The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Author:Elizabeth Marshall Thomas [Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-77295-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

BEAUTIFUL UNGKA and LAZY KWI

FOR TWO DAYS we drove our trucks through the scrub forests of Nyae Nyae and on the third day we came to a water pan not far from the village of Gam. In 1953 we had lived at Gam a short time; it was the cattle post of a very wealthy Chuana farmer. This farmer lived at Tsau, a large Bantu town several days’ travel from Gam, but he had cattle posts with herders all through the country, keeping only fragments of his great herd at each one. Two Chuana families guarded his cattle at Gam. The village had once been the home of about a hundred Bushmen, but when the Chuanas had taken it, many of the Bushmen had been made serfs and they and their families now worked for the Chuanas, tending the herds.

The little pan near Gam was full of blue water, and was surrounded by yellow-leafed trees. We found two ostriches beside it. The ostriches stared mutely at us first, very wide between the eyes and square at the jaw, until it came to them that we were not ostriches; and with that they rushed headlong away, flapping their ostrich-feathered wings, working their naked thighs and knees like pistons, wildly out of control. They had an air of old people with tough, gray, varicose-veined legs, wearing nothing to hide their nakedness but little feather boas around their waists, which were the wings.

As we left the pan a boar got up from the grass where he was lying and ran before us, a warthog with a heavy neck and red bristle of a mane, with curved tusks and with his tail stiff up in the air like a banner, trotting like a horse. He held his head high and ran away proudly, and he was old and very massive for a pig.

Not long after that we saw the two thatched rooftops of the village of Gam. A feather of smoke was rising over the rooftops, and soon we were there.

The people must have heard our trucks. A small crowd was standing in the bushes, the people watching apprehensively as we came up. Mostly they were Bushmen, naked and smooth and brown, but here and there we saw a Bushman man wearing a ragged shirt or a woman in an old, filthy dress. In the crowd, towering over the Bushmen, were the Chuanas, a woman and a man, the woman dressed in a turban and a long dress, the man in shorts and a jacket. These two were the cattle-keepers. When our trucks stopped, the woman recognized us and, clapping her hands together, ran forward to meet us, followed at once by several Bushmen who also recognized us, and after that the crowd broke and all ran forward, the tense looks of apprehension gone, for if all the Bushmen had not known us they had heard of us and knew who we were. In a moment we found ourselves in the center of

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