Arrived in Tsumkwe, in Bushmanland, after a long drive down one of Namibia’s endless dead-straight roads. This is part of the Kalahari that stretches on through Botswana – the border is just a few miles away to the east. Mention of the Kalahari Desert and Bushmen brings to mind images of simple hunter-gatherers wandering through vast tracts of sandy desert with nothing more to sustain them than an old ostrich shell filled with water and a few tasty grubs to eat.
Well the Bushmen, or more properly the San, do use ostrich shell, and they may well occasionally snack on grubs, but there’s very little desert here. The Kalahari is a fossil desert – it receives far too much rain to qualify as proper desert. It’s still a tough and harsh land, especially during the dry season, but nowadays it’s covered in low scrubby bushes and grasses. The clue’s in the name I suppose.
Standing out from all that low scrub is the odd giant Baobab tree. I drove 20 km down a sandy track to reach the Holboom, or Hollow Tree. It’s said to be the largest Baobab in the world – not sure if that’s true or not. Not surprisingly it was hollow when first named. People tend to be fairly literal around here. Apparently it’s not unusual for Baobabs to grow hollows as they mature, but eventually as they grow even older the hollow closes up. Today there’s just a narrow gap where the hollow in the Holboom used to be. It's estimated to be 2,000 years old.
As for the Bushmen or San life has changed even more in the last 50 years or so since western civilisation really began to encroach on their lives. Now they face a real challenge to keep their culture alive while choosing what to take from the modern world to make their desperately poor lives easier. That’s an interesting question. Did they consider themselves poor before the rest of the world crowded in or is it only now that their lives are compared with others that they have become an underclass?
I visited one of the nearby villages and was shown around the “modern village” by a couple of the men I met, Tsote and Jaikes. They keep another more traditional village of grass huts nearby for visiting tourists to show how they used to live. For now though they had cast aside their leather loincloths for ragged hand-me downs and trainers. The modern village was much more interesting. Everyone had chosen to build their own style of house – depending on what kind of construction material was available. Tarpaulin, old packing cases, planks, corrugated sheeting, car doors. And they came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I was taken to meet the oldest man in the village – said by various people to be 70, 80 or 90. When we arrived he was still half asleep on the sandy floor of his tiny but very traditional little hut. He was respectful woken to be asked if he liked his hut. “Oh yes” he said “This is a wonderful home when I am asleep”
Tsote, showed me his house, different from all the rest in that it was rectangular with a flat roof and appeared to made up of large mud bricks. Jaikes joked that when he was a child Tsote spent all his time building houses out of mud. Now he’d grown up and built his own house the same way. “Yes”, said Tsote “But this time I mixed a little cement in as well”