A Drink of Dry Land Read online

  The western Transvaal, I assured my wife, had always been a place of reprobates. I told her about one Scotty Smith, whose life story reads like a dishevelled pile of facts garnished with fiction. They should erect a statue to this guy somewhere out here, just like they did with the Aussie Outback outlaw Ned Kelly. In fact, Scotty could bring one of these towns some much-needed tourist-fortune. Everyone loves a story, especially one told about a big strong gunman with a twinkle in his eye and couple of coppers for the poor.

  Scotty, whose real name was George St Leger Gordon Lennox, came out here with the British army, deserted and made the southern fringes of the Kalahari his stamping ground. He stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, ran illegal firearms and generally behaved like an overgrown child with attention deficit disorder. He was finally caught and sentenced to four years’ jail for armed robbery. He served less than a year, and much of that time was not behind bars, unless you count the hotel bars of Griqualand West. He simply gave his jailers his word of honour and they told him to be back after closing time.

  Finally, we arrived at Kuruman. The sky was watercolour-blue, the land sepia and the road a viscous black and white. Jules wanted to see the mission station where the Moffats had worked. She was quite taken with the fact that the explorer David Livingstone proposed to Mary Moffat in this town back in 1845. It was also here that Robert Moffat had the Bible translated and printed in Tswana.

  With Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) singing Miles from Nowhere on the bakkie tape, we finally drove into Hotazel. Ever since I began this insane road-trekking more than 30 years ago, I had wanted to come to the Kalahari town with the strange name. A manganese mining town, Hotazel had a deadly Sunday afternoon dorpie feel to it. Even the yard dogs were silent. A sign put up by the local Combined School invited us to a performance – later that week – of Ipi Tombi, the “smash hit musical”.

  “Welcome to a long time ago,” I said to Jules …

  Chapter 2: Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

  Meerkat Patrol

  After the shimmering baby-crap-coloured flatness of the drive through the old Western Transvaal, it was a relief to come and play in the world’s biggest sandpit – the Kalahari. The word itself carries the same totemic powers of African icons like Zulu, Kruger, Mandela, Masai, the Nile, Kilimanjaro, Timbuktu, Cape Town and the Great Karoo. The Kalahari, which takes up a fair chunk of southern Africa, is a magical land of half-lost tribes, a huge, spidery delta complex supporting a massive ecosystem, remote settlements and ancient lakes beneath an all-encompassing overlay of sand.

  It’s not simply a desert. The Kalahari is a place of deep solitude, nurturing creativity and healing. Yet over all this spiritual and visual enchantment looms the ever-present spectre of drought and desolation. Stretching from the Gariep River to the Equator, it’s the largest continuous mantle of sand on Earth. The Tsamma melons you find in the dry parts of the Kalahari remain edible even in the very dead of winter, yielding moisture and food when they’re most needed. Perfect sustenance for the animals and the wily Bushmen, who had all the tricks of survival hard-wired into their genetic systems.

  And even the animals who live in the Kalahari seem to help one another out – obviously when they’re not stalking one another for supper. The aardvark, for instance, digs homes for half the creatures of the Kalahari with its incessant burrowing for termites. He makes underground dormitories for foxes, genets, spring hares, meerkats and mongooses.

  As a city dweller, however, you don’t move to the Kalahari on a whim – or with a streaky plan of action. It’s the Mojave on speed. Heaven on earth for those in the know – hell for a tenderfoot.

  The Kalahari comes in many flavours. You get your Okavango Kalahari, your Central Kalahari, your Bushman Kalahari and your Gemsbok Kalahari. We were heading for what we called the Oppenheimer Kalahari, a patchwork of former farmlands that is being stitched back together and rehabilitated into the Classic Kalahari of yore, when the grass was high and herds of game filled the horizon. The Old Kalahari, as the people who drive donkey carts on its dirt roads still call it.

  The story of Tswalu Kalahari Reserve began in the bitterly cold winter of 1998, when scion of the legendary mining dynasty Nicky Oppenheimer and his wife Strillie slept over at this game farm, now larger than most national parks in South Africa.

  They remembered the flaxen land, a convivial, fire-lit night in the boma, a sky bright with stars and a fleeting encounter with owner Stephen Boler, a man with a broad Manchester accent and a burning passion for Africa.

  Stephen died suddenly a few months later. While going through his effects, his lawyer found a document stating that in the event of his death the Oppenheimers should be contacted and offered first option on Tswalu.

  After having this enormous piece of thirstland wished upon them, the Oppenheimers grew to love the place and took ownership of Tswalu a year later.

  “But we’re just the temporary owners,” Nicky told us back in 2000, when we first visited Tswalu. “For the stretch of time that we’re here, we have an obligation to the land.” It was refreshing to hear such words uttered by a mining magnate. I asked him what kind of sightings we could expect on Tswalu, and I remember his answer:

  “I can promise you nothing but the stars.”

  In fact, as you’ll find out, he was being modest. There’s a lot to see at Tswalu – some of it very, very weird indeed.

  We were interested in what had happened to this part of the Kalahari in the four years since our last visit. As we made our way across the tawny plains towards the purple Korannaberg Mountains, plumy yellow grasses waved cheerfully along the road verges, while on the business side of the barbed wire fences the farmlands had been grazed down to the gravel. Thorn bushes were spreading to protect the stripped earth from cattle and goats. And then we arrived at Tswalu, where no livestock had lived for a while, and we saw that the land was recovering well.

  The old books tell of the trekbok migrations through the Karoo and the Kalahari, where upwards of four million springbok and associated plains game would move through settlements in the space of a week.

  One remembers the legend of the trekboer Gert van der Merwe, whose wagon was meandering down the barren Molopo River on the Bechuanaland (now Botswana) border one dry and dusty day. Gert’s Bushman guide suddenly urged him to take his wagon up to higher ground, and from there they spotted hares, jackals and snakes rushing by. Then came a huge cloud of dust and a 5-km-wide front of approaching animals. Then the Van der Merwe party, huddled in a rocking wagon, found themselves adrift in a sea of pure, unadulterated springbok – more biltong (that Kalahari staple of dried meat) than Gert would see in his whole lifetime. The trekbok stampede swept every one of Van der Merwe’s cattle along with it.

  On our previous visit, we stayed at the luxury end of Tswalu as part of a media party pack. This time, we were accommodated at lodgings reserved for researchers – which was about as much of Tswalu as we could afford. We were taken to a house in the middle of the Kalahari that looked like it had been snatched from a Jo’burg suburb and dropped here, face-brick, slick plumbing, high wall and all.

  Gus van Dyk, the manager of Tswalu, explained that the house had been built by an Austrian as a hunting lodge. This was one of the farms acquired by the Oppenheimers to add to the Tswalu legacy.

  So now we’re in the Tyrolean Kalahari, I mused as I saw the Teutonic designs of the toilets and the general Eurocentricity of all the fittings. How strange to have a light socket flown in from Vienna. What feelings of Old Country nostalgia must have washed over someone to have gone all the way to Europe to buy a tap fitting?

  But then why should I find this bizarre? I live in a city – Johannesburg – where the overriding style in the upmarket areas is Tuscany through and through. Judging by the stressed walls and faux-Tuscan village look to the hives of gated settlements in the northern reaches of Jo’burg, I’d have said most of us were Italian. Or perhaps we have fond memories of package bus tours through the bucolic m
ajesty around Florence. Or should that be Firenze? God. Who knows these days?

  “I hear what you say,” said the laconic Gus. “If I had my way I’d tear the whole place down.” But no matter, we hadn’t come for a hot time in a swanky shag palace. We had meerkats in mind.

  The road between Hotazel and Vanzylsrus forms the northern border of Tswalu’s 97 000 hectares. When Gus arrived in 2003, he found unlikely species like buffalo, nyala and waterbuck wandering about. He also found, to his amazement, specially bred freaks like white blesbok, black and totally white springbok. Stephen Boler may have been dead keen on Africa, but it turns out he was also a bit of a Dr Moreau. He had introduced all these strange non-Kalahari species and their sub-breeds to titillate the hunters, who were always on the lookout for something strange and exotic to shoot and turn into a conversation piece above the fireplace back home.

  This was so not-Kalahari PC, however. Gus quietly began to sell off many of the strange beasts and turned the freaks into snacks for predators such as the wild dogs of Tswalu. The species reintroduced to this neck of the Kalahari, however, are fine animals such as the majestic Kalahari lion, Hartmann’s mountain zebra and the black rhino – all desert-adapted.

  Early the next morning, one of Tswalu’s section managers, Mark Rutherfoord, took us off to look for the dark-maned Kalahari lions. With us was Morgan Leeu, a former goatherd who had become an expert tracker. Mark and Morgan found the tracks of a heavily pregnant lioness, but they led up into the shale mountains and disappeared. She was denning, and totally unavailable for comment or camera session.

  Then they found the spoor of some lion cubs who had recently entered this world, but that was all we saw of them. While we were sniffing about for sign of lion, I came across a strange, spiky plant that looked like a cactus that someone had smoked and stubbed out in the dirt.

  “That,” said Mark, “is the Hoodia.”

  Well now. To botanists worth a bloom, the Hoodia gordonii is potentially the miracle plant for the wonder drug of the twenty-first century. Have you noticed how fat we’re all becoming here in the so-called civilised world? Have you felt the incredible effort of lifting a TV remote control device these days? Have you experienced the instant bliss of double-cheesy pizza delivered to your home? Have you developed a love affair with your new four-door fridge and, more to the point, its highly calorific contents?

  That’s right. We’ve turned into a culture of porkers. While most of the world stumbles by on less than one American dollar a day, we’ve got our grubby noses firmly stuffed into the fast-food trough, with our baseball caps turned ’round for easier access to the fried goodies on offer. And the servings are growing bigger and cheaper every year, while our clothes are now approaching the size of your average Bedouin tent. Yeah, fatties. You know who you are.

  But before you and I rush off for more comfort food to escape the reality of our expanding girths, we should pause for a moment and consider the humble Hoodia. And, more to the point, the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

  These relics from the Stone Age are now seen as artistic and wise beyond anything we know. Which is a case of “too little, too late”, because we’ve hunted and persecuted and likkered them up to the edge of extinction over the last three centuries. We used to think Bushman art was nothing but naïve rock scratchings performed by lazy, cow-stealing sub-humans. We fought them for the right to live in their space. We hunted their eland. They rustled our cattle. And then we incorporated them, and now they wear sneakers and they like a drink and a smoke too much. And when we say sorry, they say that’s fine – it’s your round, mate. I guess the same kind of sad song can be sung around the campfire in countries like the USA and Australia, where the shattered First People are now largely remembered only in misty-eyed legends.

  Back to the Hoodia. For more than 27 000 years, the Bushmen roamed these parts. And somewhere along the line, they discovered that a bite of Hoodia on the hunt could keep them going all day long. They called it xhoba, and it staved off their hunger pangs. Scientists still have to give the final word on this member of the milkweed family, but all the signs point to its being the Viagra for the circumferentially-challenged.

  Tom Mangold of the BBC went up into the Kalahari and ate some. He attested to the feel-good effect of the Hoodia and then the “magnificent deception” that many of us crave: for nearly 24 hours, his stomach informed him it had consumed its fill, even though Tom hadn’t eaten a morsel.

  Now they’re talking about Hoodia Bars in London, Hoodia Hangouts in New York and Hoodia Burgers in LA. One can only hope and pray that the original Masters of the Hoodia, the Bushmen, get some percentage of the profits. And, more importantly, that this money is used to restore their lifestyle in some way. In the words of Jim Morrison (or was it Kojak?): Hoodia Love …

  “You’re studying that plant like your life depended on it,” observed Jules as she passed me crouched in the Kalahari dust, and I re-entered Earth’s atmosphere with a jolt. “Wait up,” I replied, jogging after her, “I’ve got a great Hoodia pun for you.”

  There are few other dry places in the world so full of edible and medicinal plants. The lavender fever-berry knocks the hell out of a headache. Grewia flava, the velvet raisin, is sweet and furry in your mouth, chasing away thirst. Add the !Nabba truffle, the shepherd’s tree berries and the spinach-like leaves of the buffalo thorn and you have a New Age vegetarian feast in the making. Then eat some liquorice-flavoured Hoodia for pudding and you’ll develop a welcome case of eating amnesia.

  We met up with Gus van Dyk and a farmer friend at one of the nearby waterholes. We’d been talking about meerkats, and the farmer told us how he used to shoot meerkats for target practice when he was a kid growing up in the Karoo. As always, there seems to be a good way to farm, and then a really stupid, arrogant way to earn a living off one’s imagined mastery of nature and her beasts. Anyhow, the rather likeable farmer said he had changed his ways and left the Meerkat Hunt Club in his later years.

  Tswalu has its own habituated meerkat family, and we headed out early one morning with another Tswalu man, Andrew Stainthorpe, to meet them.

  My camera trigger finger was twitching. I’ve always loved those cheesy “meerkat on a mound” shots where the little animal sits dreamily contemplating the sun, seemingly lost in a world of fat grubs and dagwood-sized worms. I found out later, however, that the meerkat on a mound is actually the designated lookout, keeping a beady eye on the sky for raptors on the down-swoop. And snakes, they hate snakes with a passion. No dreams here. In fact, a meerkat eats lots of scorpions and spiders that give him an in-built resistance to poisons. One of the Tswalu meerkats was once bitten by a highly venomous puffadder and lay there motionless for two days, as if he were in a coma. But then the little fellow came round, and gradually recovered.

  Meerkats are a bit like movie stars, really. They’re ambivalent about cameras and are always so much smaller than you’d expect. We arrived at the burrow of the habituated troop and met Maureen Matshikiri, who was Tswalu’s meerkat wrangler at the time. Every day she would come out to the same troop, make the same noises and do the same things. Once she’d been crossed off their raptor threat list, Maureen became an honorary meerkat – khaki division.

  The meerkat on the mound had often taken the trouble to warn Maureen about approaching snakes by chittering and pointing them out to her, she said.

  “And once or twice, when a martial eagle flew over the burrow, they clung to my leg for protection.” The meerkat on lookout duty always seeks a good vantage point – a tree stump or stone – and emits a periodic peep to let the others know all is well. Researchers call it the “watchman’s song”. Sometimes Maureen would be the only tall object available, so the lookout would shimmy up her clothes and sit sentry on her shoulder.

  At dusk, we met up with the not-so-very fearsome Cape buffalo of Tswalu. Normally, a buffalo looks at you like you owe him a lot of money and he’s found out you’re stalking his sister. He gives you that mean, stre
etwise squinty glare and more often than not it’s you who breaks eye contact. Not this lot, however. They had a beseeching mien about them as they made round cow-eyes at us. A massive bull came roaring up to the vehicle, and I thought maybe our time had come. He would surely blow us over with pure body weight, and then gore us with those bossy horns. He screeched to a halt, however, and looked up at Andrew imploringly. Words were not necessary: he was begging. Of course, I wondered why.

  “That’s because we bring them their lucerne about now,” said Andrew. “This is a temporary measure to see the buffalo through the nutritional downtime of late winter – we had a very poor rainy season.”

  And when the feed finally arrived, the buffalo were tame as Jersey cows, falling hungrily on their dinner supplement, a bit of protein to support their less nutritious main meal of winter Kalahari grass. I resisted the urge to fondle the big bull’s silken, and reasonably tick-free, ears. Maybe, somewhere deep in that Billy-buff brain of his, there still lurked a bit of angry Africa …

  Chapter 3: Northern Cape

  Trance Kalahari

  To the untrained city eye, not much happens in the southern Kalahari. A cow slouches lazily out of the shade towards a patch of grass. A listless wisp of wind toys with a spot of dust somewhere between Hotazel and the horizon. A mongoose approaches the roadside, looks left, looks right and looks left again, finally sloping across into the blonde infinity of the summer prairies. Out here, one day is the same as a million years in its passing.