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  The first Europeans to rule what is now Namibia were the Germans who, in 1915, were defeated by South African troops. The new rulers called the region South West Africa and, after years of civil war between them and the locals, gave the country independence in 1990 as Namibia.

  The Namib Desert has vast zones of high sand dunes, with many weird plants finding water only by means of very deep roots. One such, the Welwitschia, is known to live for over a thousand years, but has only two leaves issuing out of a single woody stem.

  One major difference and advantage which the Namib has over most other deserts is its proximity to the Atlantic coastline from which banks of fog creep over the sands leaving them briefly damp. Various species of sand dwelling insects emerge at night and, lined up facing the sea (like so many meerkats), they stand on their heads hour after hour letting the fog’s moisture condense on their bodies and drip down into their mouths. Bushmen used equally clever ways to benefit from their surroundings. But for a handful, they are all now tragically gone but at least their hot weather survival tricks were noted by early European explorers’ records, and they make fascinating reading.

  Bushmen’s bodies adapted themselves over the centuries, rather like camels, to desert living. We can all store food by way of fat to serve as a larder for lean times, but, as I have learnt to my cost during desert ultra-marathons, such fat deposits are a huge disadvantage to strenuous hot-weather exercise because bodily exertion generates heat in muscle and surplus fat blocks the urgent need to lose heat through the skin to stay cool. So heart and lungs have to work extra hard.

  Bushmen’s, and especially Bushwomen’s, bodies avoided this problem by concentrating their reserves of fat in their voluminous buttocks, which looked quite out of keeping with the rest of their lean, stringy bodies.

  The well-known South African traveller and academic, Laurens van der Post, described the buttocks of Bushmen as sponges. Despite their resulting unsexy silhouettes, Bushwomen were much coveted as slaves or wives by their Bantu neighbours due to their delicate limbs and honey-coloured skin.

  Bushmen learnt how to suck moisture from seemingly desiccated desert weeds. They would use a stick to dig away the sand around the weed’s thin stems until they unearthed the ‘water tanks’ where the stems swelled to football-sized, jelly-filled balls which, when squeezed, produced liquid. This the Bushmen would drink and wipe on their bodies to moisten their skin.

  William Burchell, a botanist from Kew Gardens, spent many years in South Africa during the early nineteenth century, and he greatly admired the Bushmen. He commented on the graceful ways of the women, and noted how the boys stood ‘still as herons’ for hours on end in the pools of dried riverbeds waiting to spear fish. He noted too that Bantu bands would soon wipe out all Bushmen in their zeal to take over their hunting grounds. He added that the poor Bushmen might first be killed off by neighbouring Hottentot tribes who feared the lethal desert poisons of Bushmen arrows, or by Boer farmers whose cattle the Bushmen were prone to rustle.

  One of the Bushmen’s favourite foods, found on their desert boundaries along the Orange and Limpopo rivers, was the hippopotamus. They called the meat of these 3,500-pound beasts ‘sea-cow pork’, and since animal fat was their ultimate delicacy, they went out of their way to trap them.

  Hippos are the most lethal of Africa’s riverine denizens, with more deaths per year to their credit than even crocodiles. Highly territorial when cut off from their pools, their aggressive and surprisingly agile attacks on land or in water make them particularly dangerous to hunt. So Bushmen dug deep hippo pits with camouflaged covering along known hippo tracks. Once killed, the beasts’ thick pelts would be peeled back like banana skins.

  A fully grown hippo carries more dense fat than any other animal kilo for kilo, and they are so heavy that they can walk about under water, grazing on water weeds for five minutes with a lungful of air.

  Burchell himself loved hippo steak which he would consume, while his Bushmen friends carved off great chunks of fat to dry on thorn bushes, drank bowls of melted fat, munched on entrails and offal, and ‘all around me was carving, broiling, gnawing and chewing’.

  An eccentric Scot, named Gordon Cumming, who left Eton at nineteen, joined the army in India and later in the Cape. After resigning in 1843 he went on a five-year safari, which took him all over South Africa, often alone.

  Resented early on by his man servant (a Cockney ex-cab driver), he hunted at times with a Hottentot tracker he called Hendrick. But a lion ate Hendrick one day, leaving only one leg (knee down) with a shoe on it. Cumming then tracked and killed the lion.

  He disliked the Boers and their treatment of Bushmen. He noted that hunting licences in the Boer Republic included ‘two Bushmen in each seasonal game permit’.

  He was highly impressed by the Bushmen, whose women carried hollowed-out ostrich eggs full of water over great distances of arid desert, hiding some in secret places along ancient Bushmen ‘escape routes’.

  He noted in his meticulous diaries how Bushmen, when hunting the hyper-shy ostrich, would wear ostrich skins and strut about in imitation of that bird’s standard gait until close enough to use a poisoned arrow.

  Cumming was a canny Scot and he appreciated the cunning ways of the Bushmen, who would garner whatever meat might be available within reach of their desert hideouts, whether that meat was wild or owned by farmers. He admired their meticulous withdrawal plans following a rustling raid, and how they would, on reaching their desert hideouts, drive the stolen cattle barefoot into the most arid zones where their mounted pursuers dared not follow.

  A contemporary of Cumming, William Oswell, was another British hunter who admired the Bushmen. Oswell was himself of a fearless nature, and whereas Cumming was wont to shoot at a charging lion from seventy metres, Oswell favoured a mere thirty. This sometimes backfired, and on one occasion, hunting with a companion of David Livingstone, he and his horse were thrown to the ground and gored by a white rhinoceros. Oswell’s scalp was literally torn from his head, but somehow he survived. Much of his bush and survival craft was learnt from dwelling with the families of Bushmen, who, to an outsider, appeared to live for weeks without water amid their dunes and endless plains of salt pans, thorny acacias and confusing mirages.

  His diary notes that, elephant-like, they chew the bitter flesh of the Kalahari tsamma melon. I have tasted one and instantly spat it out, but the evil flavour lingered in my mouth for hours.

  Bushmen, Oswell wrote, copy the habits of the desert gemsbok, sucking dry hidden tubers by somehow knowing where to dig for them. In places with no apparent water source at all, they hand-dig a shaft into which they plunge a long pole and then revolve this, drill-like, down to hollows in the substratum to form a mamina hole from which they suck water through a long hollow reed.

  Cumming returned to Scotland in 1850 and, twenty years later, his books attracted Frederick Selous, then a boy at Rugby School, to give up his plans to be a doctor and instead go to Africa to hunt big game. Selous was to become acknowledged as the greatest of all the white hunters of the nineteenth century and he noted the Bushmen as the most proficient trackers in Africa. He admired their boxes of acacia bark lined with gum in which, despite great heat, they stored live poisonous caterpillars to keep their n’gwa toxin fresh for arrow tips. How, too, they left the skins of their prey hanging from bushes along their secret paths for a rainy day, when the leather might keep them alive.

  Selous envied their ability to successfully digest decomposing meat and slimy offal. And, he noted, when hunting man-eating lions with a taste for Bushmen, how fastidious the lions often were with their kills. First their abrasive tongues would lick the skin off their victims, then suck the blood from the flayed bodies before eating them, feet first.

  Dr Livingstone himself, although not long in the Kalahari, also spoke highly of the patience of Bushmen hunters who would wait motionless for hours watching a lion gorge on a kill. Then, when the lion eventually slept satiated from its feas
t, they would creep up and fire poisoned arrows into the big cat’s belly.

  The records of hunters and explorers towards the end of the nineteenth century mention Bushmen less frequently. By the 1870s safari hunters like Cornwallis Harris described the few Bushmen that he met as desperate survivors, hunted to near extinction by both Boer and Bantu; no longer daring to rustle cattle or stray from the inner sanctums of their deserts, they lived off ant larvae, locusts and roots. Knowing that their hunters ambushed water holes, the Bushmen filled their ostrich egg water bottles only when in the direst of need. Harris described them as walking skeletons.

  Harris himself subsequently met the chief of one of the Zulu tribes who massacred many Bushmen, the Matabele chief Mzilikazi. In the 1830s Mzilikazi’s tribe was thrown out of Bechuanaland by the Boers and driven 700 miles to land north of the Limpopo, having slaughtered many of the Mashona who they displaced in what is now Zimbabwe. (Robert Mugabe is himself a Mashona, and he has in his time as leader murdered over 30,000 Matabele.) Harris was warned by the Bushmen of Mzilikazi’s bad habits, including decapitation, genital amputation and impalement, but he eventually charmed and gifted his way into the Zulu chief’s favour and hunted all over his land.

  Although the Bushmen clans survived Mzilikazi’s atrocities, their end nearly came in the 1890s when one of the last desperate clans of San Bushmen raided veldt-grazing cattle and were pursued by vigilante Boer farmers. The raiders usually managed to escape into a mountainous outcrop, their last refuge, but unfortunately for them this hideout, located by chance in its secret valley, was attacked by Boer commandos. Many of the San, whose ancestors sired all indigenous South Africans, were wiped out that day. Half breeds still survive, but few pure DNA members of the First People, the greatest known true desert dwellers in African history. DNA researchers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2013 traced existing Bushmen in Namibia and compared their DNA with 420,000 variants across 1,462 genomes from forty-eight ethnic groups worldwide

  Professor Stephan Schuster, the project leader, says of the Khoisan people, including the Kalahari Bushmen, ‘Our study proves that they belong to one of mankind’s most ancient lineages and that they did not interbreed with any other ethnic groups for 150,000 years.’

  Sadly, the Bushmen of today are under great pressure to leave their historic homeland which, in 1961, was known as Bechuanaland. That year the British rulers designated an area twice the size of Wales as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) which was designed to protect the last refuge of a people who had lived across southern Africa for tens of thousands of years until they were gradually exterminated by all the races that came after them. This guarantee that Bushmen could live in this reserve unmolested was enshrined in the new country’s constitution when Botswana won independence in 1966.

  But diamonds were discovered inside the reserve in the 1980s and the Botswana government told the Bushmen to move out. Despite global censure, the authorities pressed ahead with the evictions, forcing the Bushmen to an arid settlement where, like Australian Aboriginals and Canadian Inuit in similar plight decades before, they lost the will to live and turned to alcohol and despair in the ghetto which they named the place of death.

  A friend of mine, Robin Hanbury-Tenison who, to help remote jungle tribes in Brazil, had set up the now global concern called Survival International for indigenous peoples under threat, had taken legal steps on behalf of the Bushmen.

  Despite this and Survival’s successes in the Botswana High Court in 2006 and 2011, the government ignored the court rulings, denied the Bushmen access to the only available water supplies and to the hunting rights that they had always lived off in the reserve. If caught hunting, government agents now arrest, torture or shoot them.

  Botswana’s President, Ian Khama, is personally determined to drive every last Bushman out of the reserve so that the diamond operations there can be expanded.

  When I was twelve, my South African granny having died, my mother decided to take all four of us children back to England. She bought a cottage in Sussex, toned down our South African accents and registered us in English schools. I fell in love with a nine-year-old next-door neighbour named Ginny, but she failed, for at least four years, to notice. Her father disliked me, but after teenage years of clandestine meetings, we knew that we were, as the saying goes, made for each other.

  Long after we were married I returned with her many times to Africa to show her my old Constantia haunts and to explore elsewhere.

  One of our journeys took us in search of my grandfather’s Mozambique adventures a century before. We drove a rickety rental car up the coast road, the so-called Garden Route, passing by Ceres where, on a hillside, an imposing white chapel with pillars overlooks the coastline far below. This is the memorial shrine of Cecil Rhodes, land-grabber extraordinary and Grandad’s one-time boss.

  Our route was the same as that taken by most of the white settlers who arrived in Cape Town and headed east to find their own patch of the promised land. We stopped to walk on a wild beach beyond Gansbaai and tipped a one-legged self-styled beach attendant. The other, he said, had been removed by a white shark ‘in the surf out there’. He reeled off coastal history to earn his tip and told us of shipwrecks all along the Agulhas Coast. ‘Right there,’ he pointed, ‘the Birkenhead went down in the 1850s full of Brit troops come to fight the Zulus. Four hundred and fifty drowned. She was one of many.’ Turning round and waving one crutch inland, he assured us that in his grandmother’s day this coastal plain had shaken to the gallop of buck and sable, the air rent with the scream of elephants and the roar of lions, while hippos and crocs splashed in the freshwater lagoons. Then he sighed, ‘We Boers and you Brits turned paradise to hell. Now only dogs, baboons and ostrich survive – if they don’t get run over.’

  Like the settlers, we followed the corridor of red aloe trees and low veldt, with the Outeniqua Mountains always to our left and the sea to our right. The British Army had fought a dozen Frontier Wars to force the Xhosa tribes back north and so hand good farming land to the settlers. Beyond Cape Agulhas we camped at Mossel Bay, as did Bartholomew Dias from Portugal in 1488.

  Dias was then, and still is, a hero of mine. I have had two great dreams in my life. First, to emulate my father by becoming colonel of, to me, the most famous regiment in the world. In my Constantia nursery there was a photo (now in my office) of Dad, somewhere in Scotland, riding at the head of 300 grey horses mounted by soldiers of the Royal Scots Greys. My second sacred ambition, less specific but no less present, was to see for myself the steaming jungles, great deserts and remote rumbling volcanoes described by famous explorers whose books I had devoured from an early age.

  I marvelled at the daring of the great navigators and conquistadors of Portugal and Spain who risked horrific deaths to sail into the unknown. Dias had, on his Mossel Bay landing, discovered that the coast of Africa ran east and not south, as had been thought. He had, without at the time realizing the enormity of his discovery, found the way to the East, to the fabulous wealth of the Indies.

  It was clear to me that all worthwhile exploration must be to dangerous places where sandstorms, thirst, scorpions, huge spiders, alligator swamps, fierce bedu on camels and terrible disease were to be found.

  My earliest heroes’ journeys were always described in books with lively drawings of curling waves higher than their ships or, on land, spear-throwing natives.

  Marco Polo’s book Travels concerns his journeys overland during a period of twenty-three years, which took him across the Gobi Desert to little-known China, and eventually, by way of India and Persia, back to Venice. His stories inspired the subsequent voyage of the Italian Christopher Columbus under the patronage of the King of Spain.

  Some thirty years after Marco Polo, a Berber scholar from Tangier named Ibn Battuta set out in 1325 on a pilgrimage to Mecca. This turned into a remarkable twenty-four-year journey of 75,000 miles, taking in the Sahara down to Timbuktu, much of Arabia, India, Indonesia
, and a side voyage to Peking. His well-observed account of his travels were and remain a unique record of the society and culture of the fourteenth-century world of Islam.

  A century after Battuta’s journey, Columbus set sail from Spain heading due west from the Canary Islands because, unlike other great navigators of the time, he believed that he could reach the Indies that way. He is famous today for having ‘discovered America’, whereas he actually landed in the Bahamas and Cuba. He also recorded the first ever horizontal journey around Earth. (In the late twentieth century I led the first vertical journey around Earth.) Out of personal pride, he maintained all his life that he had found a new route to Asia. He was later subjected to disbelief and derision and he died embittered aged fifty-five.

  Ten years after the 1487 Mossel Bay landing of Bartholomew Dias, the Portuguese King, Dom Manuel, sent a little-known Lisbon aristocrat named Vasco da Gama south with four well-stocked vessels to follow the Dias route. Like Dias, they made a landfall on the Cape coast but, unlike him, they carried on east to the busy ports of Mozambique and Mombasa where they encountered traders doing regular business across the Indian Ocean. They took on local pilots who guided them in a little over three weeks to the spices entrepôt of Calicut in India.

  Da Gama had found the long sought sea route to the Indies from which subsequent European ‘empires’ would be built which in turn would lead to a truly global economy.

  From Mossel Bay Ginny and I passed to Oudtshoorn, where burly Boer honey farmers vied with each other to lift great tins of delicious smelling ‘protea honey’, and where we bought tickets to ride galloping ostriches around a ring. In the Tsitsikamma Forest we passed families of baboons foraging along the verges, and then at Port Elizabeth the road became a four-lane highway.

  We were now in the Eastern Cape, in a region much contested between Xhosa, Boer and Brit over a century. After the Napoleonic Wars Britain suffered a depression and, just as criminals were deposited in Australia, so a flotilla of twenty ships in 1820 dropped off some four thousand would-be ‘settlers’ with their basic belongings on to the Port Elizabeth beaches. Few survived.