Way of the Bushman

ALL OF CREATION DANCES

In the beginning every creature danced like we dance. Everything dances in the changing of first creation. Today the ancestors will come to us if there is a strong dance—the ancestors are happy when they dance with us. They will re-create the world as it was in the beginning. As we dance the world keeps re-creating itself, for the healing and renewal of life.

The strongest dances today are the eland, giraffe, and g!oah dances. The eland dance at a puberty rite is especially strong. We might dance the eland dance, n!ang djxani, the whole day and night. We can receive the power to heal at such a dance. While the strongest Bushman n|omkxao automatically acquires the ability to heal when he receives the ostrich egg, other Bushmen learn healing in a dance. There they are taught by other healers and receive strong nails from them. The eland dance is a good place to both empower existent healers and contribute to making a new healer.

Keep in mind that all dances are able to be strong ones. The strength of a dance depends on the vigor and enthusiasm of the singing. It is the quality of the music that most determines whether our nails get hot. Sometimes it takes men longer to get into the dance and they will give excuses like, “I don’t know how to dance” or they will be saying to each other, “I don’t feel like dancing.” What they need to do is sing with the women. The stronger everyone sings, the more n|om will heat and be available for transformative healing.

The women are always the most important participants in a dance because their singing is required to lift everyone to the highest place. The men need the women to help wake them up. Some of the men also sing with the women. This really helps n|om cook. When we all sing strongly, the singing becomes a big communally shared vibration and this makes everyone’s nails become very hot.

We can’t get our nails of n|om as hot as we need them to be unless our voice is shaking and singing. Dancing is not enough. Shaking the body is not enough. We must also sing in a heated way in order for our heart to rise. It doesn’t matter if we think we don’t know the song, because when we get hot enough with n|om, God makes our voice sing something—the sound just comes through us. When we are extremely hot, our singing can get so loud that it almost knocks us out. That’s when we own the song and are singing it most correctly.

Proper singing is the secret to heating the nails. Only this kind of singing and dancing makes us the happiest. When the people sing harder everyone gets hotter. If a new song comes out of a n|om-kxao, the women will pick up on it—we follow whatever songs the Sky God sends.

The dance steps are different for each station of handling n|om. As healers progress through the stations, we get hotter and our movements alter. The same is true for the singers and those who are clapping. For the healers, energized singing and clapping helps them feel like n|om is lifting their feet; gu-tsau means to be lifted up by the clapping.

In the beginning of a dance the healer must exert effort in order to dance, but when the dance gets hot with n|om, the singing and clapping effortlessly move the dancer. Sometimes they make our steps very fast. We can get so happy and ecstatically charged in a dance that we straighten out our arms behind us as we move. Or we can get so hot with n|om that we can stand up on our toes and dance.^*42 The n|om lifts us up and we feel like we are flying. When the percussive sound gets particularly loud during a dance, our soul can travel.

When a healer’s nails become sufficiently hot, we initiate a pumping in our belly that then begins to move spontaneously—this motion enables us to pull out sickness. The pumping action reaches its fullest strength only when the healer is powerfully singing during its action.

At this time we can also hold another person, usually wrapping our arms around her, and together we climb the rope. It feels like the rope comes through our head and goes right through the rest of our body. The feeling alternates between being pulled upward toward the sky and downward toward the earth. Our bodies pump up and down as we climb the rope, producing a noise in our throat as we climb that sounds like a drum. ||Xoan is the name of this heavy breathing sound that we make when we climb the rope to God.^†16 It feels like fire is coming out of our mouth; it is so hot that it dries up our throat. We feel tight in the belly and can become very hot.

When all of this is taking place, we say that we are standing or climbing on the rope to God, n!uan-tso. The strongest healers love to stand and climb on the rope. They own the rope. Our life is never the same once we own the rope. It takes over everything we do. We are pulled by it and led to where we need to be and guided in what we need to say and do.

There is a limit to the amount of heated n|om that anyone can handle, including our strongest healers. This is why a dance involves cycles of heating and cooling—we need water to cool us down when we get too hot with n|om. After we hit a peak, we cool down and then proceed to heat ourselves up again. Around and around this cycle goes, repeating itself throughout a n|om healing dance. As long as we stay on a good rope, we will be spontaneously heated and cooled in the right way.

The women’s g!oah dance and the men’s giraffe dance (≠oah djxani) are equal in their healing powers.^*43 Outside observers who believe that there’s more healing in the men’s dance need to be corrected and know that the women heal just as much in their dances. (See editors’ commentary 12.1) Though the men’s and women’s dances may begin differently, when they get hot enough and a dancer is fully into thara, the dances look more similar. One significant difference is that the men’s dance takes a while to get cooking, whereas the women go straight for the fullest thara.^†17

The difference between a giraffe dance and g!oah dance is that when we’re in thara for the g!oah dance, the shaking goes up and down the whole body, whereas in the giraffe dance, we concentrate the shaking in the belly and push it up and down. What makes the giraffe dance unique is how it bends us over as we get a pumping movement inside our belly. We talk about this as an “internal pump.” It comes to life when the fire of n|om is inside us. We have to make an up-and-down motion inside our belly to pump the n|om fire out. This is when n|om is breathing us and flows all throughout the body. Sounds come out of our mouth like a drum. Our belly feels like it is full of boiling water and we may not know our whereabouts. The foam of an eland may come out of our nose and mouth. If we are strong, this can happen while we are dancing in the same place—our feet just stomp back and forth as we get hotter and hotter. We may have to cool down to come back again. This is when we should drink a lot of water to cool off.

Women and men rarely bleed from their nose during a dance. Tcoq’a was taught that “If a nosebleed happens during a dance, it usually means that the healer has too much n|om. He must be cooled down. If a healer has foam in the mouth, however, it is a gift from God. It’s from the eland. This means the healer is successfully going into first creation. When this happens the healing energy is passing through the healer, and as it goes through the mouth, healing music and sounds come forth. This is the time when we see most properly.”

There is an interesting thing that sometimes happens with the men in a giraffe dance. If a healer becomes very hot in the giraffe dance, he might suddenly start shaking his whole body like he is in a g!oah dance. The pumping movement that goes up and down our belly and spine takes place in the giraffe dance. In the g!oah and elephant dances, we let the shaking disperse throughout our whole body.^*44 However, strong doctors may go back and forth between these two ways of having n|om move and circulate through them. This is when a strong healer can be seen stomping his feet up and down and all of a sudden his whole body starts trembling as he shifts to standing in place.

Bushman healers have differing opinions about the elephant dance, or !xo djxani. Some healers believe the elephant dance is harmful and should be avoided. Others healers, such as |Kunta Boo, have no problem with dancing it. From |Kunta Boo’s perspective, “Some people are scared of the elephant dance because the elephant needles hurt too much. They fear they might be killed. People actually fear all the dances because all the needles are strong. If you dance hard you will become used to the needles and they won’t hurt you. In the elephant dance, we shoot an arrow through a long horn. It makes people scared to see that horn. Whenever the horn comes out, the singing becomes very intense and the dancers get more serious. The use of a horn in the elephant dance is similar to the way my grandfather shot oryx arrows in the earlier dances. A person can hold the horn while dancing with it. When the arrow is shot and falls near someone, its n|om jumps into that person.”

You don’t need to see God’s divine egg in order to receive the giraffe dance or any other kind of dance. You can own a dance without being an owner of the egg. The dance, along with its song, can come to you. Everything about the dance concerns opening ourselves to catching the hearts of others. We catch the heart of the different animals we sing about and we catch the hearts of each other. Because God has given us all the songs and dances, they must be used to catch the heart of creation.

In first creation every animal has its own healer. When we dance and are trying to catch the feeling of a giraffe, eland, or another animal, at the same time the animals are dancing around their own fire, trying to catch the feeling of a human n|om-kxao. All the healers and animals are trying to catch each other’s hearts at the same time. When Beh was walking home, she actually saw the giraffe that caught her. That special giraffe was like a n|om-kxao for the giraffe. It caught her like she caught it.

As we dance the giraffe dance and enter first creation, there are giraffes around their fire that are also dancing. This is when our mothers, grandmothers, and all our family are dancing in the sky, along with the giraffes from first creation. When the whole of creation dances, it feels like the ancestors and the giraffes are within us. All the changing is happening inside our hearts. At one moment we dance inside the Sky God while in another moment we dance inside our grandfathers. Later we may dance inside the heart of the giraffe. The dance keeps changing who holds our heart as we dance on the rope to God.

It is the dancing that brings a giraffe near a village. Our movements bring the giraffe, while the giraffe’s dancing brings the people to the giraffe. Each thinks the other one was brought by their dancing. It’s really the rope bringing both of them together. The rope is attached to the abdomen of the giraffe; on all animals the rope is tied to the spine, near the intestines. That is the part of the giraffe where the best meat is found. It also is where the meat’s liquid and fat are located. In the old times we used that liquid to wash our bodies. The rope connecting the animal’s spine to our spine pulls each of us, bringing us closer as our n|om activates the pulling.

In the eland dance, as the rope between a person and eland gets stronger, it pulls the two together so that their hearts become one. In the g!oah dance, the rope to the g!oah tree pulls on our heart as we move like we are the tree. We feel the wind blowing around us. This is how the g!oah dance makes us feel as its n|om medicine comes in and wakes us up.

When women experience a strong kabi they often see the ways that the ancestral women dance. It makes us shake with great fervor. It is possible to see the original g!oah tree in a kabi. That is a life-changing experience. In the past, we would sew the g!oah leaves together and put them around our waist to dance with; the leaves would tremble as we would shake. We saw this when we were children. |Xoan remembers seeing her parents dance with the leaves. “When they danced they told us they were making us ready to become the future. Or they’d say, ‘I’m putting you into the past and the future in order to make your body stronger.’” Anything we do to foster strengthening the rope to the g!oah plant readies us for possibly meeting the plant in a kabi.

One night, when Tcoq’a’s grandmother was a little girl, she was sleeping next to her mother when the ancestors and the Sky God came to her. They said that she must stand up and heal her mother because her mother was very sick. They told her, “You must not let your mother die. You must do something to save her.”^*45 During that night she was crying and started to shake. She spontaneously began dancing the g!oah dance. The ancestors and God gave it to her. That is how the g!oah dance came to our village.

Though the g!oah dance is for all the strong women dancers, the strongest men can also receive it. Bo owns the g!oah dance, as does |Kunta Boo. When an owner of the dance dances g!oah, it’s like water is poured on us and we dance very hard. We dance like we are floating high above the people. We sweat with n|om and when other weaker and less experienced healers cannot stand up, we are there helping them.

Our women like when Bo visits us because the women n|om-kxaosi want to dance with him every night. Most of the men today don’t want to dance as much because they are a little lazy. The men sometimes have to be pushed to dance. The women will say, “We’re wasting our songs.” This means that we want to dance, but the men won’t join in. We tell them that it would be good for the village if they dance more often. We need to dance to maintain our health and vitality. The women love to dance. The problem is getting the men to dance enough!

Women talk to themselves about how the men don’t keep their ropes strong through dancing more often. Trickster knows how to deceive men easier than women. The men don’t keep their nails strong. This has always been true, even when some of us were small girls. When the women start singing, it only takes one song for us to get our nails strong.

Women are the strongest healers; they are now and they were when the first anthropologists came here. It’s strange because most of the anthropologists thought that the men were stronger and that the women didn’t know much about healing. We didn’t show them anything. We would privately conduct the g!oah dance and we kept almost everything about it secret.

Perhaps anthropologists never found out that women are the strongest healers because the men they interviewed would brag and tell them that women are weak. The women would be quiet and not say anything. Know this: when it comes to the dance, the women usually stand first, leaving the men behind. Today the women are always ready to dance.

Giving birth brings one deeply inside the workings of first creation. Here new life is brought into the world, as it is each time we move ourselves into first creation. Whether you are a woman or a man, we all give birth to the whole of creation each time n|om is heated by heartfelt song and dance. Follow the wisdom of the strongest women who sing with all their hearts. This is what changes the world and enables all of creation to dance.

Editors’ Commentary

12.1. On healing in women’s dances

The women’s g!oah dance was unknown to the Marshalls during their fieldwork during the 1950s in the Nyae Nyae area (Lee 2012, 148). Lee wrote that “no healing of the kind commonly seen in the Giraffe Dance occurs in the Women’s Dance. This is a major difference between the two forms” (Lee 2012, 176). On the contrary, we have never not seen women n|om-kxaosi healing like men heal, with their trembling hands, during an intense women’s g!oah dance. While there are variations across all healers, the placement of trembling hands on other people’s bodies is found in all Bushman healing dances if a n|om-kxao has sufficiently heated n|om.