The last natives
Christopher Booker
Testament to the Bushmen Laurens van der Post and Jane Taylor (Viking £12.95)
If one had to nominate the most signifi- cant television series ever made, the front-runner might well not be Civilisation or Life On Earth but, ironically, a little set of films made long before colour or even before television reached its present mass audience. The films brought back from the Kalahari desert by Laurens van der Post in the mid-Fifties constituted the only televi- sion series which, rather than simply pass- ing on existing information, actually added in an important sense to our store of knowledge.
Van der Post's theme, of course — later amplified in several books — was the culture of the nomadic and elusive Bush- men, the last remnants of the oldest established race in Africa. It throws the tragic history of that continent into a new perspective to realise that the little apricot- skinned Bushmen are the only people in southern Africa who could truly claim to belong to that country, and that all the other races who have settled there over the past 2,000 years — Hottentots, Bantu, European — have been intruders, each treating those who were there before them with fairly summary brutality.
It was only with great difficulty that van der Post eventually tracked down one or two little bands of Bushmen surviving in the remote recesses of the Kalahari — and the unforgettable image he brought back to 20th-century civilisation was that of a group of human beings who seemed at one with themselves and with their natural setting to a degree almost unique in the contemporary world. They regarded no man as their enemy, although treated as victims by all. Yet they were not living in some state of hopeless pre-lapsarian ignor- ance. In the delicate subtleties of their way of life, in their intuitive grasp of the seen and unseen realities of the world around them, they showed a remarkable sophis- tication. And van der Post's point, made so eloquently on many occasions since, was that we could see in the Bushman some state of wholeness that we have lost, someone from whom we should draw before it was too late a lesson of the most profound importance for ourselves.
One of the countless people who were strangely stirred by those black and white films as they flickered across the BBC television screen in the mid-Fifties was a little girl called Jane Taylor, who grew up to become a documentary film maker. A question which haunted her, as it must have haunted many others, is — what has happened to the Bushmen in the 30 years since Laurens van der Post re-discovered them? Are they still living in the same age-old way, or has their fragile mode of life succumbed to all the pressures of our violent, technological, late-20th-century civilisation? A year or two back, she set out to answer that question in a series of films — and this book, with its long postscript by Laurens van der Post, pre- cedes the showing of the series as part of the result.
In the first two-thirds of the book, Jane Taylor presents a historical and cultural portrait of the Bushmen which splendidly complements all that the more intuitive and artistic van der Post has previously written about them. She shows how the Bushman culture flourished in Southern Africa for more than 20,000 years — their earliest rock-paintings are almost as ancient as those of Lascaux — and how, as hunter-gatherers, they began to retreat under the successive waves of alien in- vaders.
Miss Taylor's portrait, based partly on earlier written accounts, partly on her own observations, admirably describes the songs, dances and chief rituals of the Bushmen, rooted in their all-embracing religious view of the world which equally encompasses in a seamless web the sensi- tivity of their relationship with all the animals, birds, insects and other natural phenomena of the world around them.
But today the Bushman culture, as she found on her visits in the early Eighties, is on the final edge of extinction. The Kala- hari is no longer a trackless wilderness. The modern world has intruded in all sorts of ways, from the setting up of cattle ranches and the disruptions of the guerrilla wars of Angola and Namibia, to the sinking of boreholes for water which, by disturbing the water table, threaten to turn the whole area literally into a lifeless desert. Faced with these threats, probably only a handful of Bushmen still survive completely in the wild, and even they are threatened by game-reserve restrictions which turn their traditional hunting into poaching. Some have been recruited by the South African army as trackers or hired as cattle-drovers, others have become the victims of more or less well-intentioned attempts to get them to 'settle down' on mission stations or to an agricultural way of life entirely alien to them. Many, under these pressures, have simply cracked up, and become unhappy, rootless shadows of their former exuberant selves.
At this melancholy conclusion to Miss Taylor's story, Sir Laurens van der Post comes forward to take over the last third of the book with a kind of epitaph to the Bushmen and their world, which is so luminous and full of wisdom that I would strongly echo the Times reviewer in saying that it is the best single thing he has written. So far is it removed from common sense into the realm of uncommon sense that not everyone may find Sir Laurens's message easy to grasp (to another review- er, Auberon Waugh, for instance, it amounted to little more than 'mumbo jumbo'). But many will find it a deeply moving and extraordinary piece of writing.
It is impossible to summarise Sir Laurens's argument because his essay real- ly takes the form of a prolonged meditation on everything the Bushmen stood for as they survived into the modern world, on everything they have meant to him through his long life, from his early days growing up with a Bushman nurse on his family's farm at 'Bushman's Fountain' in the Orange Free State, and, most important of all, on the message which he believes the Bush- man conveys to a world which today stands, psychically disintegrated and tragi- cally confused, right at the other end of the long road humanity has travelled since our emergence from a state of nature. A strong thread running through his essay is the fundamental importance of the story as a kind of mirror to our state of psychic balance — beginning with some of the wonderful stories with which the Bushmen expressed the inmost patterns of their relationship to the world of nature around them, and ending with the disintegration of storytelling in our own time as one of the deepest symptoms of our spiritual rootless- ness. The essence of his message, more lucidly and powerfully compressed than ever before, is that unless we can rediscov- er in ourselves that contact with feeling and intuition which gave the Bushmen such a sure sense of 'belonging' and of unity and meaning in the universe, we are truly lost. I can only recommend as many people as possible to read it.
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