Kalahari Diaries: Impressions of a Desert People
Allen Zimbler
Paul Holberton Publishing
Allen Zimbler reflects on his years among the Kalahari Bushmen and the stories preserved in ‘Kalahari Diaries’. By Mila de Villiers.
“‘How do you, a white South African male, presume to write a book about the Bushmen?’”
A “very valid question” that has been posed to Allen Zimbler, author of Kalahari Diaries: Impressions of a Desert People, a number of times. His response? “I didn’t presume it, I recorded it.”
Zimbler’s book chronicles his 15 years, beginning in 1975, of journeying into the Botswana desert and documenting the lives and rites of a vanishing nomadic people, via journaling and photography.
This former psychology lecturer at Wits (“I’m a Jungian, I’m afraid!” he chuckles) was first introduced to the Bushmen — “When I met people in the Kalahari from the 1970s to 1990s, they called themselves ‘Bushmen’”, he explains of the oft-contested nomenclature — as a schoolboy tasked with a group project on the Bushmen.
A boyhood fascination with hunter-gatherers — “There were people who had poisoned arrows, still somewhere around in Southern Africa!” — matured into an aspiration to explore and document the lives of people so vastly different from himself.
Enter Izak Barnard, who in 1975 presented a talk on the Bushmen of the Kalahari, organised by Wits’ Institute for the Study of Man. Zimbler — an active member of the group — was in attendance. This mielieboer from the Western Transvaal had such vast knowledge that Zimbler was propelled to join him on a journey to visit the Bushmen in Botswana.
“Some people dismiss them as primitives. I’m seeing something remarkable: there’s a gentleness between people, there’s tolerance, there’s a warmth, there’s a sharing of everything they had, there’s support,” Zimbler remarks of the people who introduced him to their way of living. From dreams to hunting rituals to tracking skills to healing methods to child-rearing to foraging abilities to tool-making, the Bushmen Zimbler encountered offered him a rare glimpse into their lifestyle, visually archived in Kalahari Diaries.
Zimbler oftentimes had to remain cognisant of refraining from interpreting the Bushmen’s way of life from a Westernised lens: “You and I are a product of our background and I was also a product of psychology at Wits in the late ’60s to early ’70s,” he elaborates, deriding the department’s “obsession with the so-called scientific method: we know it’s rubbish. But you cannot pretend that you don’t have lenses that have been influenced by whatever you’ve learnt and our cosmology is fundamentally different.”
“Just describe what you’re seeing” is a mantra he employed in his journaling, conceding that “there are times in the book when I become more interpretive and contemplative and it’s very hard not to do that. I just wanted to understand that you can’t walk in the shoes of a Bushman because I’m not a Bushman. I never pretended to be a Bushman.”
An innate connection to — and respect for — the natural world is near-inconceivable to modern societies dictated to by capitalism, industrialisation, greed, consumerism and the exploitation of natural resources; the complete antithesis rings true for the Bushmen: “An absolute connection to the environment — without possessions — is something we can’t relate to whatsoever,” Zimbler exemplifies. “The Bushmen take from the environment what they need and they return to the environment what they don’t need without leaving a trace.”
In addition to their symbiotic relationship with the natural world, Zimbler’s experience of the Bushmen’s interpersonal interactions with each other made him acutely aware of “how poorly we treat each other, how badly we share and how poorly we communicate”.
The Bushmen’s deep connection to the physical world also transcends into the subconscious, with the acts of dreaming and recounting dreams carrying both spiritual and social significance.
Zimbler remembers: “A guide came from Lone Tree and said ‘They’re talking about a dream, you must come and listen.’ So I ran to their little campfire and they were sitting on their haunches. The guy was telling a dream about hunting a hartebeest, and he went into absolute detail. And that thing has unfolded exactly as the dream foretold — to the detail. And then you start thinking about their cosmology and their incredible connectedness with everything that they’re part of. We don’t have that anymore. We lost it.”
As for trance dances: “we” can easily pop a pill, go to a trance dance and reach a synthetic sense of euphoria.
“It’s a cathartic experience for the Bushmen,” Zimbler draws the comparison. “It happens towards nightfall and the women will sit and start clapping and dancing. And the singing is a syncopated experience. It’s transcending.”
Who will carry on telling, archiving and sustaining their stories?
“My biggest hope is the Bushmen themselves. I’m involved in a curriculum in northern Namibia where we get the elders to come to the schools and teach the kids about how to track animals, how to make fire, the stories of their people — to value and cherish the story that’s disappearing.”
May they leave a lasting impression.
• ‘Kalahari Diaries: Impressions of a Desert People’ by Allen Zimbler is published by Paul Holberton Publishing
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