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

By all accounts more restless, bold, and adventurous than most, they had always been in the forefront of what we called ‘progress’ and expansion, but what must have been retrogression and contraction to the Bushman. In fact my mother’s own grandfather had been one of the very first to cross the Great River with a small band of kinsmen in covered wagons and to move north across the reeking and smoking cannibal plains of the centre. They were all soon observed, superbly stalked, and finally massacred by the Matabele at dawn of a very still day and only my mother’s mother, her sister, brother, and coloured nurse miraculously survived to tell the tale. My mother’s father’s people too, as she once told me, had always lived naturally on frontiers and he had been one of the earliest to settle north of the Great River. It seemed to me impossible, along such an advanced line, that they could have avoided taking part in extinguishing the Bushman. But when I asked for precise information I found the members of the family instinctively conspired to silence. They would answer questions in general readily enough, but when it came down to particulars of family history in this regard they were dumb. Their silence confirmed my worst suspicions. I sought comfort in the fact that I witnessed from birth daily manifestations of the capacity of love of my mother’s people for everything that was indigenous and natural to our land. They were open-hearted, and, although austere, their lives were lived justly according to their exacting lights.
    All who worked for my grandfather, no matter whether Griqua, Hottentot, Bushman, Basuto, Bechuana, Cape-coloured, or poor white, were ultimately held in equal affection as part of his family, and the relationship was nightly redeemed by calling them into his dining-room to share with his wife and children in his communion with his God. One can only realize how significant such an attitude was when one remembers that the descendants of men like my grandfather are today trying to exclude such people from common worship in the same churches. I concluded, therefore, that in a brutal age my mother’s people might have been, perhaps, less brutal than most. That helped, though not overmuch, for I knew that with their deep Calvinist addiction to what they thought right, they would have done their duty conscientiously. Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. Fearful, I was certain they would have persuaded themselves that it was right to punish the Bushman and so would have joined in his killing, no matter how reluctantly.
    It is true that when my grandfather bought his vast estate around ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’ from the Griquas, ‘Pretty Little Rose’ had already cleared the area of the little hunter. But there were still isolated bands out in hills of the Great River. They had all been proclaimed, as we put it, ‘Bird-Free’ by the government of the day. That meant every burgher was permitted, if not actually enjoined, to shoot a Bushman on sight. The Bushman raids, and those of others against the Afrikaner settlements that were being fast consolidated, finally were found to be so provocative that a great commando was assembled to deal with them. The fact that my grandfather played a prominent role in that expedition was known, but what precisely happened remains hidden to this day. All I know is that in the colourful background of the wonderful home my remarkable grandfather had made of ‘The Fountain of the Bushman’, two little old Bushman men moved like twilight shadows. My grandfather, I believed, had found them as children, whimpering among the boulders and taken them home to
    â€˜The Fountain of the Bushman’ to grow up in his service. But found them where? What were they? Survivors? But survivors of what? Another Bushman tragedy in the long series of