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Dxui: Myths Passed Down by the Bushmen
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12069 |
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CULTURE
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12 / 1987 |
2,791 Words |
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Laurens van der Post
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Editor's note: In The Heart of the Hunter, van der Post relates not only the story of his journey out of the Kalahari, but also many of the myths of the Bushmen. But since the Bushman's images and idioms would be utterly incomprehensible to a modern audience, van der Post draws deeply on his experiences and provides interpretations. Thus he attempts to provide a "kind of improvised rope-bridge over the deep abyss between the modern man and the first person of Africa." Probably no one was better suited for the task.
In the beginning, St. John says, was the Word. I believe that is a way of saying that in the beginning there was meaning. This word, this meaning according to the bible was with God and indeed was God. The ancient Chinese said something similar when they defined meaning as that which has always existed through itself. Somehow this meaning demanded also to be lived. As St. John puts it again, the word was made flesh. A similar intimation of its beginnings seems to me present in the first spirit of Africa. It is true the Bushmen I had just met in the Kalahari were not very communicative in this respect. I think it needed more time, more trust and patience that than I commanded to elicit from them the full image in which this intimation moves over the mystery of the beginning in their spirit in search of some conscious thought to contain it--like the first bird let out of the ark searching over the dark waters of the Old Testament flood for some tangible fact of earth or rock to light upon. When I pressed them to talk to me about he beginning they seemed to lose their power of speech, and the only significant answer was given to me one night by my favorite hunter. Distressed by my persistence and his inability to satisfy my curiosity, he said, "But you see, it is very difficult, for always there is a dream dreaming us."
It was a pregnant hint. Quite apart from its likeness to the Shakespearian assertion: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," it confirmed the observation of the French man, who was among the first to examine the life of primitive people with no feeling of superiority or abhorrence that "the dream is the true God of primitive man." Believing as I do that the dream is not a waste product of the mind expelled through some sewage system of the spirit but a manifestation of first and abiding meaning, I thought I should enlarge St. John's theme to include the idea that in the beginning there was a dream. This dream was with God and indeed was God. Somehow this dream demanded that it should be lived. As St. John might have put it, "the dream was made of flesh."
Fortunately I did not have just this one statement of a contemporary Stone Age hunter to go by. In the few myths, legends and stories left us; a dream contains the heart of the matter. All this will emerge, I hope, from the natural progression of the key stories towards greater awareness in the mind of the first people of Africa; but here I remember in particular a more specific and elaborate presentation of the first spirit of creation. It was obtained by Bleek nearly eighty years ago from two little Bushman boys who came from the same desert world as my hunter. Young as they were, they had already been instructed in the first spirit of creation and spoke of it in a manner which bears comparison with almost any imaginative representation of the beginning of things. They called the first spirit of creation to use Bleek's spelling. Dxui. How I long to have been there to hear its electricity on their lips. On my own, carefully following Bleek's system and guided by what I know of Bushman sound, it
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