Rand 145, ISBN 1-86914-052-4.
Kalahari RainSong is an unusual book. It is told in the first person, because it is Belinda Kruiper’s story. Elana Bregin is more like a facilitator who has taken Belinda’s words and brought them to fruition, though she is called a “co-author”. Elana has only made one brief trip to the Kalahari. She and Belinda fist met in October 2001 when Belinda was in Durban to arrange a show for her husband’s — Vetkat Regopstaan Kruiper—paintings. Elana interviewed Belinda and a relationship began that has culminated in this joint effort and this remarkable volume.
Belinda is from a so-called “coloured” family of educators who had eventually settled in Carnarvon in the northern Karoo. Her family then moved to Potchestroom where she completed high school. Belinda saw herself as an “Afrikaanse meisie” but others called her a “Boesman meid” (Bushman girl). She married and after six and a half years was divorced. She’d accumulated enough experience to be employed as receptionist and camp manager, in March 1997, at Twee Rivieren in what is now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park comprising 1.7 million hectares.
Belinda first fell in love with the national park, and then with the local people, the Khomani Bushmen, who had been evicted from the park in 1973, and were persecuted and imprisoned if they entered the park, which had once been their homeland. By the late 1990s a number of land cases were in process under the leadership, before he died, of Oupa Regopstaan, and then later Dawid Kruiper.
As tourist curiosities, and a way of surviving, a few of the Kruipers had moved to Kagga Kamma, a farm in the Cederberg, to a farm in the Magaliesberg, Ostri-San, and elsewhere. In 1997 a “cultural resources audit” was taking place in the Kalahari-Gemsbok area to determine which Bushman had rights to the National Park.
Being resident in the Kalahari made Belinda become more open, more receptive “to the world of the spirit” and to the First Peoples. “I came to understand them in the context of the Bushman world, and to accept that the spirit world is as much a part of God’s design as the physical world is” (p. 18). Belinda had fun opening up the Kelkiewyn (social club) to non-whites, even starting a newsletter “Koukus” (“to hold conversation”). She began to spend time with the Bushmen outside the park along the bed of the Molopo River (the boundary with Botswana) whom she labelled the “Riverbed Kids”. She was told by Park people that her visits to the Bushmen were like “Dancing round the fires of Satan”. She came to realise, though, that there was another side: “The Bushmen felt they were often treated unfairly by the Park management, never listened to or given a chance to tell their side of the story” (p. 24). She also recognised the contradiction in their dismissal as not genuine Bushmen, when “they had no land to roam … [as] it had been taken away from them”.
As she became closer and more involved in the lives of her new friends, Belinda also became acutely aware of the suffering, violence and agony, the pain within which they lived. “The past was the curse they carried, the pain they were not allowed to forget. Once, when I asked Silikat why the people drank so much, he said: “We’re trapped in our heads like caged animals. That’s why we drink. To Forget” ” (p. 37).
Yet the Bushmen believed in restoration, once they had been given back their land, all their problems would be solved. It was never that easy. All the factors that cause poverty, hardship, hunger, violence and drunkenness still remained. Riekie was mysteriously murdered. No one has ever been brought to trial. “His success made a lot of people jealous. Suddenly it was Riekie in the limelight … coming into his own, representing the Kruipers on the Communal Property Association, talking to the press” (p. 50).
“I realised … that no amount of land grants, no amount of development projects, can change anything. The Kruipers [a large clan of over 100 people] have to find their self-respect again, to revive their humanity and their pride as people. Only then will they be ready to move forward from the past that shackles them” (p. 51).
“The Bushmen have never been allowed to be just people, like everyone else. They’re always a symbol, an exhibit, a display item on somebody else’s agenda. That’s where the Bushman spirit stays trapped, between the truth and the lie, the myth and the reality … they have always been a people out of step with the rest of the world … all they ever wanted was to be left alone to live the life that suited them — walking the dunes, hunting and gathering, singing, dancing, painting and telling stories” (p. 53 - 54).
The breakdown of the community and the escalating violence can be turned around. “The land has not brought them the expected healing. The curse of history, the jinx, has not mysteriously lifted” (p. 56). Oupa wanted the community to select the “dry farms” where they could resume their life in greater isolation, away from bottle stores and Western influences. Political factors militated against this outcome.
On March 21, 1999 they won 38,000 hectares to the south in Andriesvale district, and March 2003 access to 25,000 hectares (only usage rights) within the Park. Surprising, as a Transfrontier Park, Botswana is part of this decision, yet in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve our government opposes any such compromise or concession.
By April 30, 1999 Belinda left employment in the Park and began a new life living mainly nearby at Blinkwater Pan. Eventually, she met her future husband, Vetkat Regopstaan Kruiper, but first in a dream. She was given a small dog - called Elop (Jesus) who protected her.
This book is a remarkable wart and all revelation on how Belinda’s life changed, and what has happened to the others, a Blinkwater tale about the “University of Life”.
Sheridan Griswold, UB Box 70007, Gaborone, Botswana.
E-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com
