The Heart of the Hunter

Meanwhile we had learnt something of their story. They came from a plain called after a fabulous kind of sweet potato dug up there three years ago. Their arms were not long enough to demonstrate the size of the potato to us. The plain was, as they put it in their tongue, ‘far, far, far away’ to the east. It was lovely how the ‘far’ came out of their mouths. At each ‘far’ a musician’s instinct made the voices themselves more elongated with distance, the pitch higher with remoteness, until the last ‘far’ of the series vanished on a needle-point of sound into the silence beyond the reach of the human scale. They left this ‘far, far, place’ because the rains just would not come. Their water was gone; the tsamma – melons which meanwhile sustained them and the game on which they live – were soon eaten up. The roots and tubers we compared to potatoes and turnips were more and more difficult to find and in any case not enough for survival. The game had moved away first. Only snakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, and some ants were left. Then one night lightning flashed over the horizon in the west. They knew at once what to do. Since they own nothing permanently which they cannot carry, they could act at once. The men just took up their bows, poisoned arrows, and spears and left the plain behind them; the women bundled up in skin shawls their water-flasks of ostrich egg-shells and their stampingblocks – the wooden pestles and mortars which are their most precious possessions and badge of womanhood. Grubbing-sticks in hand, and for long hours with the youngest children on their hips, they followed their men. They made for the quarter in the west where the lightning flashed most. They had forgotten how many days they had walked towards the lightning, but they were ‘many, many, many’. The awful part was that, though the lightning went on flashing along the horizon every night, they seemed to get no nearer the rain. Their condition steadily deteriorated, the country became increasingly desolate, yet they had endured this sort of thing so often before that they took it entirely for granted. They seemed to think it hardly worth the effort of remembering and certainly not that of talking about it. Yet despite the lack of detail and Dabé’s difficulty in coping with their dialect, we gathered that on this cloudless day without the least hint of rain their desperation was nearing its climax. They had just left the old father and mother behind, not expecting ever to see them again, when they heard the sound of our Land-Rovers. Yes! they knew about motor vehicles and avoided them because they connected them only with police patrols. No! they themselves had never seen any police, but some kinsmen of theirs had been taken away from their family once and had never come back because the police had caught them roasting a giraffe they had killed for food. But afraid as they were of police in particular and white men in general, they needed help so badly that they made straight for the place where they heard our vehicles.

We did not ask them what they would have done had they not met us, but the question provoked a lively discussion among my companions. The Bushmen had no food of any kind left. They had no water, and when I asked what they used instead of water they showed me some remains of a large root rather like an outsize turnip. They had six of these fragments in the slings carried by the women, and they were eighteen souls in all. By scraping the root with a wooden knife into their hands and squeezing the crushed material, they produced a bitter white juice which they said was better for thirst than water. Water, the old father suddenly interjected, licking his lips at the memory of his last gallon-full, was much too sweet. 

For some of my companions all this was clear proof that the Bushmen would never have been able to reach the fringe of the area where the rains had broken. Others, led by Ben Hatherall, my old guide and friend, who was born in the desert and grew up with the Bushmen, stoutly maintained that except for the old couple they would have made it. Dabé thought so too. Judging by the speed with which they had recovered after their drink of water, before they had even eaten, the Bushmen were not yet damaged by their terrible experience in any fundamental way

The camp as a result was well found by the time we left. Ben and Wyndham Vyan, whose skill with his gun had kept us all fed for months, travelled ahead in one Land-Rover. I followed in another with Dabé and the strongest of the young men among our new Bushman acquaintances. The moment of madness had passed from the day by then, and the sun was still. In its long slanted light the smoke of our camp-fire stood high and blue in the golden air. Six other little columns of smoke surrounded it. Rising from the little shelters built by the Bushmen, they were more slender and sensitive than ours but as upright and blue. For me they made the picture complete. 

As Ben had predicted, we came across game quite early the next day and set about getting meat for the Bushmen as quickly as we could. The first buck we saw was a duiker. It had bolted on the Steenbuck first alarm and was already running full out when Wyndham spotted it. Normally he might not have shot, because it made an exceptionally difficult target. Once on the run a duiker never stops to look back. I have seen only one exception to the rule in all my years in Africa. That was some years before in the Kalahari, and the duiker which had paused to glance back was promptly shot by Vyan before it could pass on the bad habit to others. Invariably it goes fast over bush and grass, its head down, showing little more than its back above the cover, all with a motion rather like that of a frightened porpoise diving in and out of the swell of the sea. It is this movement which made the old Afrikaner hunters call it duiker(diver), and which makes it so difficult to shoot. Today the shot was even more difficult than usual, for by the time Vyan had halted his vehicle and had his gun up, the back of the duiker was arching for the last time above a crest of the bush at the limit of our vision. Yet he brought it down with a deft instinctive shot, and the exclamation of wonder from the Bushman at my side was good to hear. 

We went on for a while now without seeing more game or, what was far more discouraging, the spoor of any. When the noise of our vehicles finally woke a little steenbuck from his sleep and he rose out of the bed he makes more neatly and snugly perhaps than any other quadruped in Africa, I felt I had to shoot. Yet I hated doing it. For me the steenbuck has always been one of the loveliest and most lovable of African buck. It and the Klipspringer are part of my own childhood world of magic, and this little steenbuck was a superb example of his kind. He stood at the end of a bare patch of crimson sand about twenty yards away, beside the purple shade of the bush behind which he had made his bed, and there he eagerly fed the precise little flame of his vivid self to the rising conflagration of another desert day. He stood as still and fine drawn as an Etruscan statuette of himself. His delicate ears were pointed in my direction, his great purple eyes wide open, utterly without fear and shining only with the wonder of seeing so strange a sight at this remote back door of life. Remembering the gaunt faces of the famished Bushmen, I shot quickly before he should get alarmed or the sight of his gentle being weaken me. I would not have thought it possible I could miss at so short a distance. Yet I did. My shot merely made the little buck shake his delicate head vigorously to rid his ears of the tingle of the shock of the explosion from my heavy gun. Otherwise he showed no trace of alarm. I took much more careful aim and shot a second time. Again I missed. Still the little buck was unafraid. He just turned his head slightly to sniff at the wind raised by the bullet when it passed close by his ears. So near was he to me that I saw his black patent-leather little nose pucker with the effort. I shot until the magazine of my gun was empty and still he stood there unhurt, observing my Land-Rover keenly as if trying to discover what the extraordinary commotion was about. I believe he would have stood there indefinitely, taking in the strangeness of the occasion, had I not entreated Vyan to shoot from his vehicle much further away. Vyan succeeded merely in nicking slightly the saffron petal of one of the steenbuck’s ears. Only then did the steenbuck whisk swiftly about, a look of reproach in his eyes. The sun flashing briefly on the tips of his black polished toes, he vanished with a nimble bound in the scrub. I drove on very much aware that I had not lightened what promised just then to become the long task of getting enough food for the Bushmen and, now that the steenbuck was safely gone, more put out than I cared to admit by such poor marksmanship. Yet I was even more disconcerted to find both Dabé and the new Bushman apparently highly delighted at the outcome of the affair. Had they been amused, I would not have been surprised. Indeed I expected my companions to pull my leg about the incident for days to come. Yet delight in someone so famished as our new companion so amazed me that I interrupted something he was saying, a wide smile on his fine-drawn face. 

‘What on earth has he said to please you so?’ I asked the grinning Dabé. 

‘Oh! He is just saying what we all know to be so,’ Dabé answered in the indulgent manner of someone instructing an ignorant child, which he and the other Bushmen at the Sip Wells had always adopted when discussing their own private world with me. ‘The steenbuck is protected with great magic and very difficult to kill.’ 

‘What sort of magic?’ I asked, remembering my association of the buck with my childhood world of magic. ‘His own magic or the magic of other people?’ 

‘Oh. Just magic!’ Dabé said in a superior voice, leaving unsatisfied the curiosity which always nagged me more than ever when the curtain between the mind of the Bushman and our own lifted only to flop back just as I thought I was to be allowed to see behind it. Yet my imagination had seized on the encounter more firmly than I knew. I know of few things more awesome than finding that all one’s most determined efforts to injure another living creature have been unaccountably frustrated. Throughout the long hot day, at all sorts of odd moments, my mind returned to the vision of that gentle little buck standing untroubled amid blast after blast from my gun. 

Luckily for the Bushmen, Ben and Vyan were better and more dedicated marksmen than I. Soon afterwards we ran into more game and within two hours they had killed another duiker, two springbuck rams, and a lone old male ostrich. All that meat turned into biltong should last the Bushmen well into the country where the rains had broken. Stopping only to disembowel the game, we turned back and travelling in the same tracks for the third time found them so firm that we made our camp at the fall of night.

They started at once unloading the game, and went straight on to skinning and cutting up the animals with skill and dispatch. I watched them, absorbed in the grace of their movements. They worked with extraordinary reverence for the carcasses at their feet. There was no waste to mock the dead or start a conscience over the kill. The meat was neatly sorted out for specific uses and placed in separate piles on the skin of each animal. All the time the women stood around and watched. They greeted the unloading of each arrival with an outburst of praise, the ostrich receiving the greatest of all, and kept up a wonderful murmur of thanksgiving which swelled at moments in their emotion to break on a firm phrase of a song of sheer deliverance. How cold, inhuman, and barbarous a civilized butcher’s shop appeared in comparison! 

The last red glow in the west died down behind the purple range of cloud, and it went utterly dark beyond our camp. Our own fires rose higher than ever, straining like a gothic spire towards the stars which were appearing in unusual numbers. Soon the stars were great and loud with light until the sky trembled like an electric bell, while every now and then from the horizon the lightning swept a long sort of lighthouse beam over us. At last the Bushmen stood up from their work with a deep sigh of satisfaction, scraped the blood from their arms with their knives and wiped their hands on stubbles of grass. The women and children came silently forward to help them carry away the meat piled on the skins. They vanished in the darkness beyond our fire, and only the soundof voices joined there in a common purpose revealed that they had not gone for good. Then the voices too faded out, and soon after the flames of their own fires began to go up one by one. As always their fires were more circumspect than our own. Ours was a cathedral of flame, theirs little more than slender candles burning in a night devout under stars.

‘Gone by the morning?’ Duncan exclaimed, as if he had other hopes for them and himself.’ Gone without even saying thank you for what we have done for them?’ 

His dismay was so genuine that we all laughed. Besides, his last remark touched on an old controversy. Some of my companions were continually worried by the apparent inability of Africans in general and Bushmen in particular to say ‘thank you’ for any help or gifts made to them. 

Ben answered him, not without a certain amused irony. 

‘But surely you would not expect thanks from anyone for the little we have done? Surely you do not want to be thanked merely for having behaved well? Do you expect a woman to say “thank you” every time you raise your hat to her? Well, however much we appear to have done for the Bushmen here, to them it is just good manners and no more than was to be expected of properly brought up people. If our positions were reversed, they would without hesitation do the same for us or anyone else, but they would not expect to be thanked for it. No! They would not risk insulting you by suggesting with a “thank you” that it was unusual for you to behave well!’ 

Ben appealed to me for support amid the laughter his explanation provoked. I have suffered all over Africa from the delusion of Europeans that, because the indigenous peoples of the dark continent have not the fulsome expressions for gratitude we have, they feel no gratitude. It was as unreal to me as another prejudice noticed long ago in Britain – that since the French had no single word for home, they did not really value their home-life. I had no hesitation in backing up Ben with an example of the Bushmen’s regard for manners. I told my companions a story I once heard from Faanie Ritchie. She had known Lucy Lloyd and the Bleeks, who were the first people ever to make a serious study of the Bushman tongue. In order to do so they had gained permission from the government at the Cape to house at the bottom of their garden in a suburb of Table Bay a number of Bushman convicts from the national gaol. The Bushmen soon became very attached to the Bleek family, with the exception of one little man. He behaved so badly that the Bleeks one day asked the Bushmen why he was difficult when they were all good and helpful. 

‘Oh, but don’t you know?’ they exclaimed amazed. ‘He was brought up by Europeans!’

Out there between our camp and their shelters the desert was as dark and still as I have ever known it. The only other living things capable of uttering a sound were snakes, and no serpent would have been so foolish as to hiss while about his business on a night so profound. There was no fitful air of summer even, no heat eddy of the frightful day spinning about to rustle what was left of leaf and grass on the scorched earth. But there was this intense electric murmur of the stars at one’s ears. 

Then suddenly, ahead in a band of absolute black with no fire or reflection of fire to pale it down, I thought I heard the sound of a human voice. I stopped at once and listened carefully. The sound came again more distant, like the voice of a woman crooning over a cradle. I stood with my back to the horizon bright with portents of lightning, waiting for my eyes to recover from the glare of our great camp-fire. Slowly, against the water-light of the stars lapping briskly among the breakers of thorn and hardwood around us, emerged the outline of a woman holding out a child in both her hands, high above her head, and singing something with her own face lifted to the sky. Her attitude and the reverence trembling in her voice, moved me so that the hair at the back of my neck stood on end. 

‘What’s she doing?’ I whispered to Dabé, who had halted without a sound, like my own star-shadow beside me. 

‘She’s asking the stars up there,’ he whispered, like a man requested in the temple of his people to explain to a stranger a most solemn moment of their ritual. 

‘She’s asking the stars to take the little heart of her child and to give him something of the heart of a star in return.’ 

‘But why the stars?’ I asked. 

‘Because, Moren,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘the stars there have heart in plenty and are great hunters. She is asking them to take from her little child his little heart and to give him the heart of a hunter.’ 

The explanation moved me to a silence which Dabé mistook. Afraid, I suspect, that like most of the people he knew in his life of exile I would scorn a Bushman’s belief, he wanted reassurance immediately. 

‘But why don’t you say something, Moren?’ he asked, almost like an anxious child. ‘Surely you must know that the stars are great hunters? Can’t you hear them? Do listen to what they are crying! Come on! Moren! You are not so deaf that you cannot hear them.’ 

I have slept out under the stars in Africa for too many years not to know that they sound and resound in the sky. From the time I was born until I first went to school, I slept outside a house every night except when it was raining – and that was seldom. My first memories are of the incomparable starlight of the high veld of Southern Africa and the far sea-sound that goes with it. 

I hastened to say, ‘Yes, Dabé, of course I hear them!’ But then I was forced to add, ‘Only I do not know what they are saying. Do you know?’ 

Reassured, he stood for a moment head on one side, while the light of another flash from the horizon flew like a ghost moth by us. Then, with the note of indulgence he could not resist using on me when he felt his authority not in doubt, he said, ‘They are very busy hunting tonight and all I hear are their hunting cries: “Tssik!” and “Tsá!”’ 

Had it not been for the darkness between us he would have seen, I am sure, the shock of amazement on my face. I had known those sounds all my life. Ever since I can remember we ourselves had used them out hunting with our dogs. ‘Tssik!’ repeated sharply thrice was the sound we used to alert our dogs when we were at the cover of bush, grass, cave, or donga in which we suspected our quarry to be hiding. Hearing it, the ears of our dogs would immediately prick up, their eyes shine with excitement and their noses sniff the air diligently for scent. Another ‘Tssik’ would send them to search the cover. ‘Tsá’ was the final imperative note which released them from all restraint and launched them after our chosen quarry when it was flushed. 

I had always wondered about the origin of these sounds. Neither of them had ever seemed European to me. I had asked the oldest of the old people of all races and colours. I asked one of the greatest of all African hunters, too. They could only say that, like me, they had been born into a world in which they were already in long-established use. Stranger still, wherever I went in the world I found that, although hunters outside Africa did not know the sounds and therefore did not use them with their dogs, if I tried them out many of the dogs responded. They would start searching with all their senses: if I kept up the sounds for long, they became exceedingly restless, in the end letting out that involuntary and nostalgic whimper normally provoked in them only by the moon. That had deepened the mystery for me, but now I thought I knew: we had the sounds from the Bushman, and he and the dogs had them straight from the stars. The revelation filled me with awe. I felt as if I had been allowed to witness the coming of the word in the darkness before time. I thought this was enough of magic in a day which in my encounter with the little steenbuck had begun with magic.

It was impossible to tell from the appearance or behaviour of the two that something well-nigh fatal had happened to them only the morning before. The old lady was pounding some freshly grilled meat to pulp in her stamping-block, since neither her teeth nor her husband’s were good enough to chew venison whole.

The woman’s wooden mortar and pestle, or stamping-block as we call it in Africa, stood near by with her grubbing-stick or iron-wood beside it.

Dabé and I sat down near them. The children looked up at me out of their slanted eyes, examining my face without fear, as I told him I too would be grateful for ‘some man’s talk’ with him. 

For example, was it true that the stars were hunters? Did the little steenbuck really possess great magic, and if so, what sort of magic? Dabé, I think rather indignant that his word on the subject had not been enough for me, put the questions perfunctorily. A long silence met them. The old lady again stopped pounding. The old man gave me a steady look out of his wide eyes, oddly hypnotic in the firelight flicking on his face. My heart sank. I feared a repetition of my experience with the Bushmen at the Sip Wells. There all my first questions had been met with a similar silence. I had to wait until we had proved over the days that we could be trusted before they would talk to me about the things of their spirit. I began to feel almost culpably naïve for assuming that such bold questions could draw an answer from a member of a race which for thousands of years has been so despised and hunted down by all other men. My only hope, I thought, was to remind him that we were friends of his friends at the Sip Wells and let the fact that they had freely spoken of these things plead for me. 

‘Tell him,’ I asked Dabé, my voice sounding ineffectual in my own ears in the tense silence between us, ‘tell him that his people at the Sip Wells told me about the first of all the Bushmen, Oeng-Oeng and his wives who would not put out the fire, about the little Oeng-Oengs and the elephants, the ostrich, and the finding of the first fire; Mantis and the resurrection of the dead Eland; the turtledove and the honey and many other things; but they never told me these things about which I have just asked him. Surely so old and wise a father as he knows the answers and can help me.’ 

At the mention of the Sip Wells, the magic name of OengOeng and this brief recapitulation of some of the great themes of the imagination of his race, the tension between us snapped. His eyes brightened, the old lady began to pound with vigour again, and said: 

‘Yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes! It is true: the stars are hunters.’ 

‘All the stars?’ I asked, my heart beating faster. 

He paused for just a second, then it all came out at length. Yes! They were all hunters, great hunters, but some were greater than others. For instance there was that star there! He raised his thin old arm to point with a long finger at the brightest star in the Great Dipper. It just cleared the fringe of a camel-thorn tree and in the dry air was bright enough to lay a water-sheen on the topmost leaves. That star, he said, was a great hunter who hunted in far away dangerous places in the shape of a lion. Could I not see how fierce its eye shone and hear the distant murmur of its roar? And there was one even greater! He pointed at Sirius, the star of thedog, at the head of the belted and nimble Orion. It was so full and overflowing with light that it was almost shapeless – a sort of careless gash in the night through which the brightness of the day beyond was leaking like clear water from a broken tap. As fast as the great drops of light fell, others swelled in their place to fall with a silky sort of swish on the bush around us. Yes! You only had to look at it once, the old father said, to see what a great hunter it was. Could I not see how fat it was, how heavily it sat there in the midst of plenty in the sky? He paused and I hastened to ask, afraid that silence might cool the subject: ‘Is it the greatest of all the hunters up there?’ 

From the delight that shone in his eyes, I realized the pause had been a trap set to catch just that question. He shook his head vigorously. The greatest hunter was not there yet. It hunted in the darkest and most dangerous places of all, so far away that we could not see it yet. We could see it only in the early morning when it came nearer on its way home. There, there was a hunter for you! The old father made a lively whistling sound of wonder at the greatness of the hunter. Yes, just before the dawn one could see him striding over the horizon, his eye bold and shining, an arrow ready in his bow. When he appeared, the night whisked around to make way for him, the red dust spurting at its black heels. He broke off and shook his grey old head, as he once more uttered that sound of wonder, before asking as if the thought had just come to him: ‘But can’t you hear for yourself the cries of the hunt going on up there?’ I assured him I could. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and leaned back on both his elbows with a look on his face as if to say, ‘Well, then! There is nothing more to be said about it.’

I took the hint and changed the subject. I reminded him of my question about the steenbuck and its magic. He sat up and beat the sand with the side of his hand for emphasis. Of course the steenbuck had magic, great magic! Surely everyone knew that; even the children, like his grandsons there, knew it. 

‘But, old father,’ I insisted, ‘I do not know it. What sort of magic is it? What does it do?’ 

He answered readily enough. But the subject now was far more complicated than that of the stars as hunters. The assumptions on which his explanations were based had no parallel in our own thinking. Dabé, who always had his difficulties with the dialect not quite his own, struggled valiantly to find equivalents in either Sechuana or Afrikaans for me, but I suspect often failed. For the first time I wished I had brought Ben too, because I had found in such encounters that, with his knowledge of the Bushman tongue and complete mastery of Sechuana, he could help Dabé fill the more important gaps in his interpretation. But I dared not interrupt the old father’s flow while I went to fetch Ben, in case it stopped altogether. So I watched his eloquent face and gestures, listening more carefully than ever to his words, for Bushman is so onomatopoeic, so directly related to its meaning, that if taken in as a kind of music it makes some general sense even when the words individually do not. At the Sip Wells, for instance, I had listened to many a story and discovered that often the sound had conveyed the rough sense to me before Dabé interpreted the actual words. 

Subject to these qualifications the old father’s drift seemed plain enough to me. I gathered that the magic of the steenbuck was that of the innocent, the gentle and the beautiful combined in one. It was a creature – or a person, as he called it – too beautiful to be aware of imperfection, too innocent to know fear, too gentle to suspect violence. How it differed from the duiker! Had I not noticed that the heart of the duiker was full of suspicion and fear? At the first strange sound it assumed the worst and bounded away as fast as it could without a backward glance. The steenbuck, however, when disturbed would stand up and slip out quietly from its ‘place which it made more prettily than any other animal in the veld and wherein it always feels itself to be lying so nicely’. It would stand quietly beside ‘its place’ and look without fear out of its great eyes, its ‘little ears trembling and nicely pointed’ to see what the wonderful noise could be about. The old father’s eyes as he spoke seemed to become young and eager like the steenbuck’s, his own pan-like ear to point and tremble with innocent curiosity. The steenbuck, he said, would stand there all the time ‘looking so nicely and acting so prettily’ that the person who had come hunting it would begin to feel ‘he must look nicely at the steenbuck and act prettily too’. The person who stood watching would suddenly find there was ‘a steenbuck person’ behind him who ‘feeling he was looking nicely at the little buck, wanted him to act nicely and prettily too’. When the person who had come to kill the steenbuck fitted the arrow to his bow and aimed to shoot, the steenbuck person behind him ‘pulled at his arm and made him miss’. Yes, that was the magic of the steenbuck; it had a steenbuck person to protect it. 

I should perhaps have left the matter there, but I could not resist an obvious question. Why if that were so, I asked, was the steenbuck ever killed? He looked at me almost in pity, as if I needed a reminder of the New Testament injunction that ‘it may be true that evil comes but woe to him by whom it comes’. Yes, he agreed in the end, steenbuck were killed despite their magic, just as the duiker was killed in spite of its speed and suspiciousness. Yet more steenbuck survived than were killed. Certainly in all his long years its numbers had never become less. How could so small and defenceless an animal have survived in a world full of powerful enemies without great magic? His old eyes here were suddenly child-like with mischief and he looked past me, as if he saw ‘a steenbuck person’ standing beside me, to say he had been told I had tried hard that very morning to kill a little steenbuck and failed. Perhaps he had been misinformed, but if not . . . 

That wonderful laugh of the Bushman broke from Dabé. The old lady, the children, the old man, and I myself joined in: we made such a noise that the people from the nearby fires and the men at work in the dark all came running over to find out what the fun was about.

So gradually in these and other ways a natural pride in himself came alive again. Once it nearly had serious consequences. Jeremiah tended to have a noticeably superior manner with his companions, particularly Dabé. For long he never called Dabé by his name, referring to him simply as ‘Massarwa’. This term is used by Africans to describe not only the Bushman but all the mixed peoples in the Kalahari living the Bushman way. No one suspected how much this hurt Dabé until one morning, after having been referred to repeatedly as Massarwa, he could bear it no longer. 

‘How would you like it if I called you not Jeremiah but Kaffir?’ he asked sharply. Kaffir is the term used by Europeans to describe all black people in Africa irrespective of their race and origin, and has come to be used as a deadly insult among Africans themselves. Dabé could not have hit on a more accurate or provocative parallel. ‘Massarwa!’ Jeremiah exclaimed, putting down the saucepan in his hand, while John, his chief assistant, stopped working too and looked as injured as he did. ‘Massarwa. You must not call me Kaffir.’ 

‘But if you call me Massarwa, why should I not call you Kaffir?’ Dabé insisted, the fiery Bushman temper of which my grandfather had so often spoken, for the first time visible. 

‘You must not call us that!’ Jeremiah and John said together now, both their dark faces paler with emotion. They came belligerently to their feet and looked tall over Dabé’s sturdy little figure. 

Luckily I was near and stopped the argument before it became a fight by sending Dabé away on an errand, while I told the others they were never again to call him Massarwa and I would see that he never called them Kaffir. But to me, slight as the incident was, it was a shining example of a truth I have always believed – that one of the great hungers of the human spirit from the earliest to the most contemporary level is the hunger for honour. I am certain Dabé, Jeremiah, and John had been prepared to fight to the death because the matter appeared to concern their honour. I am certain, too, that no one will ever understand the complex and desperate situation in Africa unless he realizes first that at bottom it is an affair of honour. But besides the hunger for honour there are other great hungers as well: that for justice, for forgiveness, and the one that sums up all – the hunger for love. Some of those too showed themselves a little that day I left ‘Bushman’s Reprieve’ with Dabé at my side. 

When he had been silent for some time, I remarked cheerfully, since his old melancholy seemed to be joined to him again like his shadow, ‘Well, Dabé. It looks as if the rain is really coming to your people back there. They ought to be all right now.’ 

‘Yes. They ought to be all right now.’ He answered without any great conviction, as if he and I inevitably must have different notions of what ‘all right’ was. He hesitated for a brief moment, his brown eyes going black with shadow from within; then he began speaking not so much to me as to that immense glittering overlordship of the day in front of us. His voice was flat, unemotional, and so without anger that I thought my stomach would turn. 

Had I noticed, he asked, how everything in life had a place of its own? For instance, the springbok had their pans; the eland and the hartebeest their great plains; the jackal, the hyena, the lynx, the mongoose, and the leopard had each a hole of his own: the lion could come and go and eat and sleep where he liked. Even the locusts had their grass, the ants their mounds of earth – and had I ever seen a bird without a nest? The black man, the Herero, the Bastaards, had kraals and lands of their own, and the white man houses of stone. But could I tell him what and where was a Bushman’s place? The echo of the New Testament cry about the birds having nests and the foxes holes but the Son of Man no place to lay his head, rang out so loudly in my head that I would have suspected Dabé of having heard it, had I not known otherwise. 

Moreover, he went on, many of these animals were protected by the white man. If a Bushman killed a giraffe, an eland, a gemsbok, or even a bird like the giant bustard for food because he was dying of hunger, and the police discovered it, he was taken away to prison and often never seen again. Yet, if the Bushman killed his own desert animals for food, he was punished. No one punished the white man, the black man, and the Herero when they killed their animals, their cattle and sheep for food. But if the Bushman killed the cattle and sheep that came into the Kalahari to eat the grass of his animals, again he was hunted down and punished. How could such things be? Did I know that, when the first white men came to the Kalahari, they would have died if it had not been for the Bushman? The same was true for the blackman. The Bushman showed them where the water was, took their cattle to grass and helped them to live. Once the Bushman walked the desert like a lion from end to end with no one to trouble him, but today every man and every lion was against the Bushman. He alone had nowhere to go, no one to protect him, and no animal of his own. Again, was that how it was meant to be?