Part2_Episode 7_the road south


Story Hunter Part 2 Episode 7 The Road South 


We leave Maun with a vehicle full of camping gear. We have water supplies, food and soon we find ourselves on the 300km donkey strewn road to Ghansi. Alex and James are in great spirits.


The vehicle gives an outside temperature reading of 38 degrees by 11am. From here it will only climb through the rest of the day. Subjects flow easily between the three of us.


James tells us about Anneli's ancestors, the Dorsland Trekkers. Anneli will be hosting us just outside of Khansi. The Dorsland Trekkers or Thirstland Trekkers were the early white settlers who came north from South Africa and braved the dry land in wagons to settle and establish farms in the 1800s around Ghanzi.


Accounts from these treks are almost exclusively of terrible thirst. Cattle so thirsty they would scream out and stampede at the waterholes, turning them to mush before the people could draw any water. One story has trekkers being issued a tablespoon of water each in the height of the water rations. If you are a descendant of those people and still live here, chances are you are tough as nails. It was the trekkers who established small towns and farming settlements all over South Africa and then north into Botswana. Eventually, on the brink of death, it was the bushmen who taught the trekkers to survive in the desert, guiding them to water and keeping them alive on succulent melons.A result of this is that these trekkers developed a profound respect for the wisdom and ecological intelligence of the Bushmen people. 


In the white heat of midday, we arrive at the guest house that Anneline runs. My grandmother applied for this land from the government, she said, and they gave her a 99-year lease. I grew up here in the bush with the bushmen people, so I can speak 
Nǁng, which is the local bushman dialect. I instantly like Anneline. She is authentic and warm.  She is a font of information on the area. I grew up on cattle drives across Botswana with the bushmen, she says.


She might be the definition of salt of the earth. I have spoken to some of my Bushmen friends, and they are happy to show you how they hunt and gather, but they are worried about your guys' fitness in this heat, she says. But you guys seem to be from the bush, so you should be fine.


I asked Anneline about the state of the Bushmen people. Her answers are full of fascinating confliction and nuance that you could only get from a local. Many, many Bushmen people, she said, still supplement their government income with gathering and hunting. These people still live off the land. That's why the tracking skills still exist. Many bushmen people have told her, we only suffer in town.


I know this feeling to some extent. The feeling of entering a town after the relative self-sufficiency of living wild, and feeling suddenly mired by the need for money and worldly possessions, bus tickets and frozen bank accounts or outstanding bills. I ask her about the Bushmen being driven off their land. And the Bushmen have been driven off their land by every tribe and colonist that has moved through southern Africa.


It's complicated, she says. There's lots of disinformation. Firstly, many people live on their lands.


There are villages all over the southern Kalahari. In some instances, the government has agreed to have bushmen communities living in the park, but only in traditional ways. What they refuse is for bushmen to return to the park, but with their newly acquired cars and livestock. It's a classic example of traditional ways and modern life starting to bump into each other in new, complicated ways. The official position, Anneline tells us, is that hunting is not allowed in and around the park. But in fact, wildlife services often turns a blind eye to subsistence hunting.


However, the official position of no hunting is a deterrent to prevent hunting becoming a commercial exercise, resulting in huge trailers of meat being taken out and men hunting on horseback. 


What I'm quickly learning is that, in this profoundly complicated world, where a complex issue can be reduced to fit the attention span of a modern person, we often miss the multiple layers and complexity inside of every issue. We ask Anneline if anyone she knows would be interested in studying at the Tracker Academy.
No, you'll have to ask the Bushmen themselves, she says. She does tell us, though, that Bushmen people do not travel well. They like to be with their clan and their people.


This seems to track as a general cultural trend when you talk to  Bushmen. There are many stories about a Bushman person being employed and showing up to work with his whole family, as if the idea of being employed in isolation was absurd. I happen to really like this idea.


In the afternoon, we go with Anneline to meet a group of bushmen that she is friends with. The Bushmen are warm and keen to hang out. They greet us and immediately start sharing their desert skills.


They greet us. I'm sensitive to cultural tourism and at first I feel somewhat uncomfortable. I also feel like a clunking giant. Anneli speaks perfect Nauru and her authenticity calms me. She clearly has deep personal relationships with this community. She assures me that the Bushmen people love sharing their ways. And in the end it doesn't feel contrived. We move through the dry afternoon heat, walking through the bush, gathering succulents and tubers and nuts. 


The speed of the gathering is something that I'm struck by. It's deeply parasympathetic. We move slowly with lots of rest in the sand to chat. The Bushmen trackers test Alex and I on tracks and seem surprised when we get a few right.


Kakao, the elder, teaches James and I to make fire using two sticks. I feel like I'm a thousand years back in time, at the moment fire branched in humanity's evolution. James and I need a lot of help to make the two sticks smoke. Frankly, if it had been left up to us, perhaps we would never have the brain-expanding jumps in evolution that came from cooking. Still, it's palpably ancient, moving with these people across this landscape. The bushmen are small people, and in the desert they fit their environment perfectly.


To see them walking through this kind of terrain, the kind of terrain that would scare any survivalist like it's a whole foods, is a time machine. One of the ladies plucks a tuber from the earth and slices it into wet strips of melon. And then she replants the other part so it may grow.


I think to myself that when the center can no longer hold, and when the world eventually meets its inevitable human apocalypse, these wise first people of the earth will retreat deeper into the abundance of their inhospitable home. While the rest of us in the modern world implode and rip each other to pieces when food delivery shuts down after three days. If nature is profoundly intelligent, then these people are a low-key extension of that intelligence.


Alex James and I sit in the hot sand, somewhat in awe of what we're seeing. I feel the energy of these people. And without naivety, as a tracker, I'm touched by the quality of wilderness literacy I'm seeing. They are deeply mindful about every way they interact with nature.


With this awareness comes a peace I've not touched in years. I can feel what codes these people are a living embodiment of, and it touches and heals something in me. Something I didn't know that was hurting until I sat next to one of the women and felt her ancient beingness, her harmony.


In my head a voice says, this is not lost, we are still here, we will remain when progress fails. It's the same voice I heard when I first took ayahuasca. All night it shone me the grandeur of nature, mountains, valleys, oceans, rivers, as a voice whispered, look how old I am, look how old I am.


Alex, a sharp observer that he is, feels the energy. I haven't seen you look so at peace in years, he says to me. And it's true.


I feel like I've drunk a huge dose of some strong plant and have entered into the other mystical medicine place, the dream time. In truth, I've been visiting this other world for months in my dreams, and now that I'm actually here, I wonder if it's real. 


To be with the Bushmen people, if you are sensitive, is to time travel. But it's hard to say in which direction. Have I gone back in time, a couple of hundred or thousand years, or am I glimpsing the inevitable reset future? I can't say. 


It's late now. When I go to sleep, I will wake up again in my Bushmen dream. And when I fall asleep in that dream, I will wake up back with the Bushmen here. It's been like this for months now. It's becoming hard to know which world is real. Things feel upside down. 


But when the Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth, after a day walking through the wild with the Bushmen people, I feel I understand this.