Read Online A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas - Free Book Online

could, each of us glad to meet a female age-mate whom she could at least try to talk with. I’d been a bit lonely, as by then I was missing my boyfriend. Kavasitjue was lonely too, as she was a six-day walk from her family. We both saw an opportunity for friendship. But where to start?
    The baby seemed so young that I wondered if he was born at /Gam. In my limited Afrikaans I tried to ask. Like me, Kavasitjue didn’t have enough Afrikaans to express herself clearly, but I believe she said he was born on the way to /Gam. That must have been fun, I thought but couldn’t say, bearing your first child in the back of beyond with no woman to help you.
    We then tried to talk about earrings. Hers were made of small beads. Mine were safety pins which I used to keep the pierced holes in my ears from closing. In my stumbling Afrikaans I tried to explain the safety pins, which wasn’t easy, but Kavasitjue understood. She knew about ear holes closing.
    Over the next few days our friendship blossomed. We had many a confusing conversation. She let me hold the baby. He was a joyous little guy—we laughed with him and with each other. I believe that thirty years later he became one of the owners of /Gam when, after Namibian independence, the vast Bushman lands were split up among white farmers, Bantu pastoralists, and World Wildlife, which took a large section for a tourist hotel and game reserve. /Gam was given to the Hereros. Herero people trace their lineage through their mothers, so because Kavasitjue was Herero, her son was also Herero, and thus may have been a good candidate for ownership. If any non-Bushman was to have /Gam, I hope he got it.
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    After we had been at /Gam for a while, I was given the name Kothonjoro. Such names often describe a personal characteristic, and I think mine means “one who laughs.” I believe that Kavasitjue gave me the name, but it was Philip who explained it to me. The reason I laughed—hence the reason for the name—was to hide that my heart was sad.
    I was astonished. Kavasitjue had seen right through me. Without my boyfriend I was often plagued by sorrow, which I tried to hide by doing my best as a comic. The very last thing I’d expected to find in this unending wilderness was insight into my psyche from a brief acquaintance with a woman from a different culture whose mother tongue was Otjiherero. But it has since become my impression that many Bantu people, and also many other African people, are substantially more sensitive, perceptive, and intuitive than Western people, and thus are our superiors in almost every social exercise. So I treasured the name Kothonjoro, and kept it in my much happier heart.
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    The Bushmen at /Gam were Ju/wasi, one of the five groups of Bushmen in southern Africa, each of which speaks a somewhat different language. In !Kung, the language of the Ju/wasi,
ju
means person,
si
makes it plural, and
/wa
(sometimes spelled
h/oan
, but it sounds like
/wa
) means pure, as water is pure if nothing bad is in it. By this concept, a person is pure if he isn’t carrying a weapon. For the first book I wrote, I translated
/wa
as
harmless
and used it in the title,
The Harmless People
.
    White people did not meet that description, so everyone was wary of them with good reason, and the Ju/wasi at /Gam were wary of us. Even so, they were willing to talk with us, and from them we learned that /Gam had been their place, which is called a
n!ore
. 4 A
n!ore
is where a person has the right to live. We had been told (but didn’t believe) that Bushmen were nomads, wandering here and there in search of food. We knew this was sure to be wrong, but we were later to learn how very wrong, as almost every Ju/wa person we came to know had a
n!ore
and virtually every
n!ore
was a source of water. Its owners spent the dry season there, just as the Ju/wasi at /Gam were doing.
    In the area we were soon to study, an area of some six thousand square miles