Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
one that helped shape our shared primate ancestry. Southern Africa is where the great human adventure of globalization began; Hawai‘i is where, in a sense, it ended — one of the last places to be colonized by our African ancestors. Kilauea, on the Big Island, is the longest continually erupting volcano in the world — like a piko, or “navel,” of the earth — still actively giving life to new land. From the oldest to the newest, from the first to the last, this symmetry of opposites made the islands a privileged place for philosophical distance. Distance from my birthplace also helped by putting the sharp edge of homesickness to my reflections on humanity’s alienation from our African Eden.
My journey to Hawai‘i was circuitous. My family left South Africa for England when I was a boy. After a Cambridge education in science, I emigrated to Israel, lived on a kibbutz, served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, and survived a Middle Eastern war. Throughout, I made trips to South Africa every few years to visit my parents, who had returned from England in 1970. Most of the trips were confined to the southern coast, where I revived old friendships and started to recover some of those extraordinary states of consciousness I had experienced in wilderness with a child’s fresh eyes. By the time of my first university sabbatical in 1998, I had been in Hawai‘i twenty years, and I had come to realize that South Africa stood in unique relationship, not only to Hawai‘i, but to the rest of the world. The natural and human history of my birthplace seemed to offer a crucial perspective on my times and my species.
I felt ignorant and excited about exploring my neglected homeland more thoroughly. I wanted to experience directly the people and the places that would allow me to imaginatively reconstruct something of the life of the first people of southern Africa — the ancestors of all humans. My goals were modest. I wanted to be able to sit and think in front of some of those ancient Bushman rock paintings that cover the walls of rock shelters throughout southern Africa. There are an estimated fifteen thousand such painted sites — an immense wilderness art gallery filled with tantalizing images from the spirit world of the first people of South Africa. I wanted to find some of the best-preserved examples in the wildest settings, so I could experience them closer to the way the long-dead artists had, surrounded by the multitudes of African wildlife. Finally, I wanted to meet face-to-face, if only briefly, the modern descendants of the human beings who had never left southern Africa, those who still lived in the desert of the Kalahari and still knew something of the “old ways.”
After getting acclimatized in Port Elizabeth revisiting my childhood haunts, many virtually unchanged over the years, I traveled to the urban nightmare of Johannesburg. I was told not to stop at traffic lights when driving at night because hijackers had been shooting the drivers and stealing their cars. But Johannesburg was also home to the world-famous Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I met David Lewis-Williams, its founder and director, and one of the pioneers of the shamanic interpretation of Bushman rock art. He generously gave me introductions to the wardens who would be able to direct me — sometimes accompanied by armed rangers — to some of the more impressive paintings in the Drakensberg Mountains. Much of the game in the Drakensberg has been hunted out, but large empty areas are protected and being repopulated by herds of eland.
To get a little closer to imagining what life in wilderness must have been like, I spent a few days in a primitive wilderness camp in the lowveld of Kruger National Park — a wilderness area the size of the entire country of Israel. Every morning at dawn our small group walked out into the bush led by two armed rangers in search of encounters with the “big five” — elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard — supposedly the five most dangerous animals to hunt on foot. The Kruger is one of the first, the largest, and the least-transformed game reserves in southern Africa. It is also one of the few places where it is still possible to find a few Bushman paintings in an indigenous, intact ecosystem with the full variety of animals the painters lived with. Today we often think of a walk in the woods as placid, where nature is a pretty backdrop for what really interests us — the human drama. But an intact African ecosystem is enormously complex and continually fascinating.
One morning we were following the spoor of a lone bull buffalo — regarded by many big-game hunters as the most dangerous of the big five because of its habit of turning off the trail and doubling back to ambush the hunter. We stopped for a break, and I walked out of sight of the group to some bushes at the base of a small outcrop of rock. As I approached the bushes and peered inside, an enormous mass of black muscle exploded out of the vegetation, almost knocking me over with fright, and galloped off in a panic. A lone wildebeest bull had, for some reason, separated from the herd and hidden himself in the shade of the bush. The whole event had taken place out of sight of the rangers, who on hearing my story laughed in disbelief. Wildebeest are herd animals and seldom found alone in a bush. Life in an intact savanna wilderness is full of surprises.
The Bushman paintings in the Kruger were worn, but their mere presence was evocative, reminding me that the theater of Bushman life included a cast of thousands — from the majestic elephant and rhino to the mantis, the little green flying insect, one incarnation of the trickster deity of Bushman mythology.
After a gentle initiation in the Kruger, we proceeded to a more extreme wilderness immersion experience: five days backpacking in the riverine bush of the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in what used to be called Zululand, and is now Kwazulu, Natal. We carried all our food and slept under the stars. This was the hunting preserve of Shaka and the Zulu kings, and is still home to the full complement of indigenous, savanna megafauna, including the largest rhino population in the world.* Surrounded by large and potentially dangerous animals, guided and protected by two seasoned rangers, I experienced some of the most beautiful and peaceful moments of my life.
The climax of the trip involved flying to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, renting a Land Rover, and driving into the veldt of Nyae Nyae, East Bushmanland, to visit surviving Ju/twasi** (Ju/hoansi) San communities. After Namibian independence in 1981, the filmmaker and ethnographer John Marshall, who had grown up with the Ju/twasi, helped set up the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia with the purpose of helping the people get access to their traditional land — Bushmanland — and gradually transition from hunting and gathering to farming and raising livestock.* As development priorities shifted, the government started working with international aid and conservation agencies — the US Agency for International Development and the World Wildlife Foundation — to establish the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in 1996. This was in part inspired by the idea that Bushmen were best suited for a hunting-gathering way of life, and they should be encouraged to pursue it as much as possible, together with benefiting from trophy hunting and ecotourism. Large numbers of elephants and lions had migrated to the area, attracted by the water of the newly dug bore holes. The tourist and trophy-hunting markets, however, were fickle, lions and elephants did not mix well with farming, and the land base was too small to support a traditional nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. The result was that the people remained impoverished in what John Marshall called “death by myth” — the myth of the Bushman forever consigned to hunt and gather — the title of the final volume of his five-part film documenting the saga of his family’s time with the San.3
Amazingly, in 1998, some of the old ways still remained. One of the anthropologists who spent many years working with the community introduced me to a young Bushman guide, /Twi (/Ui) Toma, who helped me connect with some of the old healers and shamans. We camped outside a tiny village consisting of a few simple huts, went hunting with the men, gathered veldkos (bushfood) with the women, distributed pouches of the harsh Botswana tobacco that visitors are expected to provide, and shared rounds of tea and biscuits around the campfire. Finally, we found singers and healers in a neighboring village who organized a healing trance dance for the group. The Kalahari Bushmen still practiced the same trance dance that seems to have been universal among diverse Bushman groups throughout southern Africa. The healer-shamans stamped and danced in a tight circle around the singers, who sat shoulder to shoulder around the fire singing and clapping the eerie, complex contrapuntal songs. The healers were bent