What Dawid Knew: A journey with the Kruipers
by Patricia Glyn (Picador Africa)
Patricia Glyn’s latest true-adventure book is about “what Dawid knew” (he died during the writing of it) and that indigenous knowledge on the verge of being lost for ever.
Her journey into the Kalahari with a handful of Bushmen (“That is how I refer to them because that was their preference,” she says) was driven by a determination to allow Dawid Kruiper, leader of his clan, to tell his final story, not just to her but to his kin with him.
It is a wonderful, revealing and shocking story: of mastery over their barren environment, and their fate at the hands of powerful enemies. His final “secret” is grindingly hard to read. The Kruipers are among a few surviving groups of the successful hunter-gatherers who once ran lightly and efficiently across much of southern and east Africa, competent beyond imagining in the world they roamed.
We meet at Cape Town’s noisy airport – tall, fit-looking Glyn is best known to us from her diction-perfect radio broadcasts as well as her previous two travel-adventure books, including her 2 000km walk in the footsteps of her ancestor, Sir Richard Glyn. She has a commanding presence and directness I found engaging. There is a warmth to her, and yet an air of urgency, as she talks about What Dawid Knew.
Her journey gave Dawid an opportunity to tell his last story to his remaining family before he died, and also to promote an ongoing “intergenerational transfer of knowledge”, says Glyn.
And yes, time is a factor.
“Five elders have died this year,” she points out. As each dies, a treasure trove of information disappears.
Such is the passion with which she approached this project that her months-long journey with them into the Kalahari was funded by mortgaging her house. We have a terrible tendency to think of them as “different”, she remarks, which is the worst thing that can happen to them. They are people just like us. And they are tired of being researched, measured and interviewed. And tired of empty promises. This is an uncomfortably valid point: the academy of learning I went to characterised Bushmen, or Khoisan, as either historical relics or else as playful, harmonious “children”.
No one who reads this galloping, stirring tale of Glyn’s will fall for that. She tells their tale, warts and all (with their permission), including their struggle with the demon of alcohol, with all the warmth and frailties, and frustrations she experienced in their journey together.
These Bushmen are supreme foragers and that is still how they live, she says, referring to their testing the limits on newcomers to see how far they will get. Their canny ability to “read’ their environment also enables them to “read” those who film, photograph, aid or exploit them. It tested her to the point where she literally drew a line in the sand and said, that’s it! They knew she meant it. And so on they went.
“They are amazing, eccentric, wise and funny people. They are trying to find their way in an inhospitable world; it is possible to straddle both worlds. For example, Vet Piet, a supreme tracker, wears Western clothes.”
What they care about are survival issues, such as land and water. “They are not forceful people – they don’t toyi-toyi. So they do need champions. But they have been let down by almost everyone – hence their suspicion of newcomers.”
One of the few groups Glyn mentions with approval is Friends of Khomani San or FOKS (slightly unfortunate acronym).
Why should it matter? “The argument is put forward that Bushmen must change, must modernise… some of that reasoning is a result of misplaced embarrassment about ‘bush people’.”
Urban-aspirant South Africans in particular want no truck with that, she says, but “we were all Bushmen once upon a time, and their all-knowing oneness with Earth, its systems and inhabitants, is what we lost when we left the bush behind”.
This book is a fine memorial to Dawid Kruiper. But if it does not stir us to tell the truth about the brutalities of the past regarding the Bushmen, and to try to rectify past wrongs with integrity, then What Dawid Knew will vanish.
Though not if Glyn has anything to do with it, and she’s a force to be reckoned with.