The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert - Hardcover

Isaacson, Rupert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802117392 ISBN 13: 9780802117397

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2003

Synopsis

The author travels to the dry grasslands of southern Africa in search of the legendary Kalahari Bushmen and finds evidence of shamans, powerful religious rituals, tribal hunting practices, and much, much more.

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Reviews

The son of a South African mother and a Rhodesian father but raised in London, travel writer Isaacson felt a longing for the Bushmen of his mother's stories and of Laurens Van Der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari. Things are different today; in postapartheid South Africa, the question of the survival of the Bushmen is framed by their struggle to gain back their land. Dispossessed from their wide roaming areas by a series of foreign invaders over the course of the 20th century, Bushmen have gradually been moved to reservations where they can't hunt or heal in traditional ways. Alcohol abuse and domestic violence have become common. At first, Isaacson looks for the mythical Bushman, who rises before dawn to track and kill wild animals, stops for a reflective pause in the shade to offer spiritual parables and caps the day by a campfire barbecue with singing and dancing into the small hours of the night. But as Isaacson struggles with drunk villagers, broken-down vehicles and petty scamming by people accustomed to living off the stupidity of tourists, he loses his na‹vet‚ and finds his real Bushmen, eventually forming his own bond with them. This isn't spiritual tourism; Isaacson's account is too funky and too honest about the very human weaknesses of real-life Bushmen. Still, readers come away with respect for the struggles of all indigenous people, coupled with an awareness that they may not live particularly pretty lives themselves.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This heart-wrenching story has connections worldwide with indigenous peoples' struggle for survival and identity. Isaacson's personal journey with the Bushmen of southern Africa brings you up close to the urgency of their present displacement, even as he connects it with their long heritage of "death, disaster, and despair." The Bushmen were there first, but as hunters and food-gatherers they threatened the settlers and farmers, black and white, who came later and drove out the Stone Age people. Is there a place now for the Bushmen in the game parks and eco-tourism industry? Can their land claim succeed in the new South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana? How much must they change? The writer's personal transformation and mystical healing experience are less interesting than his passionate viewpoint as journalist, anthropologist, and lobbyist. He's honest about the alcoholism, breakdown, and violence among the people he gets close to in the resettlement camps, and he offers no easy answers--especially now that diamonds have been discovered where the Bushmen live. Hazel Rochman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802117392
• ISBN 13: 9780802117397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288