Free The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens Van Der Post

Afrikaner spirit erupted and the hungry European frontier, which had advanced steadily to a depth of hundreds of miles since 1652, overflowed broadly. Impatiently loading their women, children, and possessions into their large covered wagons, gathering together their movable stock and numerous half-caste servants, groups of Afrikaners everywhere abruptly turned their backs on the south and struck out north. Guns in one hand, Bibles in the other, singing their sombre battle hymns, like my grandfather’s favourite:
    Rough storms may rage.
    Around me all is night
    But God, my God, shall protect me.
    they penetrated deeply into the interior and took this nightmare of tribal warfare, like a bridal opportunity, into their arms. First they settled with the strongest of their black rivals for the country. They broke the Amazulu, repelled the Matabele, cowed many others, and pinned down the formidable Basuto among the hills. Then, with some little barter fair enough perhaps according to the tight rule of the narrow day, a great deal of legal guile, natural cunning, bribery, and corruption, all encouraged by supplies of the fiery Cape brandy known to us children as ‘Blitz’ or ‘Lightning’, they dispossessed the dispossessing Griquas. When all that was done they turned to the accepted refinement of conquest in Africa, the extermination of the Bushman. They did this with greater dispatch and efficiency than any before them. Soon only a few names such as ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’ and ‘The Hills of Weeping’ were left in that wide land to preserve his memory like broken-off spars above a sunken ship which marks the place and manner of her going.
    For a while longer the Bushman made a desperate stand in the higher peaks of the Dragon Ranges, but there, too, before the end of the century, the growing power of the Basuto silenced him for ever. Thereafter he was only to be recognized dragging out his diminished days in the harsh household of some conqueror, or working among the worst criminals on the breakwaters in Table Bay – a criminal, perhaps, because, starving; he had stolen one of the many sheep now owned by men who had stolen all his land. But even in these conditions, he stood out as an individual, despite his convict suit. I am told that his face, creased, lined, and wrinkled, was unmistakable and like some Admiralty chart of the circumscribed sea of his time on earth. A sketch in colour of his old grey convict head shows his oddly slanted eyes filled with the first light of man and the last light of his race, both joined to make a twilight valediction to the land of his birth. At the back of his eyes is a look I found disturbing. It was not the calm acceptance of fate untroubled by hope or despair, but rather the certainty that, though he may vanish, his cause remains dynamic in the charge of life. I have been told by those who saw him thus that often the joyless warders guarding him with loaded guns would be startled by a gush of merriment that broke from him suddenly, like a fountain from the earth finding the freedom of air for the first time. A laugh of pure, unequalled clarity like a call on the trumpet of a herald from afar would ring out then among the hammers chipping at the convicts’ stone. I did not know which perturbed me most, the look in his eyes or the description of his laughter. In such a time and place the laughter could have come only as intimation of a future in which neither conqueror nor conquest could have place, and as a reckoning of which we have not yet begun to be aware that would be ready for presentation to all who have for so long so cruelly denied and rejected the Bushman.

CHAPTER 3
    The Pact and the Random Years
    T HE older I grew the more concerned I became over the part my own family must have had in the extermination of the Bushman. That it was considerable I had no doubt. My mother’s family had been in Africa since the European beginning.