FIREFLIES AND CLUES SPOORS

I gather all my sorrow for sin into my walking.
I gather all my thanksgiving and delight into my walking.
Let my every step be a prayer of all that is in me,
— all that I know and all that is dark and obscure.

(Fr. Dick Toby CSSR).

Walking, journeying, travelling — the pilgrimage is so intrinsic to the spiritual journey that we forget it at worst, and gloss over it at best. Many of us go though the scriptures much as we go through life, like tourists on an organised trail, always looking for the next event, parable, scene, stop; ignoring the links between them which are a listening — a moving in and across time and space.

Laurens van der Post, in A Far-off Place (Penguin Books Ltd. England 1976. pp. 14-15), talks of the Kalahari Bushmen as ‘tapping within themselves, a physical manifestation of a profound gift for intuitive apprehension’. Fundamental to their lives is their instinct’ that the whole of creation has a purpose: the experience of God.

Today, nearly 30 years on, there is a sad tale to tell of the fate of the Khomeni Bushmen of the Kalahari: only about 500 remain of the country’s indigenous San people, ‘descendants of nomadic hunter-gatherer clans that used to follow the once-huge herds of buck and elephant throughout Southern Africa.’ (Bushmen on the Spoor to Nowhere, Bobby Jordan, “Insight” May 1998). Interviewed recently, one of them categorically stated that they would continue and increase again. Brought up now, mostly in South African pen-urban locations, little toddlers, like the hundreds of generations gone before, instinctively following the spoors of their mothers when they want them!

There are also several hundred of the Khoi San on the borders of Namibia and Botswana. They live according to their old customs and, since no one wants to aid or train them, survive on roots and herbs only, as the animals they used to hunt are no more; and on a potent alcoholic brew, which, as in ‘advanced society’, they drink in ‘bars’. There is one trading store — a swap shop!

On Good Friday of 2002 comes this official report from Botswana: in the last few days, San people on the border have been forcibly removed from their dwelling places and off-loaded into a wasteland of the Kalahari where nothing survives! Of some that escaped, a number were caught and shot dead. The Botswana government spokesman says that the border land is required for an agricultural development project for their own people whose interests come first. I have yet to hear one voice raised in protest among the plethora of world aid ‘lodges’ or interfaith brotherhood!