Disappearing into the Nyae Nyae
I’m really testing my foraging and survival skills as I’ve temporarily moved house. I’ve left the fresh green Scottish spring behind and have moved to the northern Kalahari Desert, where I’m staying with a Jul/’hoansi tribe for a whole month. I’m both excited and terrified – there are, after all, 17 species of poisonous snake in Namibia!
My interest in foraging and hunter-gatherers is almost as old as I am. I grew up in Kenya and, as a voracious reader, had read many tales about the San Bushmen of the Kalahari. It was a childhood dream to live among them. I fashioned crude bows and arrows that failed to fly further than a few metres, and rubbed sticks together for hours, without a single fiery spark! Last year, for my sixtieth birthday, I joined my friends Ben and Debs, from Wild Human, on a trek to the Namib Desert and, as is always the way, I met this guy who invited me back to his place. Ha ha! Joking aside, I was privileged to meet two excellent trackers, the brothers Komtsa and #Oma Daqm, who invited me to their camp at Djamta/’ae in the Nyae Nyae conservancy.
If you’re wondering if this text has got scrambled, with # / ’ and // mixed up with words, it’s because these are four common click consonants in the Jul/’hoansi language. Komtsa’s wife has given me her name, N!ae. It’s pronounced like ‘neigh’ while simultaneously sucking your tongue down from the centre of your palate! #Oma sounds like ‘toe-mah’ but the t sound at the start is more of a tutting click
When we’re tracking and find a fresh spoor, Komtsa and #Oma confer under their breath. The words themselves are barely a whisper, no louder than the wind rustling the dried seed heads hanging in the thorny acacia trees. Their click consonants seem to me more frequent when they are discussing the animals, often sounding like the clack of beetles or the twittering of birds.
I feel as if I’ve witnessed the dawn of the !Kung languages with their four click sounds that arose in onomatopoeic imitation of the noises that animals make. Eland bulls, for example, (favourites of the Ju/’hoansi), make audible clicks with their knees as they patrol their territory. Tendons slide and twang over knee bone, clacking like castanets. The vibrating tones deepen with age, warning potential rivals of the body mass that indicates the seniority of the dominant male. Click, click, clack. These sounds can be heard by humans hundreds of metres away. Professor Best, a specialist in click languages recorded that one “Khoisan language has a vocabulary of thousands of words and can have up to 63 unique clicks.”
We can theorise that imitating animals in order to describe them, is a sensible way of developing a vocabulary. But what if it means actually understanding and communicating with animals? I don’t mean speaking and comprehending via human language but possessing an innate understanding of meaning through such intimate knowledge of animals’ ways, sounds and behaviour. Perhaps the Ju/’hoansi know the emotions and intentions of animals in the way that you know, in a sudden hunch of insight, what your partner of many years is randomly thinking. They visually read the landscape like reading a story book, so how does the symphony of audio clues enrich their knowledge of the world? I make a mental note to discuss this with them around the evening fire.
Despite reading everything I could get my hands on about their culture and heritage before I left, I still have so many questions that I’d like to ask but it would be rude to interrogate them. This is partly why I’m going for a month. Over time, they can decide whether they like me enough to chat about all the things going on in my mind. And also, because I’ve promised Komtsa I’ll teach him to paint – although we’ll have to make the paint first!
This ‘writer in residence’ break has also come at a poignant time in my life. April’s Mercury retrograde was particularly harsh and death surrounded me. Meadow, Amanda, Keith and Ursula may you rest in peace. The last was my mother, who I was with until her last breath. She died a good death – conscious, awake, undrugged and held my gaze until the moment when her spirit left. The intensity of life at the threshold strips away all: the troubled past and happier memories. When all is stripped back there is only love. I am transformed. As changed as Aldo Leopold when he saw the green light fade from the eyes of the dying she-wolf, pivoting him from hunter to ardent conservationist in an instant. This time of living simply with no modern trappings, journaling, and living an ancient, timeless way with the Jul/’hoansi will be healing in ways I can’t even fathom yet.
It's a rare day when we find a phone signal so I not trying to update Instagram etc. But I may be able to send the odd picture to put up via to the lovely Liza, who’s manning the fort while I’m away. I will be back in time for yet another powerful life changing event – the Solstice Wilderness Crossing (19-23 June in Cumbria). If you’d like to join Mungo and I there are still a few spaces. Click the button below for more details or email Liza at hello@monicawilde.com.
Now off in search of some tsamma- the bitter wild Kalahari melon! Best wishes to you all, Mo.
Pictures!
I can't wait to read the follow-up to this article. There is a kind of jealousy in me who was lucky enough to meet some Bushmen in South Africa. I would love to go to Namibia to meet some there, too. I am sure that you will have a great time there.
emangalisayo