Lightning Bird

There is no such thing as coincidence, right?  Sitting here in Oregon, I wrote a story about a guy in New Jersey, sent it to a site in England, where it was read by a guy in Greece, who pointed me to a story from South Africa, about a man I’d never heard of: Adrian Boshier (1939-1978).  His life was described in Lightning Bird, a biography by Lyall Watson (1939-2008).  Watson was the inventor of “the hundredth monkey,” a magical thinking meme that once went viral.  The book was just what I needed: a visit to an old-fashioned society.

Boshier was an Englishman who moved to South Africa when he was 16.  He was a reckless, brainy, and extremely lucky man who had a short, fantastic life — a whirlwind adventure in rewilding.  He lived in the bush for most of his first six years in Africa.  Unlike other whites, Boshier walked wherever he went, ate what natives ate, and drank their water.  He would head off into wild country with nothing but a pocketknife and a bag of salt (for trading), and live off the land for as long as he wanted. 

He became highly skilled at catching and befriending dangerous snakes.  Walking into a village wrapped up in a 14-foot python, he terrified the natives, giving birth to his reputation as a powerful magician.  He would catch an eight-foot cobra, milk its venom, and drink it before a wide-eyed crowd.  They called him Rradinoga, the father of snakes.

By and by, Boshier met Raymond Dart, the archeologist who discovered Australopithecus africanus.  Dart took him under his wing, and arranged museum work for him.  The lad also made some money selling snake venom to labs.

Boshier was forced to unlearn his narrow Englishness.  Natives taught him the juicy delights of gobbling three-inch caterpillars.  Eventually, he learned how to chase down a young antelope and strangle it with his bare hands.  When a leopard killed an animal, he would race at it screaming, scare it off, and snatch a hunk of flesh.  He once tried to swipe some fresh meat from five lions, unsuccessfully, but he lived to tell about it.

He was fascinated by native culture, and decided to learn more about diviners or witch doctors.  An elder told him to go to Makgabeng, a mountainous land that was home to fearsome spirit power.  The mountains were so dangerous that you shouldn’t even point your finger at them, let alone walk into them.  Boshier walked into them.  Before long, he gained the respect of the residents.

Their chief introduced him to the keeper of the traditions, who told Boshier that the spirits had brought him to Makgabeng to learn.  Why?  “The lessons that the spirits bring cannot be doubted and they must not be ignored.  If you disregard the experience offered by the sprits, you will fall.  You may even die.  But if you follow the path along which they lead, you will learn.  You will gain power and your sprits will be happy.”

A witch doctor reinforced this message.  She told him that his health problems resulted from his resistance to the spirits.  “The hospitals in your cities are full of the hornless ones, those who have been called and would not go.  No one asks for the spirits and it is not easy to live with them.  Everyone fights in the beginning, but in the end one must obey them and do their work.  You should be dead.  I do not know why they let you live.”

Eventually she taught him the skills of a witch doctor, and he was honored by an initiation ceremony.  But whenever he got too stressed, he would flee to Johannesburg and spend time with the whites.  He straddled two incompatible worlds, and never felt at home in either one.

In the mountains, he visited many caves, and studied the paintings on their walls.  Some were recent, and some were very old.  He met elders who understood their meaning.  They were not just decorative graffiti.  The images recorded information, something like writing.  Tribes who spoke different languages all understood the painted symbols in the same way, because they were like a universal form of communication, archetypal images.

The bright climax of the book occurred when a severe drought came to Makgabeng.  Since he was a powerful witch doctor, the people asked him to make it rain.  He responded in a beautiful way.  He found their sacred drums in a forgotten cave, where they had been hidden 50 years earlier, when German missionaries demanded their destruction.  A black bull was sacrificed to provide new hides for the drums.  To bring rain, everyone had to be initiated in the old ways, and the ancestors fully honored.  The people were united by an empowering healing process.  It rained.  Joy!

“There is in African custom an essential harmony, an equilibrium with the land which seems to be lacking in our lives.”  Africa is a special place.  The roots of the old culture go “all the way back, in one long unbroken line, to the origins of man.”  For all of us, a journey to Africa is a homecoming.  “There are few things in traditional life in Africa that can be identified as distinctively sacred in the sense that they can be separated from the rest of life.  For Africans, the whole of life is sacred.”

The megafauna of Africa did not go extinct, because humans coevolved with them.  Living in the tropics, we needed no clothes or substantial shelters.  A sumptuous buffet was available year round — lizards, snakes, roots, berries, nuts, grubs.  We got by with very simple tools for a long, long time.  This was the normal, time-proven, sustainable mode of human living — a mode that our genetic evolution had fine-tuned us for (with the same genes we have today).

Then, folks migrated out of Africa, to non-tropical lands where living conditions were less perfect, and survival was more challenging.  Dwelling outside of our evolutionary homeland turned us into something like moon explorers.  Without technological crutches, we would have been unable to survive.  Be clever or die!

The dark climax of the book was one of humankind’s big tragedies.  Some old cave paintings that Boshier studied had images of sheep.  Sheep were not indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.  They came from the Middle East, where clever people had reduced strong and powerful wild mouflon into fuzzy, sub-intelligent freaks that could not survive without human care.

Portraits of sheep indicated that the clever moon explorers had returned to sacred Africa, bringing with them domesticated livestock, sacks of seeds, and the consuming mindset of the colonizer and domesticator.  “The introduction of a pastoral economy, starting perhaps three or four thousand years ago, seems to have marked the beginning of a relentless destruction, now almost complete, of the earliest way of human life.  It was the end of a society that had discovered how to live in harmony with — rather than at the expense of — nature.”

The archaeological community was always on the lookout for evidence of the miraculous transition, when primitive hominids, who lived by instinct, crossed the Rubicon and became self-aware Homo sapiens with complex brains — incredible modern humans!  Well, here we are, neck deep in a bubbling cauldron of toxic progress soup, big brains and all.  Success!  These days, the primitive side of the Rubicon is looking more and more like where we really belong — home.  Can we learn something here?

Boshier was an epileptic.  To Europeans, epilepsy was a disease.  To Africans, he was blessed by the spirits, very special.  Near the end of his life, he was having as many as 30 epileptic attacks per week.  On 18 November, 1978, Boshier waded into the waters of the Indian Ocean and died.  The next day, a storm raced into the bone dry Makgabeng, the thunder rumbled, and “it rained and rained and rained.”

See a photo of Boshier here: http://www.williamjames.com/History/SHAMANS.htm

Watson, Lyall, Lightning Bird — The Story of One Man’s Journey into Africa’s Past, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1982.

The Harmless People

Folks who spend their lives staring at computer screens in vast corporate cubicle farms have a powerful tendency to drift off into vivid daydreams of gathering nuts, roots, and melons in wild country, with their hunter-gatherer ancestors, in a world without roads, cities, or alphabets.  For them, there is treasure to be found in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ book, The Harmless People.  It’s a beautiful book. 

Elizabeth was 19 when she first met the Bushmen of southern Africa.  Her parents led three expeditions between 1950 and 1956 to study and film these people, who were among the last surviving hunter-gatherer societies in the world.  The family spent a lot of time living in Bushmen camps, learned their language, and really got to know them.  Elizabeth’s book is a respectful and affectionate diary of her experiences with these people, and it is easy and enjoyable to read.

The first expedition searched for several months before finding Bushmen, because Bushmen disappeared whenever they saw outsiders, who were a dependable source of trouble.  Black and white outsiders frequently kidnapped them, and forced them to spend the rest of their days as farm laborers.  They never returned home.  Police would arrest them if they killed a giraffe in the desert, because giraffes were royal animals protected by the law.  Arrested hunters were hauled away, and never seen again.  The Thomas expedition eventually gained their trust because they developed a reputation for being very generous with their gifts, and for being unusually decent white folks.

Long ago, Bushmen lived across much of southern Africa.  But black and white farmers and herders aggressively seized the best lands, forcing the Bushmen into the Kalahari Desert, an exceedingly difficult place to live.  Some places were so dry that the primary sources of water were melons, roots, and killed animals.  Some winter nights dipped below freezing, leading to sleepless nights for the nearly naked people.

Each group lived in a specific territory, sometimes several hundred square miles in area, which had clearly defined traditional boundaries.  They intimately know every bit of their homeland, every rock, every bush, and every notable variation of the terrain.  They knew exactly where different types of food could be found.  They often had to move their camp every few days.

Hunting was done with spears and bows and arrows.  Arrows were treated with a poison made from the pupa of a beetle, which could take several days to kill the prey.  After shooting, hunters waited two or three days, then tracked the wounded animal, hoping to find it dead.  One unlucky hunter was fully impaled on the long horn of an angry buffalo who wasn’t dead yet.  Amazingly, he survived.  Another time, hunters tracked a wounded wildebeest, and found it surrounded by 20 to 30 hungry lions.  Amazingly, they drove away the lions, finished off the animal, and carried the meat back to camp.

In the honey season, men climbed high into the trees to raid the hives, whilst being stung everywhere by a furious cloud of stingy bees.  There was a long tradition of fatal falls.  Hives that were frequently raided became fiercely defensive, viciously attacking all of the Bushmen on the ground, before the climbing began.  Honey was definitely not a free lunch.

Living in a harsh land, the Bushmen were very careful to sidestep the problems caused by overpopulation.  The stability of their society was more important than the survival of every newborn, and these cultural values enabled their way of life to be sustainable.  They believed that there was a period of delay between birth and becoming alive.  If the newborn was crippled or deformed, it was promptly buried and forgotten.  When conditions were strained, and it was not possible to feed more mouths, newborns were not kept.  The Bushmen had no tools for contraception or abortion.  To avoid the pain of infanticide, they frequently abstained from intercourse for long periods of time, when there was room for no more.  Usually, childbirth was a joyful event, because the number of pregnancies was voluntarily limited.

Thomas described the ongoing soap operas of camp life, and the inevitable friction that developed among people who lived in close contact with others all the time.  Camp life was not a never-ending love fest.  But great care was taken to avoid conflict, and to promptly defuse and resolve conflicts.  Belongings were constantly kept in circulation via gift-giving to avoid jealousy.  The fundamental keys to their success were cooperation and sharing.

She presented us with a fascinating description of thriving in a challenging land.  Bushmen life seemed to be far less dismal than life in corporate cubicle farms.  Bushmen enjoyed healthy, satisfying, and meaningful lives, despite their lack of televisions, computers, cell phones, automobiles; despite being a cruelly persecuted minority; despite being surrounded by lions and leopards who enjoyed having children for lunch; despite the blast furnace summer days when the sand burned their feet.  Life was good.  They had what they needed.

Thomas published her book in 1961.  She returned to the region in 1986 and 1987 and discovered that the Bushmen had been blindsided by what is called sustainable development (i.e., catastrophic destruction).  This inspired her to produce a revised edition, which was published in 1989, to bring us up to date.

The Bushmen had been driven off their land and forced into villages, where their superiors treated them like the scum of the Earth.  Their culture disintegrated into a nightmare of malnutrition, disease, alcoholism, homicide, and wage labor.  People quit sharing, ate in secret, and hid purchases.  

Thomas summed up the new reality:  “No Bushmen lack contact with the West and none is undamaged by it.  And their own way of life, the old way, a way of life which preceded the human species, no longer exists but is gone from the face of the earth at enormous cost to the individuals who once lived it.”  Welcome to industrial civilization!

Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Vintage Books, New York, 1989.

The Heart of the Hunter

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) was born in South Africa and grew up to be a reporter, dairy farmer, soldier, writer, and television personality.  He was the godfather of Prince William, and was sometimes referred to as “Prince Charles’ guru,” because he was a mystical visionary with a wise old soul, quite skilled at thinking outside the box. 

He took great pleasure in creating fascinating stories intended to wake up people whose thinkers had fallen asleep.  The transformative power of his stories was far more important to him than 100% factual accuracy, and he sometimes “embellished” them to make them more forceful.  This was the storyteller’s job: creating amazing stories — not rigidly accurate scientific discourses.

Laurens was not universally loved by white South Africans, because he had an annoying habit of criticizing segregation, racism, and oppression.  He had special fondness for the Bushmen, who were sharply mistreated by everyone, both black and white.  Bushmen once inhabited all of southern Africa, but black and white newcomers drove them off their best lands, forcing them into the Kalahari Desert, an extremely harsh place. 

In 1955, Laurens did a documentary on the Bushmen for the BBC, and it was the second most popular program ever, only the queen’s coronation had a bigger audience.  He went on to write several books on Bushmen themes, including The Heart of the Hunter.  Passages from this book are often quoted by writers of the counterculture, because Laurens had profound respect for the ability of simpler societies to live lightly on the Earth, with great reverence.  He also had a robust contempt for modern industrial society, and he did not hesitate to express this.  He had a front row seat for World War II, and this adventure in industrial warfare took much of the shine off of civilization’s reputation.

Laurens introduced us to his beloved wild Bushmen, people of “irrepressible gaiety.”  One elder was “utterly at one with all the life that was and could ever be.”  Bushmen were incredibly in tune with nature, and could feel the presence of unseen animals.  They could sense danger from far away.  They could communicate telepathically.  They didn’t work hard, they didn’t have jobs, they didn’t have leaders, and they were free.  Free!  They had a culture that worked.  John Reader once wrote that the Bushmen were able to live in their ordinary manner during the third year of extreme drought that killed 180,000 people and 250,000 cattle. 

Unfortunately, the Bantu and European newcomers were farmers, herders, and assorted moneymakers — property freaks — and the way they treated Bushmen was similar to the relationship between Montana ranchers and prairie dogs.  Consequently, the Bushmen avoided all contact with the outside world, because the dominant culture treated them like sub-human vermin, or no-cost slaves, or future tax-paying peasants or diamond miners.

Laurens lamented modern society, with its vast hordes of property freaks, the tragic innocent victims of arrested development.  Because of our estrangement from nature, our minds had lost contact with core human instincts, we had lost our souls, we were starved for meaning, and we were mindlessly destroying system after system.  He decreed: “One look at the identical towns we are building all over the world ought to be enough to show us that this kind of progress is like the proliferation of a single cell at the expense of the rest, which produces the cancer that kills the whole body.” 

In 1961, Laurens did not think like the herd.  He celebrated wild freedom, and denounced the destructive insanity of industrial civilization.  Yet he was a popular and respected celebrity in Britain, and he sipped champagne with the richest and most powerful.  He was knighted in 1981, becoming Sir Laurens van der Post, an extraordinary achievement for someone who was so at odds with mainstream thinking.

The power of this book lies in its rebellious and unconventional attitude.  It’s OK to think.  It’s OK to question.  It’s OK to shout “Wolf!” when there are wolves as far as the eye can see.  It’s OK to be different, to prefer integrity over trendiness, to seek truth instead of mindless conformity.  If your heart is screaming about the senseless destruction of life on Earth, you aren’t crazy, you’re awake.  What’s crazy is our way of life, our culture.  This is an important concept to understand.

Creative people have a primary role to play in influencing the path of our society, because society permits them to think outside the box.  Popes, politicians, tycoons, and educators aren’t allowed to do this, because they have an obligation to protect and preserve the pathological belief system that is laying waste to the world.  Everything we need for healing can only be found outside the box, and creative people can help us find them, with luck.

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t teach us a great deal about the Bushmen way of life.  Laurens knew few Bushmen, spent little time with them, and didn’t know their language.  The BBC documentary was almost aborted because Laurens and his team had a very hard time finding any Bushmen to film.  Finally they found one band, who allowed themselves to be seen, because they were close to dying from dehydration.  You could learn much more about the Bushmen by reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

The Bushmen finally got their own official home when the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961.  This Denmark-sized park was located in the middle of what is now Botswana.  But diamonds were discovered on the reserve in the early ‘80s, and this inspired the government to remove the Bushmen from their land.  In 2006, they won the right to return, but were forbidden to hunt or drink water.  In 2011, they won the right to drink water. 

Botswana promotes safari tours at the reserve, and this generates a lot of income for an extremely poor country.  Rich tourists want to enjoy a pure wilderness experience, gazing at giraffes from their hot tubs, and wild, naked, blood-spattered savages would simply spoil this demented fantasy.  Laurens would have a different opinion, of course.

van der Post, Laurens, The Heart of the Hunter, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1961.