Bookplanet: the lost tribes of the Kalahari

Elegy for a lost way of life
Rare firsthand account of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert
Review of "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX
By Austin Merrill/SF Chronicle

In 1950, a former president of Raytheon named Laurence Marshall took his family on a trip to one of the most desolate spots on the planet. Their destination was a stretch of bush land within the Kalahari Desert near the border of what is today Namibia and Botswana, in southwest Africa. Their mission was to find a group of hunter-gatherers who were said to be living off that scrubby, uncharted terrain. How the Marshall family would get there, where they would secure water along the way, and whom, if anyone, they would actually find was, according to Marshall's daughter, "just a guess."

They traveled hundreds of miles over several weeks during their search, breaking a truck axle, driving through a brush fire, and getting by on cup-a-day water rations. Finally one afternoon they stopped and set up camp. Two days later, people who were dressed in simple leather loincloths and adorned in ostrich eggshell beads slowly emerged from nearby hiding places. The family had unknowingly parked and pitched their tents in the middle of the home camp of the very people they sought.

And so began the astonishing relationship between an American family and the hunter-gatherers known as the Bushmen. More than 50 years later Marshall's daughter, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, now a well-established author and anthropologist, has written a new book about these Kalahari dwellers and what has become of them. "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" is part memoir, part anthropological study, part skewering of the forces of modernity that have destroyed a way of life that was not just ancient and extraordinary but full of clues about how we came to be who we are today.

For most of her adult years, Thomas was perhaps the least involved family member in the lives of the Bushmen. After a trip to the Kalahari in 1955, she didn't return again until 1986, whereas her mother became one of the world's foremost hunter-gatherer ethnographers, and her brother made several documentaries about the Bushmen and was married, for a while, to a woman from their group. But the sum total of Thomas' work -- including "The Harmless People," her 1959 book about the hunter-gatherers -- has made her arguably the most influential.

In "The Old Way," Thomas has produced a magnificent elegy to a way of life that has only recently passed us by. "For fifteen hundred centuries, we kept to the Old Rules, then broke them all and erased the Old Way from our lives," Thomas writes. The Bushmen of the Kalahari "in the 1950s were still living entirely from the savannah, as people had done since people began." They would continue to live in that manner for two more decades, when industrialized society forced profound, and often deadly, changes upon them.

Thomas tells of how the Bushmen taught her to poison an arrow, dig for edible roots, and track animals over great distances, sprinkling her text with lessons on evolution, sociology, biology and history along the way. Whether describing the grass half-dome shelters the Bushmen lived in, analyzing their concept of land-ownership or custom of gift giving, or recounting the care taken when living among dangerous wildlife, Thomas' style manages to be understated and vivid all at once.

When Thomas' family arrived in camp too late one evening to set up their tents, they made do by simply lying on the ground to rest. She writes: "That night the lions came and walked all around us, even standing right over us and looking down at our sleeping faces. We learned this from their tracks in the morning and were glad we had been asleep at the time, glad to have missed what would have been a dreadful experience."

The white settlers who would forever change the landscape of southwest Africa did little to accommodate the needs of the indigenous people who preceded them. For the Bushmen, the transition to modern life has been rocky, to say the least, marred by hunger, slavery, alcoholism, suicide and murder. "Things too terrible to say happened to these people," Thomas writes. As for the Old Way, Western civilization "almost guarantees its disappearance."

If it is hard to believe that a lifestyle from tens of thousands of years ago was still around as recently as the 1970s, then it is all the more remarkable that Thomas managed to witness the last years of its existence, pen in hand. Her book provides us with a cultural artifact of the rarest kind -- a first-hand account of a way of life usually only guessed at by experts poring over bones and fossils found in the dirt.

Today much of that dirt has been taken over by patrols of well-heeled tourists in four-wheel-drive trucks, binoculars and sun block at the ready. The Bushmen are kept out.

(Austin Merrill is a writer in New York City.)