The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

8. Among the Real People

IT WAS ON THE FOLLOWING day, in the hot flat bush some miles north of Tsumkwe, that — as I began this narrative by saying — I crossed the 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 called in Afrikaans Boesmanland (Bushman Land), and generally known as the Kaokoveld. This had been redesignated Nyae Nyae, a homeland for the!Kung and subgroups like the Ju/’hoansi — hard to utter, click-thickened names for the ancient race that still inhabited the region.

An old dream of mine had been to meet and talk with some of these people in their own village, though “village” is the wrong word for a n!ore, the expanse of land they claimed to keep themselves alive — a portion of the landscape with vague boundaries they called home. It was an area of bush where there was water, wild game, and sufficient edible bulbs, tubers, roots, seeds, and manketti nuts for their diet. In that place they would have a campsite, called a tshu/ko, and build shelters — hardly more than windbreaks or twiggy lean-tos — just sleeping places, not for living in or shuffling around inside. They lived under the sky, they lived around the fire. That was the accepted notion of the Ju/’hoansi by travelers like me, many of us romantic voyeurs.

Long ago, in the freest period of my life, I had worked as a teacher in Africa for six years straight. I had revisited the continent every few years after that, sometimes staying for months. I had been up and down half a dozen great rivers, including the Nile and the Zambezi, hiked the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon, and crossed Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi. I had traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town. I had fraternized with, and worked among, Angoni people, Baganda, Nubians, Karomojong, Watutsi, WaGogo, Masai, Zulus, Kikuyu, the Sena people of the Lower River, the Batwa Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, and scores of other peoples. Yet in all that time I had never met a Ju/’hoansi — elusive, dwelling in small related groups — on his or her own turf.

But I had glimpsed them with fascination, the way you see a bird of passage flashing onto a nearby branch and twitching its brilliant tail. Their physiognomy — the look of these people, their whole physical being — was unmistakable. Now and then, on a busy Cape Town street or in a sleepy dorp in the countryside, I would see that light-hued, faintly Asiatic face, the narrow eyes, the delicate hands, the small stature, a distinct upright way of standing and a swift, almost skipping way of walking — and, even if the person happened to be wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf against the wind blowing from Table Bay or the Great Karoo, I knew whom I was looking at.

I always suspected that these people, oblique in answers to my direct questions, were far from home. And I felt there was something radiant about them. It was no illusion. It was the radiance of peacefulness from the core of their being, what Elizabeth Marshall Thomas called “their magnificent nonviolence.” They are known as, in a rendering of their own name for themselves, the Harmless People.

These were the people who had endured, and they had a claim to being the living remnant of the first humans on earth, with an ancient pedigree that was an unbroken link to the present. Bands of other Africans, mainly Bantu, those who were rovers and conquerors, had traveled — some settling, others moving on — through the forests in the heart of Africa, at first clockwise through the Congo and then fanning out and descending, percolating east and south as far as the Great Fish River. That river became a traditional boundary of the Cape Colony, where in the late eighteenth century a confrontation between the Xhosa on one bank and the Dutch and English settlers on the opposite bank led to a series of bloody wars. But both the Bantu and the whites were another story; they were migrants or the children of migrants.

The Ju/’hoansi were not migrants. Some had scattered because of persecution and land grabbing, but most of them had remained pretty much where they had always been, in this southern part of Africa, since the Upper Pleistocene, loyal to each other and clinging to their skills and traditions, famously peaceful and accommodating — no thieving, no fighting, and divorce so simple a matter that adultery was almost unknown among them.

Celebrated as trackers of game, masters of the hunt — just a small hunting party could bring down and butcher a fleet-footed, full-grown giraffe, as John Marshall had shown them doing in one of his earliest films. Brilliant as botanists, they recognized an enormous taxonomy of bush and savanna plants — used for food, for medicine, as fetishes, as ornaments. They knew the entomological chemistry of poison and the art of weapon making, the skills of using arrows and spears and snares. Despite all this, they hardly fought or raised their voices, had never gone to war with each other, nor had they become inflamed by bellicosity even against the greatest provocation — slave raids, intruding white settlers, and predatory Bantu hunters.

It was amazing, in the face of all the encroachments — they lived in a land where diamonds littered the ground like pebbles, where trophy animals might be slaughtered, where cattle might graze — amazing that the Ju/’hoansi still existed. Yet they did, though in dwindling numbers, and they had become the obsessive subjects, even the darlings, of ethnographers, for what they were able to tell us about how we as humans had lived in prehistory, and also as “noble savages” — “one of the most heavily scientifically commoditized human groups in the annals of science,” wrote Robert J. Gordon in The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass.

They seemed a timeless people, as eternal as the features of the landscape — the rocks, the gullies, the termite mounds. They didn’t grow old, they didn’t change, they endured in their ancestral land. That was the impression I had gotten from the first books I read.

It was, of course, all wrong, but what did I know?

Decades ago, the only books about the Ju/’hoansi I could find were the works of Laurens van der Post, but I soon learned to be wary of him. He had published Venture to the Interior in 1952, an account of his surveying trip to Nyasaland, and when I began to live there a little more than ten years later, I saw that he had made a crepuscular and existential narrative out of a fairly conventional few months of bushwhacking with a team of hearties in the Mlanje region of tea estates. I realized from that book and his others that he was something of a mythomaniac.

I once visited van der Post in England in 1975, for a magazine interview, and found him humorless and vain, monologuing to me, mostly about the highly colored life he had led, in the dry, imperious tone of a headmaster. His life had indeed been extraordinary in many respects (prisoner of the Japanese, friend of Carl Jung’s, patron of the Bushmen), but in his telling it was a succession of sullen boasts. He had an odd pout, his wet lower lip protruding as if in disbelief, staring blue eyes, and a severe, somewhat reluctant manner.

In a large wing chair he looked like an old auntie interrupted in her knitting, and had an auntie’s lined and tetchy face. He refused to see me alone, but remained canted sideways in his chair, surrounded by sycophants and handmaidens who treated him as a sage. (Later he would become a mentor to a similarly bedazzled Prince Charles.) Starring in his own films, he saw himself as a pioneer interpreter of the Bushmen, and though he had no language proficiency and no deep knowledge of the people, only a romantic enthusiasm for their tenacity and their culture, he was instrumental in helping to frame South African government policy that granted them a homeland.

I came to see that he was a posturing fantasist and fake mystic in the field, and as a writer he was an impressionist using colors, rather than a social scientist using facts. It was easy to understand and almost forgivable, because the people in the mid-1950s when he first visited them were still (we have the Marshalls’ work as proof) culturally coherent, self-sufficient, remote, and wonderful physical specimens. But van der Post tended to get carried away in describing them; his self-regard and his Jungian glosses impeded his narratives. His work, full of breathless mystery or plain inaccuracy, is either not mentioned or dismissed by later scholars, who seem to regard him, with reason, as a little more than a village explainer (The Lost World of the Kalahari) or fabulist (The Face Beside the Fire) — an unreliable witness.

The most complete book I found, the bible of Bushman culture, was the classic Specimens of Bushman Folklore by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, the earliest study of the people and their language. (Van der Post had created one of his Bushman books, The Heart of the Hunter, by rehashing the folktales in Specimens.) Bleek — stout, hairy, ursine, even to a lumbering bearish untidiness — was a linguistic genius, a Prussian philologist who migrated to South Africa in 1855 with the aim of compiling a Zulu grammar. But while a young student at the University of Berlin, in 1850, he was, as Neil Bennun wrote in The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People (2004), “the world’s greatest expert on the languages of southern Africa.” He suspected, and tried to prove, that the Bushmen’s languages might be related (because of the northward push of prehistoric peoples) to ancient Egyptian. He was scholarly but sickly — tubercular, easily fatigued, prone to chills, and habitually coughing up blood. He married Jemima Lloyd, daughter of a Welsh clergyman, but it was his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd who became his collaborator on the project of writing down and piecing together the elements of the Bushman language /Xam, and recording the stories and beliefs of these unknown and unregarded people.

How this happened is a good story, and a short one. Bleek did not have the stomach or the constitution for arduous travel. He could not meet the Bushmen on their own terms in their distant hinterland. But the Bushmen were routinely arrested for minor transgressions — drunkenness, loitering, theft, cattle rustling, trespassing, poaching (“Hunger had made criminals out of the /Xam men,” wrote Bennun). This was in the 1860s and 1870s. The captured men were brought in chains to Cape Town, put on trial, sentenced to hard labor, and jailed. Hearing of this, Bleek volunteered to house one of them at his little estate, The Hill, in Mowbray, a rustic village just outside the Cape Town city limits. This wish was granted, and other prisoners joined the Bleeks. As residents at The Hill, the convicts became their language teachers, and over time these Bushmen divulged their kukummi — their oral history, their traditions, their cosmology, their stories. The Bleek archive of Bushman lore, dictated by the prisoners, grew to twelve thousand pages.

Many of the stories were harsh, some bitter and violent. “If you were learning the language of the indigenous hunting and gathering people of South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century,” Bennun wrote, “the first words and sentences you learned were to do with hunger, dispossession and crime.”

Wilhelm Bleek died in 1875 at the age of forty-eight. Lucy Lloyd and Bleek’s daughter Dorothea carried on his work, deepening their understanding, relying on prisoner informants. After many trials, some of this material — groundbreaking ethnology of the earliest people — was published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911. Through the twenties and thirties curious travelers made forays into the Kalahari, yet these expeditions were largely touristic, not adding much to what Bleek and Lloyd had learned but only confirming the stereotype that the Bushmen were naked semisavage Stone Age hunters who slept under trees, grubbed for roots, chased down antelopes, and ate insects.

Much later, choosing to live among them and know them better, the Marshall family were the pioneers: Lorna in The!Kung of Nyae Nyae, the subtle and detailed study of the people, then her children, who documented the change and decay in the people’s circumstances — John in his many films, Elizabeth in her two evocative books. Ultimately, many other books appeared, and the titles alone are offputting: Land Filled with Flies, The Land God Made in Anger, The Bushman Myth, Women Like Meat—helpful, well-informed books, actually, but they kept the people two-dimensional, odorless, unphysical, out of focus, in sepia tones, as books of anthropology often do.

Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you’re reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to endure the unrewarding nuisance and delay of the road. But reading can also be a powerful stimulus to travel. That was the case for me from the beginning. Reading and restlessness — dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere — made me a traveler. If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes — importantly — to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

That was what compelled me to travel through a desiccated landscape from Tsumkwe to the Ju/’hoansi village on this very hot day.

Some Ju/’hoansi men were drying and curing slashed hunks of meat — thicker than mere strips; great black sinewy belts of it — that looked more like old leather than flesh, turning it into the jerky known all over southern Africa as biltong. They had food and water on their minds.

The settlement of shacks and shelters was up a narrow road of sand so soft and deep our vehicle plowed and butted it clumsily into heaps like a tipped-forward and wobbling wheelbarrow. We became stuck several times, the useless wheels scouring deeper ruts until the axles rested against the road. The sand was hot, too, as I found out when I knelt in it to push against the back bumper. I thought of walking the rest of the way to the settlement, but the driver, who was himself a town-dwelling Ju/’hoansi, and calm, urged me to be patient. After a while, the vehicle was plowing the sand again, and we swayed and slewed into the village.

A dozen small people wearing skins and beads rushed to greet us, all smiles.

But at the far side of the village, a group of five children, none older than ten or twelve, barefoot, dressed in conventional clothes, were sorting an array of plastic buckets and tin basins. In Tsumkwe, most children of that age, many of them Ju/’hoansi, would have been in school this morning, in blue-and-white uniforms, wearing shoes, scribbling in copybooks.

“They are going for water,” one of the men said through an interpreter, whose name was John.

As he spoke, the children shouldered their containers and set off through the low thornbush. I noticed that the man who had spoken was dressed in a traditional leather breechclout, called a chuana, and handsewn leather sandals, and that he carried a wooden staff. The water-seeking Ju/’hoansi children wore castoff Western clothes that are found all over sub-Saharan Africa. The boys had on torn shirts and shorts, the two small girls pink and blue dresses. Far from seeming like hunter-gatherers, they looked like urchins in any rural African village. And like most African urchins they were skinny and overworked.

“Where’s the water — is there a creek nearby?” I asked.

“No water! The children are going two kilometers for water!” I could see grievance on the man’s face as he spoke in his language. “The government promised us a water pipe three years ago, but it hasn’t come.”

The drought had lasted for years. Weather was often blamed for Africa’s troubles, but “what is the use of ascribing any catastrophe to nature?” Rebecca West asked herself in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and answered, “Nearly always man’s inherent malignity comes in and uses the opportunities it offers to create a graver catastrophe.”

Chickens were pecking in the sand near us, and a little distance away a crudely made shed looked more substantial than the shelters of tree branches and thatch I had seen in the black-and-white photo plates in anthropology books. This was not a seasonal camp but seemed more like a permanent settlement, and to say it was a poor one was an understatement.

I asked about the belts of meat blackening in the sun, about thirty pounds of it draped on a wooden rack.

“It is elephant meat.”

“You killed an elephant? Tell me how.”

This made the Ju/’hoansi man laugh. “No, no,” he said. “We don’t kill elephants.”

“Where did the meat come from?”

“From a trophy hunter.”

“A Ju/’hoansi man?” I knew it could not have been. No village hunter anywhere here was interested in killing an elephant or a lion or a buffalo as a trophy. “Who was it?”

“Hunter!”

“From where?”

“White man!”

I wanted to know the word he’d used. It was !hû — white person. Trying it out, I said I was a !hû, and they agreed, yes, but I was also a ju-s-a-!gaa — a red man, and they confirmed what Lorna Marshall had discovered and explained, that black Africans are called ju-s-a-djo — black people.

“And what are you — red or black or white?”

“We are Ju/’hoansi!” And he gave the name the emphasis of its true aboriginal meaning: We are Real People!

“Was this a big elephant?”

“Very big,” the man said, flinging his arms out, “with big tusks.”

“Why don’t the trophy hunters kill small, weak elephants?” I asked, another leading question — but he knew I was testing him.

“The big one with tusks is the only elephant they want.”

As the Ju/’hoansi man led me around the compound, the interpreter and some women followed us. The women, young and old, also wearing animal skins and shell and ostrich egg beads as ornaments, were bare-breasted, and one carried a child in a sling.

“Look, Mr. Paul,” John, the interpreter, said — and by the way, this dapper Ju/’hoansi man was wearing a T-shirt, sunglasses, and blue jeans, with sturdy shoes on his feet. As he walked he jingled his car keys, which were chained to a plastic tag. “He wants to show you this hook.”

The Ju/’hoansi man in the leather clout snatched a pole resting against a stump. A long stiff wire was attached to one end of the pole and a wicked-looking hook to the other end. Shaking it, thrusting it, he explained how it was used to capture any small animal that had retreated into a hole in the ground. The hook was pushed into the hole — sometimes to its entire length, which was seven or eight feet — until the animal was spiked and yanked out bleeding.

“What animal are you after?”

“The springhare.”

“Are there many here?”

“No. Just a few.” The man looked downcast, and I had the impression there were no springhares at all to catch, because the pole looked lethal but unused — no blood on the hook — perhaps just a curiosity to show to a credulous visitor like me.

Jingling his keys again, John said, “Mr. Paul, you want to go for a bush walk?”

“Not now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

I had seen an old man standing in the shade of a tree, holding a sturdy, well-strung bow. He wore an apron of animal skin and had been watching us making the rounds of the drying meat and the weapons. He was slight but sinewy, as they all were. I was attracted by his stance — not leaning against the tree but standing lightly on his feet under its boughs, dappled by the filtered sunlight, just staring at us, unmoving, as though we were no more than unheeding animals, browsing in his compound.

“I want to talk to him,” I said.

I am making this sound sober and deliberate, and there might be an unintentional note of ponderous solemnity in these descriptions. It was a very hot morning, over a hundred degrees once again. I was writing notes and asking questions at the same time, and all the while tramping through the sand. This seems to have all the bitter ingredients of a hard day. But it was not hard at all. I was happy.

I was happier than I could remember being when so far from home. Happiness had removed all obstacles. I hardly noticed the heat, I was excited, I wasn’t hungry. The fulfillment of an old dream can be that way if the reality matches the dream. Some people who have dreamed of the pyramids and finally manage to travel to Giza are disappointed at the sight of them. “I hadn’t realized they were so small,” a man once said to me in Egypt, because the pyramids had towered in his imagination. But most people are blown away by their first sight of the Grand Canyon; their first experience of the Balinese Monkey Dance, the Ketjak; their first glimpse of a breaching humpback whale. That was how I felt. Being among these people exceeded my dream. And maybe happiness is the wrong word; perhaps what I felt was bliss bordering on rapture.

“Please ask that man if I can speak to him.”

When the man was asked, he didn’t change his posture or his expression, nor did he blink, and I was afraid the answer would be no.

“He will speak to you.”

A stranger, whether black or white, among these people was called ju dole — a bad or harmful person. “The strange is potentially harmful in!Kung thinking,” wrote Lorna Marshall. Strange places, strange people, and strange situations make the Ju/’hoansi apprehensive. Yet as a peaceable people they have ways of dealing with the alien and the odd. First they put down their weapons before greeting a stranger, because they believe that approaching someone while armed might provoke trouble. They are polite even toward a person who is obnoxiously ju dole; they maintain restraint, modesty, and deference.

So the old man, observing the ritual courtesies of his people, could not reasonably refuse to talk to me, although he had kept himself away from the eager group that had welcomed me, and looked wary and oblique as I approached him.

He was a ju n!a, an old person, and this expression, like mzee in Swahili and bambo in Chichewa, is a term of respect, meaning “elder” or “father.” The elderly in Africa, men more than women, are generally accorded a special status — age demands deference. But the age of a person who has lived a hard life is always difficult to reckon; an elder in such a society might be no more than forty or fifty. I had the impression that this man was much older than that, and that he might be willing to share kukummi — talk, stories, history.

His name was Dambó. He did not know how old he was. John translated for me.

“Seventy or eighty,” Dambó said, and admitted he was guessing. This excited me further. If he was seventy, he would have been nine in 1950, the year the Marshalls first came and found the culture intact, unviolated. He might have memories of the old ways.

“Did the Christian missionaries come here?”

“Yes,” Dambó said, “long ago. I was myself a Christian for a while.” He shrugged as he spoke. “But I gave it up.”

“What about the mantis. Do you believe in the power of the mantis?”

I asked because the green praying mantis is one of the dominant creatures in the stories collected by Bleek and Lloyd; the mantis is a supernatural being, called /Kaggen, who was a creator and, through the dazzle of his dreams, a bringer of fire and tools. The mantis was also creator of the /Xam people, the group to which Bleek’s convict informants belonged, and this creator was not always an insect but sometimes an old man. Nothing in the /Xam or Ju/’hoansi (to whom the /Xam are related) mythology is simple. In this it resembles many of the world’s mythologies, full of transformation, where animals become people or cohabit with them. In Hindu mythology, a deity might give birth to an elephant, as in the case of Ganesh, the four-armed, one-tusked, elephant-headed god whose mother is the voluptuous Parvati (but even that is not the whole story). And the Ju/’hoansi believe, as do many other peoples on earth, that humans were once animals, and still retain the characteristics of wild creatures. And the other way around: certain animals can be tricky and selfish like humans, because their ancestors were human.

“The beasts of prey were once people,” a Bushman told Lucy Lloyd, and she entered this in a notebook, which remained in the archives until Neil Bennun transcribed and published it. The rest of the fragment Bennun found is tantalizing. “[The people] became beasts of prey because of the Lynx and the Anteater — they were the ones responsible. They cursed each other because of the little Springbok’s doings. They cursed each other.

“All things were once people.”

The Anteater made laws that ended immortality for most creatures, but not /Kaggen (the mantis), who survived as a hero, a trickster, and a shape-shifter, because /Kaggen was immortal.

“Yes, I know this mantis,” Dambó said. He called it by its Ju/’hoansi name, G//auan — the “//” sound was the giddyup click.

“Please tell me about the mantis,” I asked, through John.

“It is a devil,” Dambó said. “It brings illness.”

“But is it always bad?”

“It is strong. It knows everything.”

“It’s just a small insect,” I said, in the way I might bait a Hindu by saying that Ganesh was just a jolly elephant with one tusk who often rode or danced on a mouse.

“The mantis can kill anything,” Dambó said.

“You could kill it if you wanted to, with that stick,” I said, because in addition to his bow, Dambó had a short staff jammed into his woven belt, and the thing had a thickened top like the knobkerries that Zulus and Boers used for whacking people on the head.

“If you kill the mantis, you will be in trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“You will get sick. You will die.”

This was interesting, because here we were in the bush, where wildebeest, warthogs, jackals, and hyenas were common, and lions and cheetahs, though rarer, might turn up too, not to mention the snakes that thrived in this hot desert: the mamba, the python, the puff adder. A hyena had prowled around the Ju/’hoansi shelters the previous night, probably attracted by the hanging elephant meat. But the fragile-looking praying mantis was feared more than any of these.

“Do the young people here know about the mantis?”

“The young people here don’t know anything of this,” Dambó said.

Some of the youths were watching us talk, and five women sat apart from them, the youngest a shy, elfin-faced girl of sixteen or so, the others much older, one of them a crone and partially blind. Another young woman joined them, and this one carried a dazed infant in a sling.

Dambó, too, had poor vision — pale, clotted, unfocused eyes that were glazed and weepy. His skin was smooth and lined like glove leather. His narrow twisted mustache gave him a look of almost dandified elegance.

“Have you traveled far from here?” I asked.

“I went to Windhoek once,” he said, and when I prodded him he added, “Some years ago.”

He was as vague about the time he’d been there as he was about his age. The Ju/’hoansi observe the seasons but not the years — and only the recent dry or rainy seasons. Years have no meaning, history has no meaning; the past is simply gone and largely unremembered.

“What did you think when you saw Windhoek?”

“I liked it. It was very good. It was so big.”

“What did you like most about the city?”

“The best part” — and for the first time in this little talk he smiled and showed his small darkened teeth — “you don’t have to worry about getting food. There is plenty of food.” He continued smiling at the memory of meals in distant Windhoek. “There is everything to eat.”

I asked for details — how and why he had made the long trip — but he was unforthcoming. I had the impression that it might have been political. He was ju n!a, an elder, and since elders were held in high esteem, his visit might have been part of a government initiative. In spite of the fact that the Ju/’hoansi were marginalized, advocates for their development worked in affirmative action programs, put in place by Namibia’s first prime minister, Sam Nujoma, who had taken an interest in uplifting the Ju/’hoansi after independence. Delegations from rural villages made numerous visits to the capital; Dambó might have been a member of one of these groups, reporting a grievance, offering testimony, or giving an opinion. Such a group would be comfortably housed and well fed. But all that was in the past. Windhoek for him was a place where no one went hungry, unlike here, where finding food was always difficult.

Then he volunteered another memory, that among his travels, as a small boy he had been to Rundu. This town, due north, on the Namibia-Angola border, was several hundred miles away, and there was no direct road, only a bush track through the semidesert and the wilderness of Kaudom, now a remote game park.

“We went on foot and by truck,” he said, and I worked out that “small boy” meant he might have been eight or nine. It could have been 1950 or earlier, when, as all the anthropologists testified, the foraging and hunting culture had been intact, the people ignored, unchanged, still following the old ways.

“Dambó, what do you remember of Rundu?”

“I saw a white man.”

I seemed to hear the word !hû. I verified this and asked him why he used this particular word and not the one for red man, which I thought was interchangeable.

He said, “He was white like you. We call you white because your skin is white.”

“You were a small boy then. Had you seen a white man before that?”

“Never.”

“What did you think when you saw the man?”

“I was with my father. My father took me to Rundu. He explained everything to me.”

“What did he say?”

“My father said, ‘The white people are the people you have to work for.’ ”

Forced labor, amounting to blackbirding, was common as late as the 1960s, with many instances of white Afrikaner farmers raiding Ju/’hoansi settlements and forcing the men into their trucks to work their farms, keeping them in harsh servitude, if not semi-slavery, as harshly treated farm workers. By putting pressure on the Pretoria government, Laurence Marshall helped put a stop to this brutal practice.

“When your father said that you had to work for them, how did you feel?”

“We were afraid of the white people.”

“Were you afraid because they would force you onto their farms?”

He thought hard before he answered, and finally said, “They were not good people for us.”

“Did you think the white people might hurt you?”

“We thought, ‘They will kill us.’ ” His face was grayish in the shadows, and he gazed into the middle distance with his glazed and clotted eyes. He said, “Herero people were also killing San people.”

Also true. The animosity had a long history, certainly since pre-colonial times and probably much further back. Early-nineteenth-century explorers had described the pitched battles between the two peoples. As the Herero had been pastoral and the San hunter-gatherers, the two modes of life inevitably came into conflict. The Herero driving their cattle before them had encroached on traditional Bushman lands, and the intrusion had resulted in submission, exploitation, and bloodshed.

“Are the Herero your enemies now?”

“No. We have no enemies now.”

“Everything’s peaceful?”

Standing stock-still seemed to be his way of taking exception to my generalization. He said, “We have problems.”

“Tell me some of your problems.”

“The main one in this village is water,” Dambó said. But “village” seemed a misnomer for the small cluster of huts and sheds in the immensity of low thorn scrub. “We have to walk so far to find water.”

“The children go for the water.” I had been struck by the small kids setting off with their buckets and basins on the hot weekday morning.

“That is the children’s work.”

“What about other problems?” I asked. “How do people get along?”

“We get along,” he said.

Practically all observers of the Ju/’hoansi spoke of their acceptance of adultery, because divorce was a simple matter. An adulterous partner was separated from the marriage and, suddenly single, allowed to continue without the taint of transgression.

So I asked Dambó about this, and he gave me a surprising answer.

“If your wife has sex with another man, you beat her,” he said. “You might beat the man, too. Or kill him.”

“Do such things happen here?”

“A few years ago a man killed his wife in this village.”

It seemed uncouth to ask for details, so I let it pass. Many of the violent crimes among the Ju/’hoansi were attributed to drunkenness, which was a scourge of Ju/’hoansi life today. According to one recent researcher, as much as a third of a family’s income might be spent on alcohol.

Recalling the film Rite of Passage, which I had seen in Tsumkwe, I asked Dambó about his first kill. The memory of this successful hunt animated him, and though it was said that the Ju/’hoansi did not dwell in the past, and were unmoved by historical events, it was a different matter — if Dambó was an example — in the case of personal history, where ritual was involved.

“My first kill was an oryx,” he said. The usual name for this large antelope (Oryx gazella) is the gemsbok. A mature male can weigh over four hundred pounds, and its long sharp horns, like a pair of samurai swords, make the oryx more than a match for an attacking lion. Dambó raised his arm and said, “He was bigger than this.”

“And how big were you?”

“I was small.”

“How did you kill him?”

He hoisted his bow and made the gesture of nocking an arrow and letting it fly. He said, “Then I used my assegais.”

“What happened after you killed the oryx?”

“They cut my arm — see?” He showed me the ritual scars of the slashes on his forearm that his father had made and pressed with hot fat and oryx flesh.

We talked some more, and out of idle curiosity I wanted to ask about the Ju/’hoansi word for orgasm, which was tain. I had read (in Richard B. Lee’s The Dobe Ju/’hoansi) that tain was also the word used to describe the intense sweetness of wild honey. I resisted inquiring because I thought he might be offended, and rightly so, by something so indelicate. Otherwise, I was so happy talking to this old man I had not noticed the time. He seemed content to answer my questions, and perhaps because he was so venerable, no one was emboldened to interrupt.

But during a long pause in the conversation, John tapped his watch and mouthed the words “bush walk.”

Dambó stayed behind, frowning in the dappled shade, as we set off into the low thorn scrub in a long file of men and women wearing skins who seemed to dance through the bush. They pointed out the plants they used for medicine, the berries they ate, and the branches that were the hardest and straightest for arrow shafts.

The young elfin-faced woman found a vine and dug up 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, and, smiling, she offered the first bite to me. Then everyone shared it, as they shared everything.

Farther on, two men knelt in the leaf litter facing each other. They took turns spinning a two-foot-long stick between their palms, which raised a puff of smoke from the friction of its bottom end in a darkening piece of soft wood, and in the dust of the drilled block some sparks were lit. One man lifted the glowing, gently smoking wood and blew on it with lips framed in a kissing expression, and we had fire.

The women sat in the shade and watched, one of them nursing her baby, as an older man made, out of twisted vine and a bent-over branch, a snare for a guinea hen or any other unwary bird.

They named the trees, they identified a lizard and chased it, they called out to each other, they laughed. The sun beat down. The heat was tremendous and seemed life-giving, and everything was golden.

And though it was all a charade, my mood of happiness persisted.

Back at the clearing and the rack of drying elephant meat, the shelters and sheds looked more depressing and shantylike after the light and air of the bush walk. All the men and women had vanished, and soon others appeared, dressed in faded used clothes. But what I took to be a whole new crew were the same people, who had changed from their animal skins into Western clothes that had been handed out by foreign charities, T-shirts lettered Tommy Hilfiger and Springfield Hockey, and old pleated skirts and threadbare pink pajama tops with bunny rabbits printed on them.

They all hung back, looking a bit apprehensive, because they had a favor to ask.

John, the dapper interpreter and driver, said, “They are asking if you can take some of them to Tsumkwe. That one” — and he pointed to a thin teenage girl in a blue blouse and plaid skirt — “she is sick and wants to go to the clinic.”

“Tell them they can come with us,” I said. Five of them climbed into the Land Rover, the ailing girl helped by the others into the back seat, where she lay as if sorrowful, and she did not move even when farther down the road the vehicle became stuck in deep sand and we struggled to push it.

What I had seen, all of my happiness, my bliss bordering on rapture, was the result of witnessing a reenactment.

“Today, nobody lives in the old way,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote in 2006. “All Bushmen, unless they put on skins for a photographer, wear the clothing of the dominant cultures … and none live by hunting and gathering, although with these activities they sometimes supplement their meager diet, which today is often cornmeal provided by the Namibian government as a welfare ration.”

A German charitable organization, the Living Culture Foundation, sponsored some of these Ju/’hoansi villages as “Living Museums” (Lebende Museen). As the foundation elaborated on its website and in its brochures, “A Living Museum is an interesting and authentic way of presenting traditional culture,” and “guests can learn a lot about … the original way of living of the San.”

“The Living Culture Foundation’s three aims are to protect traditional culture, to encourage intercultural dialogue, and to fight poverty.” Toward the realization of the last aim, the foundation encouraged “the establishment of sustainable projects for the tourism industry, for example our ‘Living Museums.’ ”

In the mid-1930s, when the Ju/’hoansi were still known as Bushmen, a white South African named Donald Bain mounted a campaign to protect their way of life, put some of them on display at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, and promoted them (for their “Stone Age” reputation) as “living fossils.” What he managed to do, to realize his vision of the people, was not very different from the creation of the Living Museums.

What I saw — what visitors in general see — is a travesty in the precise meaning of the word: a parody, a dressing up in unnatural clothes. The Ju/’hoansi were costumed, misrepresenting themselves to cater to the imaginations of fantasists, of which I was one. It was like taking the reenactment at Plimoth Plantation, and its employees dressed as Pilgrims, for the reality of life south of Boston today. Ultimately, I saw the reality of Tsumkwe, and read more of the Ju/’hoansi’s travails, which were extreme. “Far from being ‘beautiful people living in a primeval paradise,’ ” one anthropologist has written, “they are in reality the most victimized and brutalized people in the bloody history that is southern Africa.”

If I was a latecomer to the world of the Ju/’hoansi, I was not alone. Anthropologists agree that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle ended in the 1970s, largely as a result of the South African army’s installing itself in Tsumkwe and recruiting Ju/’hoansi into its ranks to fight the Namibian nationalists. The South Africans spread money around; they doled out free food; they discouraged hunting in some areas and made it unlawful in others. Deprived of their traditional livelihood, the Ju/’hoansi moved closer to the growing town, and with their army money they bought food at the store and alcohol from the shebeens. And for the first time in tens of thousands of years they began to suffer from Western diseases — high blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments, and alcoholism.

The Kalahari Peoples Fund was started in 1973, the moving force behind it being the anthropologists and linguists who had observed the decline of the traditional lifestyle. In 1981 John Marshall and Claire Ritchie started the Nyae Nyae Development Fund and began drilling boreholes to supply water to family compounds. One hope for the people’s survival lay in learning agricultural and stock-raising skills to become small farmers, as well as earning wages and doing occasional foraging. To that end, the Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Cooperative was established.

At about the time the Ju/’hoansi had nearly abandoned hunting and gathering, a South African filmmaker shot The Gods Must Be Crazy in and around Tsumkwe, using Ju/’hoansi actors and celebrating the “living fossil” aspect of the people. This was in 1984, and though the gimmick of the film — the McGuffin — was a CocaCola can that was chucked from a plane into the unviolated Eden of Bushman Land, it was a time when in fact Western soft drinks and beer were freely available, when alcoholism and poverty were eating away at the culture.

The Ju/’hoansi lost their land in the cause of nature conservation, tourist safaris, and expanding game reserves where elephants (like the fillets and biltong of the one I had seen) were killed by wealthy foreigners. Robert Gordon, in The Bushman Myth — his subtitle, The Making of a Namibian Underclass, says it all — gives a detailed chronology of the loss of Ju/’hoansi lands and describes how tourism robs the people of their dignity, exploits and suppresses them, and leaves them manipulated and unprepared for new ways of life.

But there is near unanimity in the belief that the Ju/’hoansi no longer want the traditional lifestyle for themselves. “Is it right that we should still be wearing loincloths?” one elder asks, referring to a planned government game reserve for tourists in which the Ju/’hoansi would be part of the colorful foreground (described in Lee, The Dobe Ju/’hoansi): “[Eating well] is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean our women should have to expose their stomachs and buttocks again by wearing skin clothing.”

In the aftermath of the anachronistic The Gods Must Be Crazy — which made anthropologists apoplectic with rage — John Marshall compared the Ju/’hoansi, in the way they were stereotyped, to the conventional image of the Hollywood redskin. Almost thirty years ago he wrote, “Among the simplest and dangerous [misconceptions] is the widespread conviction that, somewhere in the Kalahari, Bushman people still live skillfully and peacefully by hunting and gathering. The danger lies in the belief that these mythical people both can and want to live their ancient life in isolation” (John Marshall and Claire Ritchie, Where Are the Ju/’wasi of Nyae Nyae?).

The process of this misunderstanding he calls “Death by Myth,” the title of one of his last films. It is the myth that they are still hunter-gatherers, that they can go back to it and flourish that way. “The myth is inherent in our thinking about Bushmen.”

The traditional mode of living is long gone. A Ju/’hoansi born after 1950 would know little or nothing about hunting and gathering. “The cycle of knowledge was broken.” Apart from a handful of Ju/’hoansi who allowed themselves to be co-opted into the choreographed charade I had seen, the vast majority want to join the mainstream, go to school, work, live in a stable and safe place, and never again have to depend on the insecure life in the bush. They have drifted to town, where manual labor, even pick-and-shovel work, is easier than hunting. Some welfare was available at Tsumkwe, and the new clinic was installed to deal with the new diseases.

In this grim fate, the Ju/’hoansi had gone from a fleet-footed bush-dwelling people who chased down game, to sedentary town dwellers plagued by drunkenness and hunger. In the past they had been able to move their settlement, to search for animals or water. But by living in a static way, in a cash economy, in a house on a small plot of land, this was not possible, so they became more dependent on government assistance.

The myth of the Bushman has shaped the plans of the NGOs that try to help them. For the many charities and NGOs (the Living Museums program was the most visible one), which were sentimental like me, hankering for the days Before the Fall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas had a shrewd rejoinder: “Such organizations have no choice but to carry out their missions,” she wrote in The Old Way. “No wonder that they wish to save traditional Nyae Nyae, a place where an indigenous population occupied an ecosystem for 35,000 years without ruining it. Who would not want the survival of a life style that could accomplish that?” And she added, “The myth was that the Ju/’hoansi wanted it.”

So they don’t hunt as they once did. They eat junk food and too much refined sugar, and they drink themselves into stupefaction, yet even in dysfunctional Tsumkwe the Ju/’hoansi retain their social culture of interdependency. With this mode of survival and generosity, they help each other through hard times.

There was no future for them in being dependent on tourists’ visits, or the leftovers from trophy hunting, or government handouts. It seemed to me that, at bottom, Tsumkwe was one vast welfare scheme funded by NGOs. But in the face of an indifferent government, what was the alternative? I had seen that in the recording of oral histories and folktales, and with the health programs, some success had been achieved by the agents of virtue from foreign countries.

And perhaps the Ju/’hoansi would manage to become small sustainable farmers, keeping cattle, feeding themselves, and overcoming the new diseases and the old hardships of hunger and lack of water.

I was disillusioned, of course, as anyone would be, knowing what I knew now. I had been wrong. Being wrong and disillusioned seems an inevitable consequence of any serious African journey. But I felt lucky in one respect. I had met the old man Dambó. He was undoubtedly a man from the past, and knowledgeable — wise, experienced, a patriarch. That part of my visit, I was convinced, was neither a travesty nor a charade. Dambó was a true relic who had somehow survived from an earlier age. He could have said, with Job and Ishmael, And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

The image of the Ju/’hoansi we cling to — I did anyway — is that of a wild-dwelling, self-sufficient people. We seem to need them to be that way, not merely different from us, and purer, but more different than they really are — tenacious, resourceful, generous, peaceful, as if inhabiting Eden. They are reminders of who we once were, our ancient better selves. At one time, long ago, all of us were foragers on earth. What a relief it is in a world yearning for authenticity to know that though we have blighted our habitat, there is an unspoiled place on the planet, and a people who have defied modernity by clinging to their old ways. The past recaptured. Isn’t it pretty to think so?