My Life In The Bush

He is a modest and unassuming person, with the true humility of someone who observes and respects the forces of the Nature, and in this article he lets us glimpse something of these observations through his own eyes.

“When I think back to the early sixties, I remember clearly how I felt when, on trying to get a party of people together to visit Botswana; they replied that of course they would go if I paid them. I suppose on reflection that it was to be expected. The salt pans, the lonely sand dunes of the Kalahari, the forests and game tracks, had only been explored by the locals, who knew every facet of the land as well as they knew the lines of their own hands. I had just a taste of this knowledge and was so captivated that I believed that everyone would be as fascinated as I was.

In fact it was only in 1963 that I managed to persuade three people to join me on my travels, and that was on condition we shared the costs. Of course it didn’t matter. I had the opportunity for the first time of sharing some of the pleasure which Botswana gave me. That was the start. These days there is no need for persuasion, the country is appealing to an increasing number of people, and by December 1984 I myself will have taken 13 tours this year. If we go to the west Kalahari, it is for about twelve days, if to the Okavango, it is for 15 days, and we do special charters and cater for special interests like insect or bird life. I am lucky that this has become my profession, because Botswana is the focal point of my life. The silence of the dune country and the waterways of the Okavango are part of me. I hate cities, three hours in a city is enough, but I like people and this is what has made me want to share the Botswana wilds, to open doors to the people, and let them realize there is more to life than cars and offices and ice-cream. I first went into the bush in Botswana when I was 23. Even as a child, I had heard stories of it. My grandfather and uncle were in Botswana as early as the 1880’s and my mother was born at Kayne on the way back from Lake Ngami. My father Cecil Barnard was a notorious poacher, outlaw and hunter in that corner of South Africa where the present day Kruger Park meets Mocambique and Gonarezhou in old Rhodesia. You could say that he was famous. He was the king of the ivory poachers, and the Shangaans called him “Bvekenya” (the one who swaggers when he walks) and Bulpin wrote a book about him entitled “The Ivory Trail”.

By the time I was born, my father had put that way of life behind him, and was a farmer. But of course it was natural enough that the stories I heard would fire my imagination.  Still it was my first meeting wit the Bushmen that really changed my life and it happened as late as 1962. I can remember clearly the very day – June 3rd 1962 – so great was the impact of that meeting.

Travels had taken me to Lethlakeng, and there they were – my first real contacts with the Bushmen world. They carried their traditional bows and arrows, and when darkness fell thy danced and sang until late into the night. I gave them tobacco and sat talking to them for many hours, and it came to me then how well these people understood the ways of animals, and how very much they could teach me.

The following year in Lokgwbe I met the leader of Nama Hottentot people of Botswana, a man called Simon Kooper, the son of General Simon Kooper who fought in the German-hottentot Herero wars, and a stronger link was forged. Simon and I became close friends, and it was he who took me into his world of the Kalahari, to hundreds of salt pans where Europeans had never ventured, and it was Simon who taught me virtually all the bush-lore I know. He taught me common sense things, related to survival in the veld, where to get moisture in a waterless land, animal tracks, things like that.

Animal tracks are like road signs, and today I can tell you how old a track is and when it was made, whether last night after midnight or this morning at six, and I can tell you what animals had passed, from the biggest elephant to the tiniest elephant shrew. This I learnt from my tutor. Later Simon took me to the Kalahari dunes for the first time.

There was no water, just animals and desert and a deep silence. After that I started to go further and deeper into the Kalahari and to the Okavango, trying to get information about the area, but it was difficult. Nobody was interested except the hunters who only wanted to shoot, and I, who have never hunted and never carry a gun in the bush, used to go in on my own a lot and bring back cuttings of flowers and trees for identification. During the first three-man safari in 1964 Simon agreed to be our guide, and he took us to the saltpans. It was a rough journey, but that is my idea of a safari in any case.

To my mind it should never be cushioned by iced water or air conditioning and brandies. To get to know a country as it really is you have to “feel” it, the good and the bad, feel the heat and the ruts, and bump over the roads of the country in a land rover, experience the heat of the earth underfoot at 80 degrees and drink from the surroundings, which may mean water hot enough to make a cup of tea.

There are compensations, because then you become part of the terrain. Otherwise, you might as well be a spectator sitting watching a film of Botswana. I think that to know the bush you must get under the skin of it like the Bushmen do. The Bushmen are wonderful people. They understand the veld and the animals they are our link between ancient and modern man, between man and the animals, and this fragile tenuous link will be gone before too long. I know that. Scientific research has been carried out into the Bushmen’s way of life, but it cannot quite capture the essence, which already is gradually being lost. The link weakens each year, because, as a wild animal when it is caged loses its instinct for survival, so it is with the Bushmen. They come to work in the kraals and on the farms, and they slowly lose their age-old knowledge and their instinctive ability to become part of the bush world. It seeps away like water spilt in a dry country. Wasted and unrecoverable.