!Xuu and Khwe Bushmen
research oral history project workshops performances
lower Kalahari Desert
The Two Stones origin myth
The group consisted of seven traditional healers--Machai, George and Silenga amongst them, and the rest were their assistants and musicians. All were between thirty-five and seventy years old. It soon became clear that there were deep conflicts between these older people and the younger members of the community.
Machai: They think they are better than us because they can read and write. To them we are old and foolish.
Arenesto Ndala: The sooner they learn about the new ways the better they will be.
Machai: We old people still like to think about the old times, but if we tell those old stories to children they say “leave those old things we are living in modern times. Can’t you see we are wearing clothes today and not antelope skins.”
George: The old ways should not be abandoned so quickly because it is still important to know those ways. What we do must show them about the old ways. Before we lose the old stories. Those stories hold us together and make us who we are.
Tumba Gisenda: We must tell them our story even if they laugh at us. Someday they will understand and use it.
Silenga:Those old ways are gone now and we must start with a new story.
Riccio: What is the new story?
Silenga: We don’t know, you must help us.
Riccio: Should the performance tell the new story? Ndala We don’t know. What should be a part of the new story?
George: In the past we have suffered, in the future we don’t know if we will suffer.
Tumba: In the old story we were not chased, now in the new story we have been chased.
We finished the session with the agreement that the story lives within the group; and that the group must create it if necessary, and then tell the others. The purpose of my presence and the function and reason for, of what we were doing finally became apparent to many of them. I couldn’t explain theatre to people who had no concept of it.
However, they understood there was a story within them that needed telling. That evening I attended a healing ceremony conducted by George in the Khwe camp.
When I arrived at the tent about forty people, mostly women, were seated on blankets in a circle, rattling and singing in support of George, who was at the center next to the fire and his patient. He wore a T-shirt and torn dark pants, no shoes, and no special regalia. The sick woman lay wrapped in a blanket with her naked back to the fire. Near her back was a covered plate, red powder medicine on it, and an automobile brake shoe shaped into a ten-inch knife.
George was also healing two grandchildren of the sick woman who were also sick because they ate from the same bowl as her. Throughout the ceremony, George first ministered to the woman, then repeated the same actions on the infants.
As I entered, George welcomed me by anointing my brow with the red medicine, a ritual he performed on everyone entering the ceremony. The group gave me a place at the inner circle and I immediately felt comfortable, as if being with family, huddled close together against the cold desert night.
There were no drums, only rattles, hand clapping, and singing. Rhythms and counter rhythms were dense and complex. The voices of the women laid a vocal and rhythmic bottom while the voices of George and the few other men sang counter to and over those of women.
Each healer has a unique style and method of healing; the songs George used were his only.
from Performing Africa
