During the nearly twenty-hour flight that separated Dublin from Hosea Kutako International Airport in Namibia, which included two uncomfortable stopovers, David had enough time to sift through—in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways—the confusion that his life had become after his decision to travel to the African continent. Above the clouds, his thoughts were more apparent, and the few weeks that separated him from the community debate on homosexual marriage now seemed like an eternity.
Although his behavior had kept ears and mouths occupied in Newcastle West, the sudden request for a license from priestly engagements had thrown even more wood onto the fire, leaving the diocese of Limerick and the good ladies of the Tea Club in a state of near shock. It was up to Elizabeth to convey to the local Christian community an explanation for Father Callaghan’s sudden departure.
David had spent the last days buried in logistical and bureaucratic necessities—something he was not accustomed to since his previous trips had all been to European destinations. This time, much to his annoyance, he needed numerous documents. The greater irritation—he began to realize—lay not in arranging practical matters but rather in his lack of clarity of purpose.
At the Tea Club meeting shortly after David’s departure, the ladies had all jostled on one side of the table, leaving Elizabeth O’Brien alone in the spotlight. The guardian of David’s secrets, in trying to justify his voluntary disappearance, found herself unable to look her friends in the eyes. So instead, she focused on the empty space just above their heads, with her arms crossed like a shield in front of her body. She then forgot about the philosophical concerns that David had confided in her, finding better shelter in the Holy Scripture, more precisely in John 6:38.
“Father Callaghan doesn’t doubt that he came to this world to do the will of the Lord, and his desire doesn’t need to be comprehensible to the reasoning of men but to their hearts,” said Elizabeth, her dilated pupils betraying her inner commotion.
Elizabeth’s free interpretation of the biblical passage paid off. Not only did it help to soften criticism of the young priest’s intemperance, but it also resulted in the formation of a chain of spiritual support for the journey on which David had embarked, whatever his destiny would be.
In recognition of her invaluable care, hours before his departure, David had entrusted to Elizabeth his most prized earthly possession. It was a brass candlestick, which had belonged to St. Samantha, one of the four Irish female saints of the eighth century—a time when the island was recognized as “the land of the saints.” The relic had been cherished by many generations of Callaghans. David had always found it difficult to worship the object, which in his childhood had produced a sense of guilt in bringing him closer to the Protestant’s attitude against the adoration of sacred relics, yet he was fully aware of its immense monetary value. Elizabeth had not known of the valuable candlestick passed down through the ages, but the revelation was so extraordinary that she looked into David’s eyes, put both of her hands on his shoulders, and accepted the errand with an earnestness reminiscent of a Knights Templar guarding the pilgrim path to the Holy Land.
Amidst the many tasks during his last days in Ireland, David found time for a short anthropological study of the San people. He also read about the history of the region of the African continent they called home, more precisely the Kalahari Desert between Namibia and Botswana. He found it particularly noteworthy that Namibia, a country so young, emancipated from South Africa only a quarter of a century before, was the keeper of such incomparable preciousness: the living ancestors of the most ancient humans.
Still crossing the Atlantic, and unable to sleep despite consuming two small bottles of wine, David sought to revise the scientific aspects of the discovery. He had been a lousy biology student in his school days and was counting on the aridity of texts extracted from the journal Science and an article printed from The Independent online to help him find his lost sleep:
(…) A study of 121 distinct populations of modern-day Africans has found that they are all descended from 14 ancestral populations and that the differences and similarities of their genes closely follow the differences and similarities of their spoken languages.
The scientists analyzed the genetic variation within the DNA of more than 3,000 Africans and found that the San were among the most genetically diverse group, indicating that they are probably the oldest continuous population of humans on the continent–and on earth.
The study, published in the Science journal, involved ten years of research comprising trips to some of the most remote and dangerous parts of Africa to collect blood samples. The project found that modern Africans had the most diverse DNA of all racial groups in the world, confirming the theory that Africa is the birthplace of humanity, said Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania (…)
It was not working. The journalistic nature of the text did nothing to diminish his interest, let alone lull him to sleep. Later, while pretending to be asleep so as not to be dragged into a conversation by two enthusiastic and talkative English ladies—one on each shoulder—he remembered that he had not yet received any news regarding the logistics of his arrival. He had entrusted these to a former seminarian with whom he had had virtual contact mediated by a South African cleric based in Dublin.
In the rather few but thick messages David exchanged with the former seminarian—whose name was John Paul Elliot—he found out that his interlocutor’s sound knowledge of the Bible was cultivated at early age in his childhood spent with Catholic grandparents in Cape Town. However, to the disenchantment of his tutors, John Paul wrote, his passion for anthropology eventually made him withdraw from the rigidity of priestly life.
The scientific evidence of human evolution and the explanations for homo sapiens’ repeated misfortunes were of particular interest to John Paul. Both as a student of social anthropology at a local university and as a volunteer and handyman on a scientific expedition through Southern Africa, the former seminarian knew that he was following untamed human steps. Wild and original, those steps would eventually lead him to a blueprint for reforming the entire civilization. Something infinitely more precious than the emeralds of Zimbabwe or the diamonds of Namibia.
When David contacted him, John Paul—or Jack, as he had been called in childhood—was serving with a pair of Scandinavian researchers studying the socio-cultural and linguistic characteristics of the San people, a subdivision of the Khoisan of South West Africa. “With a history estimated to go back tens of thousands of years, this hunter-gatherer people are now reduced to small populations located mainly in the Kalahari Desert,” wrote Jack.
When the plane started its descent towards Hosea Kutako International Airport, David could see from the window that the aircraft would land in the immensity of the semi-arid savannah. Ten minutes after the captain’s announcement, it was not yet possible to see the airport facilities or any urban structure. It was then that he remembered reading somewhere about the meaning of the Tswana word that had baptized the Kalahari: “the great thirst.” In a mechanical movement, he took a sip from a small bottle of mineral water he had saved from dinner. Five minutes later, the aircraft found the ground.
As he waited for his bag, staring at the conveyor belt as if it were a distant landscape, David thought of the Garden of Eden as described in the Book of Genesis. From what he could see as he got off the plane, the arid landscape with scatterings of trees in sandy soil did not really evoke the biblical description of a green paradise of trees laden with fruit. Although he knew that the original couple would never have stepped on this land, he allowed his fancies to continue immune to any reality check.
Without news from Jack, David loaded his luggage into a taxi headed to a guesthouse in Windhoek, the country’s capital. When informed that the ride would be about forty kilometers, he ran his hands through his messy hair, put on his sunglasses, and leaned back in the front passenger seat of a sedan that still smelled new. He then tried to settle his thoughts in the comfortable headrest, keeping his eyes fixed on the landscape unfolding outside the speeding car. His eyes fell on the rocky and hilly horizon filled with twisted acacias and skirted by a luminous blue sky. He smiled as a group of baboons paraded on the roadside and sighed at the sight of a young woman carrying a baby on her back. There was plenty of time for a myriad of thoughts to resurface and dissipate in the immensity of the scenery.
In the capital, as the taxi drove through the well-kept streets, David’s first impression was that he had arrived in a small, charming city nestled between impressive mountains and with an urban atmosphere that blended the styles and tastes of the old German and Dutch colonizers with native African culture. The parched vegetation discolored by the long dry season stood in stark contrast to the flawless blue of the sky, and it all seemed more vivid than he had imagined.
After arriving at the two-story guesthouse with large balconies reminiscent of German colonial style, the taxi driver unloaded David’s luggage. The seemingly historical building rested on a hill overlooking the center of Windhoek, which the driver explained meant “corner of wind” in Afrikaans. David was overwhelmed by the view, almost leaving his possessions behind on the side of the road. What he was yet unaware of was the contrast between the two worlds on the same horizon. At one end, the township of Katutura—“the place where people do not want to live”—where the persistent scars of the apartheid regime were evident in poverty and harsh living conditions; and, at the other, the modern and elegant neighborhoods of the middle and upper classes.