughter all around. “They were deep in the bush, and it became night, and so they decided to sleep just there, under a tree. The first man fell asleep. But it was a cool night. The other man used a cheetah skin as a blanket, and he pulled it over himself. In the middle of the night, the first man woke up — eh! He saw the cheetah skin. He took his knife and stabbed at it, and slashed his friend’s leg.”

The students yelled with delight, as they had the first time they’d heard it in their own language.

“The friend began to cry out. When the man with the knife saw what he had done to his friend’s leg, he held his own face” — and the girl held her face and gestured madly — “and stabbed his eyes, he was so upset. So one was lame and the other was blind.”

The children howled at this irony, perhaps for the symmetry of it, perhaps for the sheer gory horror of it.

“Morning came.” The girl was smiling. She wasn’t done. “The blind one carried the crippled one on his shoulders back to the village.”

When the laughter died down, I asked, “Is there a moral to this story?”

“I don’t know.”

There was, I discovered, a Ju/’hoansi story called “The Beautiful Elephant Girl.” A folktale, it concerned the strange and sudden birth of the elephant girl, her meaningless murder by two brothers, the butchering of her corpse and her whole body cannibalized, the setting aside of her blood, the mystical opening of an anthill as a refuge, the blood swelling to create a rebirth of the Elephant Girl, a magic gemsbok horn, the reappearance of the murderous brothers, and the revenge on them: “When the two brothers had entered the village, she took out her magical gemsbok horn and blew on it, saying, ‘These two brothers and their village shall be broken apart and ruined!’ The horn blew down the village, flattened it to the ground. Then the beautiful elephant girl walked home.”

This weird disjointed tale, characteristic of traditional Ju/’hoansi stories, was not greatly different from the short gory tale the schoolgirl had told. The only difference was that the girl was extemporizing, and amusing her friends; and “The Beautiful Elephant Girl” was a tale that had been told by an elder and transcribed by a team of bilingual Ju/’hoansi.

It was what I had advocated to the students that morning.

And that was how I learned about the transcription project in Tsumkwe, the Kalahari Peoples Fund, and the enormous number of foreigners who had contributed to keeping this culture alive, while the indigenous people were helped along and looked after.

The Ju/’hoan Transcription Group had been active in Tsumkwe since 2002, but the tales had been collected since 1971, some of them recorded almost forty years ago by the distinguished Harvard anthropologist Megan Biesele, and the stories (printed in both English and Ju/’hoan) were faithful translations of recordings that had been made in villages. Much of this work was supported by the Kalahari Peoples Fund (based in Austin, Texas), which dated to the 1970s and operated throughout the apartheid era, creating homegrown reading materials for the local schools. There was no government involvement in the fund; in fact, the Namibian educational authorities had always resisted mother-tongue instruction in this area.

The Village Schools Project had been created within the Kalahari Peoples Fund in order to lobby the Namibian Ministry of Education to have the Ju/’hoan language used in schools and in printed materials. All of this information was available on the Kalahari Peoples Network, and the whole initiative was funded with foreign donations.

Over the years, the project had become more and more ambitious. The idea was to create a database of traditional stories, to codify the text by creating a user-friendly orthography for this phonetically complex language. Another goal was the updating of a Ju/’hoan dictionary. A Youth Transcription Group was started in order to pass on skills. This meant the training of transcribers to be computer savvy, the raising of money to buy equipment, and a collective effort to encourage anthropologists, volunteer teachers, writers, and aides to help run the center, guide the project, and see the work into print and onto the Internet.

Foreign aid! From afar came webmasters, tech assistants, linguists from Germany, donations of laptops and solar panels by foreign companies. After 2007 the Norwegian-funded Captain Kxao Kxami Community Centre became available, and now it had electricity and an Internet connection.

These aid givers from abroad engaged the whole community, starting with village-based students who would encourage elders to speak about the past and share stories. Some of the elders were healers, who would pass on their experiences of “psychic healing.” But the stories of local leaders who had participated in the struggle for Namibian independence were also recorded. The transcription group was a memory project, the oral history I had described in my talk — but I was a latecomer to this effort.

In the foreign-funded center with the foreign-funded equipment — computers, digital tape recorders, video cameras — the goal was “technological empowerment” — to protect the culture, produce educational materials for schools, and build an archive. The stated mission was for the Ju/’hoansi people to tell their own stories.

When I was asked to speak on “Preserving a Cultural Heritage,” this is what I had in mind. It saddened me to think that so much in Africa had been lost — the skills of building and farming, the arts of carving and ornamenting, of music and dance, of storytelling. I had not realized that the preservation had already been under way for so many years, and that the whole Ju/’hoansi community and a large foreign community of supporters were also involved.

If these foreigners hadn’t done it, no one would have done it. And preserving this history was an important matter — as important as providing water or food. It was all a lesson to me: none of it would have happened if it had been left to the Namibian government, which seemed to regard Tsumkwe and the lands beyond the Vet Fence as beneath notice. Without the inspired meddling of outsiders, Tsumkwe would have subsided into its own dust in silence. Because of this foreign involvement it had pride in its language, an oral history, a growing archive of stories, and a place to meet and make plans.

In Tsumkwe I met an American, a man from Seattle, who had been teaching in Namibia for fifteen years, the past two in the school at the crossroads.

“Lots of challenges here,” he said, because I had asked. “Remoteness, drunkenness, teen pregnancy.” But he was not dismayed; he was hoping to stay a few more years.

I saw that I had been hasty in judging some efforts by outsiders. This was necessary and timely. Yet you cannot see such hope and high spirits in the young and not think: What will happen to them?

The next day I voiced my anxiety to one of the South Africans, who simply shrugged.

“They’ll go to the cities. To Grootfontein. To Windhoek.”

“What will they do there?” I asked.

“They’ll be servants. Domestic service.”

It sounded crueler in that accent: dimisteek.

At the end of my last day, the children in a large group made their way back to the school compound, which was at the far side of the crossroads. They saw me watching from under a shade tree and called out, “Sir!”

I walked with them for a while and was heartened by their vitality — their humor, their teasing, their intelligence. Each of them carried a copybook with notes they’d taken at the event. When we parted, they called out, “Come back to Tsumkwe, sir!” and then they continued on their way, in the heat, attached to long shadows.