There is one person left on earth who still speaks an ancient Bushman language. Eddie Koch spoke to her
TO meet Elsie Vaalbooi, her black frock draped over a frame bent into the shape of a question mark by 96 forbidding years in the sands of the Kalahari Desert, is to come face-to-face with what is probably the most brutal, yet ignored, shame in this country’s history.
She is the last person on earth who remembers one of its most ancient languages. Encoded in her story and the fate of her language, a Bushman dialect known as Khomani that was spoken for up to 25 000 years before it became extinct in the 1970s, is a legacy of genocide and persecution that has yet to be set right by South Africa’s new government.
The thought is breathtaking: when this gentle and cultured woman dies she will take with her the codified remains of a culture that, in its heyday, possessed such an uncannily sophisticated knowledge of animals, plants, the soil, the weather, traditional medicine, human relations and moral values that one author has argued it was the very origin of science as we know it today.
Ancient paintings sketched into rocks and walls of caves across the subcontinent are beautiful relics of the deeply spiritual culture that was embedded in the peoples’ way of communicating: a world view that venerated the land and the animals they hunted; created mystical stories of how the world has its origins in lovemaking between the moon and the stars; and used dreams and shaman-like trances to communicate with their ancestors.
Perhaps owing to their need to carry so much lore and scientific information, San languages were among the most complex in the world. A recent study of phonetics across 317 languages, conducted by the University of California Los Angeles, noted that the San languages have the most complex click systems and the largest inventory of phonetic segments of any in the world. The languages literally are vast databanks for linguistic science. And now they are either dead or dying.
To find the last person in South Africa who can speak a San language is simple. Take a line from Cape Agulhas, the southern-most tip of the continent, and draw it due north until it stops on the northern extremity of the country at a place called Rietfontein. The little village of matchbox house and palm trees, wedged between the Namibian border and the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in a sea of red sand dunes and pans of dry salt, is about the most remote place in the country.
That is where Tony Traill, professor of linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, travelled earlier this year, armed with a collection of San dictionaries, grammar books and 78 old recordings of Bushman languages, made when a group of these people were brought from the Kalahari to the Empire Exhibition held at the Johannesburg Showgrounds back in 1936.
His mission was to establish the veracity of reports that there was an old woman in Rietfontein who could speak a language long thought to be extinct.
A few thousand Bushmen live and survive in Botswana, Namibia and Zambia today. But in South Africa it is estimated that between 200 and 300 are alive in the Kalahari region of South Africa. The story that Vaalbooi told Traill is typical of the events that led to the death of her language and the near-extinction of her people.
She was born at the turn of the century. She doesn’t remember where but other historical research suggests her family, the Vaalboois, came from the area now designated as the Kalahari Gemsbok Park. When she was a young girl the family trekked around the sheep farms of the Kalahari and eventually settled on an estate called Groendneus near Upington.
There she rubbed shoulders with its white owners, the Coetzees, and wore proper clothes for the first time. The San of the Kalahari were, in the early 20th century, the last survivors of a 300-year-old set of genocide campaigns that had been waged against them by African impis, settler armies, and commandos of trekboers who considered them vermin and poachers as they expanded into the hinterland of the country.
The ferocity of campaigns to exterminate Bushmen in the Cape Colony is reflected in the diary of an adventurer who travelled to the frontiers of the colony in the year 1797.
The notes read: “A boor from Graaff Reynet being asked in the secretary’s office a few days before we left town if the savages were numerous or troublesome along the road, replied he had only shot four, with as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges. I myself have heard one of the humane colonists boast of having destroyed with his own hands near 300 of these unfortunate retches.”
The Kalahari became a place of refuge, beyond the colonial frontier where the Bushmen were able to escape the full ferocity of these forces and live off the desert landscape by hunting and gathering with their intimate knowledge of its ecology or working for the few white and mixed-race (Baster) farmers who trekked into the inhospitable area.
But as can be expected life was not easy. Vaalbooi remembers her family moving from farm to farm, trying to find a decent employer and place to settle. German troops based in what was then South West Africa were a menace and the Boer Rebellion of 1916 was an additional problem.
While Traill was playing the old records to her, she vividly remembered her father, !Uxwe, loading the family into a donkey cart and abandoning their home to escape a squadron of government troops.
The troops were, she says, moordagtig [murderous] and accounted for the death of her brother Klaas. After the family had settled in the Rietfontein area, probably just before or after World War I, the boy went out walking in the dunes. It appears he got lost and old !Uxwe went out to look for him.
Instead Vaalbooi’s father found a regiment of soldiers camped out in the desert and was forced to turn back. She never saw her brother again.
But hers are not only memories of the pain that punctuates the history of the Kalahari Bushman. She has delightful memories of her mother, Kx’uisi, and the intimacy that developed between them.
“She [Kx’uisi] could cook ostrich eggs after making two holes in the shell to get it out. She was also good at cooking the groot jong tsamma [a melon which grows in the desert and formed a basic subsistence item in the Bushman’s diet]. She would scrape out the flesh [of the melon] with a wooden spoon. Then mash the tsamma into tsamma pap. Then throw some seeds that were chopped finely into the pap. My mother could also dry tsamma seeds, roast them on the fire and then grind them into a kind of flour.”
Traill relates how it was an old Khomani recording of a Bushman describing the initiation ceremony for young girls, clearly one of the most memorable moments of her life, that sparked an incredible ability in Vaalbooi to reach into the recesses of her mind and recall coherent snatches of the now dead language.
This is how she translated the 1936 recording: “The girl sits playing and finds she has become a woman. She comes to the hut and sits … She is adorned with ornaments, beads and a bag. She is lovely. She is made beautiful so she can look like a young girl … We kill a gemsbok and take her a grilled rib and she eats it so her body should not become thin nor she ugly …
“They dance. The older men go out to dance on the open place, and the older women … We make her delicious food, give her buchu, ointment and ochre so she can become lovely and sit there and her body can develop. She is very lovely and the men can’t look at her. They can’t hold this young women that is there. Then when they all sit at the fire their eyes can’t stay off the young woman as the fire lights her up.”
Nigel Crawhall, a socio-linguist working for the South African San Institute, argues that since this way of life ended the Bushmen of the Kalahari have become among the most oppressed people in the country.
Describing his research among them, he notes that the single most important cause of their distress was the way they were forcibly removed from their traditional lands, in what is now the Gemsbok Park, from the 1940s to the 1970s.
“In most of the Northern Cape towns we visited there is a subtle but visible ethnic hierarchy – with the San at the bottom, then the Khoi people [descendants of ancient Nama speakers], then the dominant culture – Baster or coloured and eventually a predominantly black government and privileged white farmers.”
There, he says, they suffer double persecution at the hands of the old oppressors as well as the formerly oppressed. Negotiations to resolve an official land claim, lodged by the Bushmen against the Kalahari Gemsbok Park in terms of the new restitution laws, are under way.
These could result in a new development programme that will include educational programmes aimed at reviving the language that will die with Vaalbooi.
But progress is painstakingly slow and, in the meantime, educational and cultural authorities in the province have shown little interest in dealing with what amounts to a holocaust in the heritage of this country.
When I met Vaalbooi in Rietfontein there were two images that sprang to mind. One was the multi-coloured stick figures from a Bushman painting used in our bid to host the next Olympics. The other was a line from Johnny Clegg’s song about the scatterlings of Africa.
It is one of this country’s less well- publicised scandals that it is the latter that most accurately describes the fate of the old lady and her people, the last scatterlings of an ancient San culture that everyone tries to romanticise but does little to protect.