FOR the past 11 years I have been blissfully
ignorant of the fact that a baleful creature, half man, half fish, lives in the
Olifants River just 4km from my home. This waterbas,
as it is known, has been lurking in the
reeds, ready to pounce if I so much as
put a toe in the water on a 42C day. It
was only thanks to Jose Manuel de Prada-Samper, who came all the way from Barcelona to the
foothills of the Cederberg, that I
learnt the monster was there.
He didn’t make the trip only for my sake, it must be
said. He has been travelling to South Africa every year since 2005 in pursuit
of his vocation, which is the investigation and collection of Bushman
stories. Now this Spaniard knows far,
far more about what’s going on in my own beautiful backyard, and about its
history, than I do.
For example, I did not know that a train has recently been seen and heard in
the middle of the night, roaring across the sky above Clanwilliam. Except it
was not really a train, it was a water snake, with a single bright light on its
forehead and a red light on each of its four tails. It was moving from one
mountain pool to another.
And this is better documented: commandos carried out a genocide of Bushmen in
the northern Cape in the 1850s. According
to De Prada-Stamper, records he found in the Cape archives show that a
magistrate who investigated the mass killings reported they were “the
systematic extermination of a race of
men”. No one mentioned that in my high
school textbooks, and few people are talking about it now. The Bushmen have not
had their hands on the levers of power for a long, long time.
“Most people don’t know about it,” says De Prada-Stamper.
“The description of massacres in those documents is of really very large-scale
affairs. It strongly suggests a wiping-out operation.” This operation, he says,
was on a different, more concerted scale than the anecdotes most of us have
heard, of 18th and 19th century white settlers hunting Bushmen like
animals.
De Prada-Samper is a professional folklore
researcher, with a PhD to prove it. His
interest in South Africa blossomed in 1988, when he came across the book
Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a bookshop in Cambridge, England. Published in 1911, it related the stories
told to linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd by convicts of
the /Xam tribe from the northern Cape in the 1860s.
De Prada-Samper, by the way, knows how to pronounce
the “/” in /Xam, along with the “!” in !Kung, and so on.
“That was a mind-blowing experience,” he says. “I
think the stories are among the most beautiful literary creations of any part
of the world. They are very poetic.”
They have
titles like The Mantis assumes the Form of a Hartebeest, The Cat’s Song, #Kaga’Ra
and !Haunu, Who Fought Each Other With Lightning, and A Song Sung by the Star
!Gaunu.
De Prada-Samper is in Clanwilliam in the Western
Cape for two months this time,
interviewing people for their stories.
He uses the term “Bushman” instead of “San”, and tries not to use “coloured” at all. “I have coined a name for them, in /Xam, which
translated would be ‘People of the Land’.
So I call them ‘the People’ … otherwise it’s a problem, ‘coloured’ is a
non-identity.”
One of the members of the People he has interviewed
is Johanna van Wyk, the 50-something woman who cleans my house two mornings a
week and lives on the banks of the Olifants River.
She told him that about 20 years ago when she first
arrived in the area, her son Isak, who was six at the time, was down by the
river with his friends. “Suddenly a big wind came up,” she said, “one gust from
the north and one from the south. They collided and there was a ‘bang’ like a
rifle shot that I heard from my house .”
It was the waterbas coming for Isak, because he was new and had
not been properly introduced to the creature.
“Fortunately his friends pulled him away,” Van Wyk
said. She has seen the creature herself,
from a distance of about 200m. “It was a black shape lying on a sandbank, and
it shone like a mirror. Fortunately the children were all at home.”
I was somewhat hurt that Van Wyk had never told me
this story before in all the years I have known her, and that it took a stranger
from Barcelona to get her to open up. But De Prada-Samper explains: “When you
ask about the stories, they are very reticent, because they fear you may not
take them seriously.”
He himself takes them very seriously.
“These are beliefs which have been held in this part
of the world for possibly thousands and
thousands of years. Very old rock paintings show these creatures . . . it’s
very much magic-realism, and it’s set in this world. It’s not some far away
land, not some never-never land, it’s here. Many people tell you of seeing
extraordinary things.”
Apart from waterbas,
a word in general use only in the Cederberg area, De Prada-Stamper knows other
Afrikaans words I’ve never heard of, like “baljas”
, which refers to sorcery or
supernatural powers. “Many South Africans don’t know this word. It means a special connection to the invisible
that some people have … ‘magic’ possibly doesn’t do justice to the complexity
of the subject.”
De Prada-Stamper says he had an epiphany in
2011when, somewhere in the Karoo, someone told him a story from the Bleek and
Lloyd collection, but in Afrikaans, not /Xam. “I realized that really the /Xam
people were not extinct. The genocide had not been as complete as many people
imagined, and this culture, even though the language has been lost, the culture
has been passed down.
“These people cannot be said to be a rural working
class, they’re an indigenous people with a culture, who have been reduced to
serfdom at some point. They have an oral tradition which is largely
undocumented, and that connects with the one that was documented in the 19th
century. It’s amazing, there’s a whole world to discover.”
Doing so, De Prada-Stamper believes, could help
communities plagued by poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence “realise who
they are, and move ahead”. The People of the Land who pass out outside the
bottle stores on the Clanwilliam Main Street on a Saturday, the People of the Land who sit in the local
police cells with black eyes and stab wounds
– they could certainly use a boost to their self-esteem.
De Prada-Stamper says that to understand the culture
he was researching, he has to keep coming to South Africa. “I found the
landscape gave so much more meaning to the stories.”
Equally, knowing the stories gives much more meaning
the landscape. Now I involuntarily
accelerate as I drive across the bridge a stone’s throw from the lair of the waterbas.
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