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.......................................... If we lose the dance, then we disappear.
In the circle between the singers and the fire, the healer Besa was dancing: a slow, stamping rhythm set to a beat of many hands coming together in complicated sequence. The trance came suddenly. Besa staggered, stumbled into the fire right into the flames, then danced on, his bare feet somehow unburned, his head tilted back, eyes rolling white in their sockets, veins standing out hard on his neck and forehead. A pure, high note, a scream almost, pitched somewhere between agony and joy rocketed out from his mouth to resound off the vault of bright Kalahari stars. He staggered over to Dawid, the old Bushman leader, and closed his hands around the old man's grizzled head. At the firelight's edge, among the singing women sat my mother, Polly, her eyes wide open, fully alive. In that moment three decades fell away, and I was once again the little boy listening rapt to my young mother's stories about Africa, the land of her birth. Tales of a hot land ablaze with colour, completely unlike the grey London reality outside our front door. Tales that had included this place where we now sat: the Kalahari, a vast flat grassland where--so my mother had told me--lived a semi-mythical people called the Bushmen; small, golden-skinned hunters who didn't make war, who spoke to the spirits and sang to the stars, and had lived there since the dawn of time. As soon as I was old enough I set off on a number of trips to Africa, inspired by her stories. Still, it was not until 1995, after a decade of exploring, that I finally found the resources necessary for penetrating the deep Kalahari. I had spoken to so many old Kalahari hands by then, that I knew that if you drove east of a small government post in northeast Namibia and looked out for a grove of tall baobabs rising above the bush away to the south, then you might or might not find a track leading off towards them, at the end of which you might or might not find a village of the Ju/Hoansi Bushmen (pronounced junkwazi with a loud wet click on the k) one of the last groups still living almost entirely as hunter-gatherers. Following these vague directions, I found the track, made camp under the largest of the baobabs, built a fire and brewed up some coffee. There was a scrunch of feet on leaves. I looked up. Two Bushmen had walked into the clearing. Real Bushmen I had come to meet the wild, gentle people of my mother's stories. From the outset, however, all my preconceptions were turned upside-down. The younger of the two men, Benjamin Xishe, was dressed in ragged Western clothes with Reeboks on his feet. He walked straight up to me and welcomed me in fluent English. Meanwhile the older man, clad in a more traditional skin loincloth (or xai), looked on, smoking marijuana out of a pipe made from a hollowed out machine gun bullet. Were these real Bushmen, I found myself thinking? Had I come so far only to find a ruined vestige of the gentle hunters of my mother's childhood stories? Benjamin understood my confusion. Indeed, he shared it, and explained over the course of that first awkward contact how most Bushmen now existed both in their tradition and in the black African and Western cultures that surrounded them, hence his good English. But that did not mean they had lost the old ways. To prove it, next day he took me hunting, allowing me to follow behind as, expertly, silently, he stalked the shy steenbok and hartebeest, his only weapon a small bow, the arrows poisoned with a paste made from crushed beetle larvae. I stayed a week. As well as hunting, I went gathering with the women who taught me that the seemingly barren semi-desert was in fact a cornucopia if you only knew where to look. When we ran out of water they dug up tubers whose succulent flesh quenched the thirst, or they picked tsamma melons from the ground, mashing the flesh into liquid and using the rind for a cup. They showed me herbs, barks and roots useful for anything from contraception to conception, stomach cramps to arthritis, and which, I was told, were most effective when combined with the trance, or healing dance. If I hung around long enough, Benjamin and the other Ju/Hoansi told me, I might be invited to witness one of these. I went back home, planning to return again the following year. In the meantime I began researching more on the Kalahari and soon realized that the free, peaceful life of the Ju/Hoansi was the exception rather than the rule. Almost everywhere else Bushmen were being dispossessed wholesale by cattle ranchers (both black and white) and by governments intent on mining the diamonds underneath the Kalahari and on developing the Bushmen into farmers who lived in one place, had jobs and paid taxes. The result was land loss, despair, and its inevitable by-products: alcoholism, violence, abuse, suicide and prostitution. I managed to persuade a publishing company to let me write a book about this, and the year after meeting Benjamin, went back to Africa intent on playing the journalist. ....................................................... He became a bird, and would fly until
he found the sick person's spirit By far the worst affected group were the Xhomani Bushmen of South Africa. Back in the early 70s they had been evicted from what is now the Kgalagadi National Park, South Africa's second largest reserve, and were now fighting a land claim to have this vast area returned to them. It seemed the best place to start my reporting. Reduced now to some thirty or so individuals, they scratched a living by the side of the road. Yet as Dawid Kruiper, their grizzled, canny old leader told me on the first day I met him: 'We can lose everything, the land, the game, the wild foods. But as long as we have just a little patch of ground to dance on, we survive. If we lose the dance, then we disappear. With it, we can be as we are and still be happy.' First healing The first day with Dawid was also the day I witnessed my first healing. Soon after we had arrived at the slummy roadside settlement, an old woman, bare but for a skin xai, came wandering over to us, swaying and singing to herself. At first I thought that she must be drunk; in fact she was in trance, a very gentle one. Without making any greeting she took Cait, my white female guide, by the hands, made her lie down on her back in the sand and then began to move her hands over Cait's abdomen, singing all the while. After perhaps ten minutes of this she then simply got up and walked away still singing. Driving back to our camp, Cait revealed that, just days before, she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had not yet told anyone. As far as I know, Cait (still healthy now, five years on) never sought any further treatment. A month later, while among the Nharo Bushmen of western Botswana, I was invited to attend my first trance dance, for an old woman with painful arthritic swellings on her legs. The trance was violent, anguished--the healer (a man this time) screaming and sobbing as if in fearful pain, and pulling at the old woman's legs with frightening force, while all around him a chorus of younger women kept up a rhythmic, chanting song. The healer had a helper dancing behind him who rubbed his back with burning coals (neither man was burned) the first few times he entered his trance, so that he would go fully into the trance only when it had reached its strongest pitch. The dance lasted until dawn. Next day the woman's swellings were gone. A shape-shifter Eventually, while moving between the different Bushman groups of Botswana and Namibia, I began to hear of an especially powerful healer living away to the north, a man called Besa, who had a reputation as a shape-shifter, a man who could transform himself from man into lion or leopard, and who could heal people long-distance. The image of the shape-shifter seems to be as old and as universal as humanity itself. Cave paintings from Africa to the Arctic, from the Americas to China, share this common theme. I had always assumed it had something to do with hunting rather than healing. I was intrigued, but also confused. I had come to the Kalahari to play the journalist, but I was finding myself irresistibly drawn to this 'healing thing', as I called it. For some gut reason, I felt that if I could find this man Besa, get to the bottom of this shape-shifting, then my dilemma would resolve itself and my real role become clear. So after many months of searching I at last arrived under a small siringa tree, its green branches buzzing with yellow and black striped beetles, at the foot of which sat a little man with strange round eyes like an owl's or a cat's: Besa. I explained why I had come. He was silent awhile, then told me he knew nothing of this shape-shifting. Resigned, I made to go, was already walking back to my vehicle to begin the long journey back south when Besa said, 'Stop'. I stopped. 'Sit down', he said, 'I will tell you of these things'. Shape-shifting was something you did while in trance, said Besa. You danced until your body fell unconscious and your spirit climbed the rope into the world of spirits, where distance and dimension meant nothing, and there you took on the shape of the animal you needed. Sometimes for healing, said Besa, he became a bird, and would fly until he found the sick person's spirit lying down in the bush. He would hop onto their shoulder and sing until he felt the person smile, and then the sickness would be gone. Other times, if someone else had caused the sickness, he would become a lion or a leopard and hunt down the spirit of the person who had sent the evil thought, confront them and make them admit that they had done it: and in the admission the curse would be undone. It was different every time, he added, and moreover each healer had his or her own way. Everything depended on the situation, the moment. Leopards As for my own dilemma, said Besa, that night he would trance for me to see what could be done. It turned out to be a happy, laughing trance filled with snatches of song and joyous little jigs. A strange pulse, felt at the farthest edge of sensation, flowed from his hands into my body. 'Leopards! Leopards!' he shouted and two leopards growled from the darkness, setting the village dogs into fearful, barking frenzy, and then continued to prowl just outside the firelight until Besa at last dropped unconscious in the sand. Next morning I felt greatly relaxed, at ease, but no wiser. 'Go back to the south', Besa told me, 'and everything will become clear.' So I went back, 1000 miles south, to sly old Dawid and the alcoholic, dispossessed Xhomani Bushmen of South Africa. 'So, have you discovered something more about what it is to be Bushman?' laughed Dawid, the night of my return. When I told him where I had been and who I had seen, however, he went silent. Next morning he told me that this was a serious business. This man, this Besa, was someone he had been dreaming about for years. This was the healer, he was sure, who would return to him his own healing powers, lost through the years of alcohol and abuse, which he needed to regain in order to see his people's land claim through. And it was up to me to take him there. I agreed, wondering how I was going to raise the funds for another trip. Then Dawid dropped the real bomb. I had never really told him why I was here in the Kalahari, he said. He was used to meeting journalists and anthropologists. I was the only one who had been drawn to the healing path. What had brought me to the Kalahari in the first place? So there on the dunes I told him of my childhood in London and my mother's stories. He held up a hand, stopping me: 'Ah, so the mother had the vision before the son. She who kept us alive in her stories while we were dying here in the Kalahari. Well, if this healing is to work your mother must be there too.' It had all come back full circle to my mother's stories. But she was now 60 years old and living comfortably in London. Would she be prepared to do this, I asked when I returned to England some weeks later. Her answer: 'When do we fly?' The healing process Yet that healing, when it happened three months later, was a disappointment, at least initially. Besa got drunk before his trance, something that is almost taboo among Bushmen. And during his dance he went to Dawid only twice, despite the old man having come so far to see him. Most of his attention was given to a child with a terrible racking cough, whom he held aloft to the stars, and who when dawn finally came was breathing easily and normally again. Yet later, on the road back south, Dawid chuckled when I asked him worriedly if it had been worth coming. 'This Besa, he is a clever one! You know why he ignored me, why he got drunk like that? It was to show me that it was for me to heal him. That I had never lost my healing powers at all. That I just have to have faith.' A year later, Dawid accepted, on behalf of the Xhomani people, over a hundred thousand hectares of his clan's lost hunting grounds. Although the dispossession of the Bushmen continues apace elsewhere in the Kalahari, and particularly in Botswana, Dawid and the Xhomani have set a political precedent. The healing process has begun, and not just for the Bushmen. My mother, always an exile in England, had suffered from periodic bouts of depression up until she attended the healings with Besa. No longer. As for me, it was more complicated. Dawid explained why Besa had called the leopards from the bush that night he had first tranced for me. It was, said Dawid, to show me that the ruthless, darker side of my personality (ie Leopard) can be harnessed for healing. One way to do this was through telling of the Bushman story. But he also told me that I should follow the healing path in other ways too. It was up to me to find out how. For a Brit like me this is revelatory. For someone like Besa or Dawid it is ordinary reality. It is hard for us westerners, whose culture has tried to turn its back on nature, tried to tie the spirit down with organized religion and hard science, to grope our way back to that older authentic healing reality. The Bushmen and those like them are holding a candle for us. But the dispossession of the world's indigenous peoples is not slowing down. We could well be looking at the last generations of human beings who still know how to live the original, authentic way. The Xhomani have a saying, part proverb, part prophecy: when the little people of the Kalahari dance, then the little people around the world shall dance as well. We need to remember that we are the little people too.
The Healing Land is published by 4th Estate, London. Survival International campaigns for indigenous peoples across the globe. Contact Liberty Bollen or Fiona Watson at 0207 242 1441; www.survival-international.org
© Caduceus, 2002.
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