Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Gathering food in the bush is thirsty work. Xhing Xhai found a slender
and unremarkable vine growing nearby. To my uneducated eye the vine
was not obviously dif erent from other small plants that formed the ground
cover on this part of the bush. She recruited the others to help. Using their
digging sticks they swiftly excavated a hole more than two feet deep. Xhing
Xhai reached down into the dirt and pulled out a huge tuber. She and Stefan
expertly scraped away the tuber's brown covering, revealing a snow-white
interior. They carved the tuber up and passed pieces around.
The fl esh of the tuber was cool, with an insubstantial texture. It was
so full of liquid that eating it was like taking a drink of delicious, slightly
radish-fl avored water. As we exclaimed over this discovery, Xhing Xhai dug
further down and pulled out another, deeper tuber from the same plant's
root system. It was clear that we were in no danger of dying of thirst as long
as we stayed in her company.
Back at the camp we ate slices of the trul es—in the process I dined on
more trul es than I had consumed in my entire life up to that point. And
the Buprestid beetles were roasted in an open fi re and passed around to the
eager members of the clan. The beetles' casings could easily be broken open
to reveal their soft and runny greenish insides. I wish I could recommend
them, but their bitter fl avor and less than appetizing texture makes them a
decidedly acquired taste. Nonetheless, they are rich in protein and fat, like
the witchetty grubs eaten by Australian aborigines, and the San wolfed them
down as eagerly as if they were chocolate-covered strawberries.
The San have adapted to this hunter-gatherer way of life because of brutal
necessity. A thousand years ago Bantu tribes moved down into the ancestral
home of the San in southern Africa, bringing agriculture and the ability to
smelt iron for weapons and farm tools. They drove the San from the best
hunting land and forced them to fl ee deep into the Kalahari. The small-bod-
ied San, who had already been selected to survive on very little food if nec-
essary, were able to draw on millennia of tradition to live and thrive on the
unexpected bounty of the dry African bush.
Then the San were driven even further into the desert by the arrival of
Europeans from the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. The Boers hunted the San like animals. As a result of this cruel invasion
