Book Notes

By: Dr. Joan Ruddiman
   "When in 1950 my father, Laurence Marshall, was looking at a map in Windhoek—then a frontier town with unpaved roads—a government official told him that the place he was viewing was the end of the earth. No white person, he thought, had ever been there, and no Bantu person, either."
   So Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes in her reflective memoir of a time over 50 years ago when her father, mother, brother and she went into the Kalahari Desert in Africa to find and live with hunter-gatherers — the Bushmen — who had lived on the land for 150,000 years. "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006) chronicles what the family learned about the Ju/wasi, as the first — and the last — white people to see these people live the Old Way.
   Laurence and Lorna Marshall and their teenagers John and Elizabeth met the Ju/wasi in the early 1950s. Their lives from that point on were entwined with the Ju/wasi, translated as "The Harmless People" or "Pure People," as they documented and fought to protect their beloved friends from the onslaught of evils from the outside world.
   The Marshall family was remarkable. Laurence Marshall, who trained as a civil engineer, was the founder of the innovative electronics company Raytheon. In his 50s, he sold the company and pursued his dream of taking his family to an unexplored corner of the world — the Nyae Nyae, on the border of what is now known as Namibia and Botswana.
   Lorna Marshall was a former ballerina and later an English teacher at Mount Holyoke. With no training as an anthropologist, she became an expert on the lives and language of the Bushmen. In reviewing her first book, "The !Kung of Nyae Nyae" (Harvard Press, 1976), anthropologist Alan Bernard wrote, "Lorna Marshall is one of the most sensitive, meticulous and unpretentious ethnographers of all time."
   John Marshall, who was 17 when he made the first exploratory trip with his father, devoted his life to documenting the Bushmen culture and then to agitating for their wellbeing as government policies displaced them from their lands and lifestyle. A self-taught filmmaker, he collected footage and produced films, culminating with the five-part, six-hour film series "A Kalahari Family" (DER, 2003) that documented 50 years of the Ju/wasi.
   Elizabeth Marshall, who was 19 when she and her mother joined the family adventure, returned to the United States in 1955 to complete her education at Smith College (with Sylvia Plath who was awed by Elizabeth) and then at Radcliffe College. She married historian Stephen Thomas, had a son and daughter, and published several pieces from her work in the Kalahari, including the critically acclaimed "The Harmless People" (Knopf, 1959).
   Though she did not make her life there, Ms. Thomas has often said that what she learned and experienced in those years with the Ju/wasi has influenced everything she has done. Those who know her best-selling books on dogs and cats ("Hidden Life of Dogs," Houghton Mifflin, 1993; "Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture," Simon and Schuster, 1994; "The Social Lives of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company," Thorndike Press, 2000) recognize the ethnographic and anthropologic skills with which she understands all cultures.
   In "The Old Way: A Story of the First People," Ms. Thomas returns to her notes and her mother’s journals from those long ago years in Africa to "reexamine some of our experiences in the light of all that was learned since our first visits."
   Not much remains of what the Marshall family discovered 50 years ago. Though some of their friends are still alive, their lifestyle is gone. Ms. Thomas does not reveal such details until the very short Part Two at the end of the book.
   A good storyteller, the author first sets the context by sharing rich details of life among the Ju/wasi, recreating the moment when she entered as a nineteen-year-old. She carefully connects the culture of the Ju/wasi both to the beginning of time and to our own time. What at first glance seems primitive slowly emerges as a sophisticated and very civilized society that has successfully lived in one of the most severe climates on earth.
   Ms. Thomas does not romanticize the Bushmen. She and her family were with the Ju/wasi to understand why they lived as they did. This is what she documents in "The Old Way."
   Though she admits to some misconceptions based on naiveté in her first account, "The Harmless People," Ms. Thomas is convinced that what her family found was a superior civilization, where jealously and acts of violence are kept in check, and where gift-giving and sharing was "perhaps the most important element of the social fabric."
   But before the author makes this point — one the reader is willing to accept — she has so thoroughly detailed the world of the Ju/wasi that the reasons for their civilized behaviors are apparently logical.
   The society revolves around finding and conserving water — the most precious resource in this intensely hot land — and finding and securing food. They move constantly, in search of game and plants with a constant awareness of where there will be water. Everyone supports the good of the group, as eons of surviving in the Kalahari have taught them that it is better to be part of a social fabric. "That was the Old Way," Ms. Thomas notes.
   She continues: "Yes, they had violence in them. But for as long as possible, they curbed it…No matter how provoked, they rarely acted out their discomfort, nor did they vent it on one another as long as their ancient culture served them. Not for nothing did they call themselves the Harmless People, the Pure People, when the harm and impurities were jealously, violence and anger."
   When outside societies discovered these long-hidden people, the Old Way ended. The Bushmen were taken off their lands, which were given over for wildlife preservation and the pleasure of tourists. All tribes of the Bushmen, including the Marshalls’ good friends, the Ju/wasi, were interned in filthy compounds, some virtually enslaved as the cheapest farm labor. Alcohol, drugs, AIDS, and the ugliness of more evolved cultures destroyed lives and families.
   John Marshall fought for a new life for the Ju/wasi; they took to working as farmers relatively well. In the greatest irony, after destroying the ancient link to the Old Way, some well-meaning albeit foolish planners now seek to return the Bushmen to the Kalahari to live as they once did.
   Ms. Thomas observes, "Sad to say, the depth of the Bushmen’s knowledge may never be fully appreciated. The generation of people we knew in the 1950s was essentially the last generation to live entirely in the Old Way. The last to have practical, hands-on access to the full array of a hunter-gatherer education."
   Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is one of the last of that generation of whites that discovered the Bushmen and attempted to document their culture. She now carries on the work her brother John and others began, including the Tradition and Transition Fund established by Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who studies the Bushmen culture.
   Ms. Thomas is a realist. "No culture today obtains its livelihood in its traditional manner. But most cultures keep some of their ancestral features…," she writes, referring to language, family patterns and values.
   Her wish for these people is that "some pockets of their culture can remain. Perhaps, the real culture, the social culture, can be preserved by the First People."
Joan Ruddiman, Ed.D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.