The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey

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Rupert Isaacson. The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey

THE HEALING LAND. A KALAHARI JOURNEY. Rupert Isaacson

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Map

1 Stories and Myths

2 Lessons in Reality

3 Under the Big Tree

4 Regopstaan’s Prophecy

5 A Human Zoo

6 Old Magic, New Beliefs

7 Trance Dance at Buitsevango

8 Into the Central Kalahari

9 Revelations at the Red House

10 The Same Blood

11 Dream and Disillusion

12 The Leopard Man

13 Dawid Makes a Request

14 Bushman Politics

15 Off to See a Wizard

16 The River of Spirits

17 What Happened After

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author. THE HEALING LAND

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For the Ancestors

I have entered the airy, dancing lightness of love.

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My mother went almost mad with grief. She had at last begun to know her parents, and now suddenly they had been snatched away. Throughout our childhood, she would be prone to periodic depressions, and the sense of being an exile never left her. Unlike my father, who fitted happily into London (he later told me that even in his Rhodesian childhood he had longed for cities: ‘The first time I went to Johannesburg and smelled the car fumes and saw all that concrete around me, I felt an almost sensual thrill of excitement and pleasure’), my mother missed Africa keenly. She expressed it in her sculpture, her painting, almost all of which featured African people, African scenes.

It was perhaps to make up for the loss of her parents, and of all that she had hoped we children would have learned from them, that she became such a willing story-teller. She told us of the four Loxton brothers – Jesse, Samuel, Jasper and Henry – who in 1830 had come to South Africa from the Somerset village of Loxton and immediately dispersed into the wide spaces of the dry north, the area known as the Great Karoo.

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