A Walk on the Wild Side by Robin Hanbury-Tenison

Most expeditions start with lots of planning, preparation and poring over maps. Occasionally, they are spontaneous. Apart from a chat with Laurens van der Post before I flew to South Africa in February 1980, I knew little about the Kalahari or its people. My first wife, Marika, who was a great food writer, was doing a three-week lecture tour, and I found I was superfluous. And, so I flew to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The first person I met in the hotel bar was a prospector, Roger Billington, who worked for a company called Falconbridge. He was about to drive back to his camp, invited me to join him and, within 24 hours I was 500 km to the west near the edge of the Gemsbok National Park and the Namibian border.

There was a Bushman village near Roger’s camp and I walked there with Tumalano, his Tswana foreman, who spoke their language, as well as English. There were six small scherms, huts built from grass and thorns with a family living in each - a total of 25 people, more than half being children and babies. They were shy at first, until I explained that I was not from the government or the military, when they became animated and cheerful.

They told me that they lived only from hunting and gathering. Life was very hard as it had not rained for a year, and they had not eaten any meat for a month. They were frightened to leave the borehole that was the only safe supply of water and so no one dared go hunting any more. I learned later that these boreholes, which were dug by cattle ranchers and reached down 100 meters and more, had lowered the water table. The traditional way of sucking water up through a straw from sip wells could no longer be relied on.

I asked if anyone would be prepared to walk across the desert with me. One young man, whose name was Ebenene, said he might, although he was not sure if I would make it. And there was another problem. ‘How’ he asked ‘ will we speak to each other?’ Through Tumalano I replied ‘I see no problem. I will follow you. When you stop, I will stop. When you sleep, I will sleep. When you drink, I will drink.’ When my words were translated, the whole village did what van der Post had described. They all danced around me clapping their hands and laughing. I had given a good answer.

The next morning I was ready at 5 am, equipped with my rucksack, some bread, some salt, a French sausage bought in Gabarone and a few tins of sardines. Ebenene looked at my plastic water bottle and shook his head. Going back into his scherm, he emerged with an ostrich egg decorated with a picture of a gemsbok. He filled it with water (it held ¾ of a litre), stopped the hole in the top with a wisp of grass, put it in a bag made of black cord and hung it round my neck. That, I understood, was to be my daily water ration. I have it still. We walked fast, usually in single file. Ebenene seemed tireless and never paused. The Kalahari is a green desert, largely of low thorn scrub and acacia trees. Sometimes we rested in the shade, but walking across wide, white salt pans on a sultry afternoon when the heat became oppressive was exhausting. Wildlife was plentiful, especially bustard which soared vertically into the air when disturbed, flying noisily in a wide circle until we were past. Ostriches boomed in the daytime and lions roared at night. Springbok leapt away from us but wildebeest often turned and watched, head down as though about to charge, before waltzing around and galloping off.

On the edge of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which was set up in 1961 to provide an area where hunter-gatherers could live in peace, I spent a night with a group of Khwe Bushmen who had been encouraged by the Rural Areas Development Programme to start small gardens in which they grew good crops of tomatoes, pumpkins, melons, beans, maize and tobacco. They danced in the darkness around the fire, the women sitting in a tight circle, chanting and clapping to a fast rhythm, while a man with horn rattles around his ankles pranced and strutted in imitation of various animals. It was a promising settlement but beset by familiar problems: lack of funding, overcrowding and now a threat that it would be turned into a refugee camp for Bushpeople evicted from elsewhere.

Recently, there have been reports that the Botswana authorities have new plans to move all the thousand or so Khwe and other Bushpeople out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Survival, which has been concerned for 20 years about the situation, protested to the President of Botswana in February 1996 and led a campaign to stop the eviction. On May 23, 1999, a party of dignitaries including the British High Commissioner and the U.S. and other ambassadors were driven to the Reserve to witness officials assuring the people that they would not be removed. And, so they can stay for the time being. But, they are not safe. It is a Game Reserve and control lies not in the hands of the people who live there and whose territory it is by customary law, but of the national government. The pressure from those who want to farm the land for cattle, to exploit the diamond deposits and to develop tourism will not go away. Only legal guarantees that they occupy the land by right, as they have since before the arrival of black or white races, will give them the security they seek.