Painted Hills and Kalahari Bushmen
Trip Start
Apr 26, 2005
1
27
42
Trip End
Nov 17, 2005
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Tsodilo, Botswana
Sunday, September 11, 2005
It's a lot to take in, and I've been promised a San, or Kalahari Bushman, guide, but none have shown up to work this morning at the local museum. "They must be still drunk," says a museum official with a smirk. More likely, as it's the slow tourist season, the Bushmen have better things to do. They're also not exactly happy that Tsodilo officials recently lowered the fee paid by visitor for guided tour to 30 pula from 50.
Instead, Nxisae Nxao plays stand-in for her missing guides. Nxao (the 'x' indicates a click sound, one of 5 in the local Ju/'hoansi language) is a development facilitator with a local NGO, helping people in nearby villages to earn an income by selling crafts and cultural shows to tourists. Her initiatives include the guides but we're not about to dwell on their absence. We have thousand-year-old rock paintings to see.
With over 4500 images at 400 sites around the four main hills, it would take months to see all of Tsodilo, and more paintings are still being discovered. Tsodilo became a World Heritage Site in 2001 and is surely the largest, impossible to take in at a glance, even from afar. Close up, the hills are coloured by minerals leaching from rock, causing vivid swaths of purple, pink, orange, yellow, and red. In places lichen adds green to the palette.
The paintings themselves are red and from hidden corners, towering wall or high above on a cliff face, stand out like modern works. Many have been tested and their age and authenticity determined accurately. The oldest, at over 3000 years, have faded significantly. An elephant is just barely there, other animals and geometric shapes discernible only at a distance and unrecognizable up close. Easier to make out and painted between 700 and 1100 c.e., a giraffe strolls by an eland, two massive rhinos stand over older images of zebras and antelopes, and in a striking outline, a fish, complete with unmistakable fins and tail, swims on the rock face.
There used to be lots of fish here, in a lake that existed at intervals between 22,500 and 7500 years ago. Barbed spear points, mollusk shell beads and even fish bones have been found at Tsodilo. The local airstrip is on what used to be the lake bottom. The name Tsodilo itself means "damp earth", and for millennia people have been drawn to the food, water, security and spiritual setting of the place. 100,000 years ago our earliest modern ancestors used the caves and overhangs that I'm now exploring. Tsodilo's history dwarfs us as much as the scale of its rock.
In its more recent history, Tsodilo was first visited by a European, Siegfried Passarge, in 1898, and is so remote that another 60 years passed before the next white man came along to have a look. Now with a new road providing better access, some 15,000 tourists visit every year, and the nearby settlements have a steadily increasing market for their cultural goods.
At the Bushman village in sight of the hills, women make ostrich egg shell beads for necklaces. Each bead is meticulously shaped from shards of eggshell, a hole is bored, and any edges polished and smoothed on a stone. To give colour the beads are fried in vegetable oil, cooking longer to give a deeper, almost black, colour. The entire process from shell to necklace can take 2 days, and I can see why. When I try my hand at making the hole, a process rather like trying to make fire by rubbing a stick between the hands, it takes three or four attempts to grind through the thick shell.
And as I kneel in the sand, taking pictures of the women at work; the children's faces grubby and beautiful; the old men ignoring the scene and playing a traditional game; I'm captivated by the magic and romanticism of these people. I'd heard about that enchantment, was almost warned against seeing them in such a light. And they no longer wear the traditional goatskin loincloths or carry bow and arrow. That archetypal image is now found only on postcards. But I've just made an ostrich egg shell bead in a Bushmen settlement in the shadow of the Tsodilo Hills, and don't know how else to be but charmed.
