June 1959
This book is a wonderfully gentle piece of work by a young American who seems to be blessed with a mind as tranquil as her nature is alert - who manages to be serene about adventure, simple about beauty and direct about human experience. She is writing about the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert - the earliest living inhabitants of South Africa - and as she has the time and took the trouble to learn a great deal about them and they are an interesting people, the book is the most harmonious success.
The author visited and lived with four of the language groups into which the Bushmen are divided, but this is mostly about the Gikwe who inhabit the eastern part of the desert, and the Kung whose territory is the south-west. The Kalahari is subject to drought for nine months of the year; in the summer the temperature rises to 120ºF; in the winter it varies from 80ºF to an arctic frost at night. Hunting is difficult, it is too dry for crops of any kind, and so these people are nomadic within their own territories, and although they manage to survive in country which would kill any civilised man in a few days, it is not unusual for a Bushman to die of thirst. They have been driven back into this country by the Bantu and by Europeans, whose relative ‘progress’ in civilisation has made them more aggressive and grasping than the simple and submissive Bushman, who is afraid - with reason - of being kidnapped for slave labour, of the family units being broken up and leaving a disastrous preponderance of old people and young children who cannot hunt for themselves. They are not fighters or farmers, but the finest trackers in Africa, and all their other skills are stamped with the (nowadays peculiar) charm of necessity.
In appearance they are small - about five feet tall - almost naked, delicately built, and handsome because of the extreme grace with which they move, which as the author says, is not a beauty of the flesh, and therefore exists in everyone who is not infant or stiff with age. They have long slender arms and legs and the men are built for running: they love music and speak softly. They wear leather and ostrich eggshell beads, and the women are sometimes decorated with a row of blue scars on the forehead and the thighs to imitate the beauty of zebras. They hunt with arrows poisoned from a grub which they dig from the roots of certain trees, and when they kill everything is shared out of the animal by a rigid system of rules, the formal ownership of every part mattering to the Bushmen, although in the end no person eats more than any other. Because they are envious, they are afraid of being envied, and everything is always carefully divided, but they are also very honest - they neither lie nor steal, nor do they kill one another, have many curious and interesting beliefs, and are altogether worth reading about.
The author, who never writes about herself, emerges as the most remarkable young woman. She crossed the Kalahari three times in the course of her expeditions and endured the climate: she learned something of the extremely difficult languages, and her affection for the people with whom she lived is implicit, throughout the book, but she is never sentimental, patronising or dull as she describes them - their marriage customs, their hunting, their children, their dancing, their music, their magic and their endearing behaviour to her Viz: ‘…all the Bushmen who knew us threw their gentle arms around us, touching us so lightly that it was like being embraced by moths.’ An excellent and delightful book.