Anton Ferreira meets a Spaniard who's passionate about capturing South African folk stories
For the past 11 years I have been blissfully ignorant of the fact that a baleful creature, half man, half fish, lives in the Olifants River just 4km from my home. This waterbas, as it is known, has been lurking in the reeds, ready to pounce if I so much as put a toe in the water on a 42°C day. It was only thanks to Jose Manuel de Prada-Samper, who came all the way from Barcelona to the foothills of the Cederberg, that I learnt the monster was there.
He didn't make the trip only for my sake, it must be said. He has been travelling to South Africa every year since 2005 in pursuit of his vocation, which is the investigation and collection of Bushman stories. Now this Spaniard knows far, far more about what's going on in my own beautiful back yard, and about its history, than I do.
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For example, I did not know that a train has recently been seen and heard in the middle of the night, roaring across the sky above Clanwilliam. Except it was not really a train, it was a water snake, with a single bright light on its forehead and a red light on each of its four tails. It was moving from one mountain pool to another.
And this is better documented: commandos carried out a genocide of Bushmen in the northern Cape in the 1850s. According to De Prada-Samper, records he found in the Cape archives show that a magistrate who investigated the mass killings reported they were "the systematic extermination of a race of men". No one mentioned that in my high-school textbooks, and few people are talking about it now. The Bushmen have not had their hands on the levers of power for a long, long time.
"Most people don't know about it," says De Prada-Samper. "The description of massacres in those documents is of really very large-scale affairs. It strongly suggests a wiping-out operation." This operation, he says, was on a different, more concerted scale than the anecdotes most of us have heard, of 18th- and 19th-century white settlers hunting Bushmen like animals.
De Prada-Samper is a professional folklore researcher, with a PhD to prove it. His interest in South Africa blossomed in 1988, when he came across the book Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a bookshop in Cambridge, England. Published in 1911, it related the stories told to linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd by convicts of the /Xam tribe from the northern Cape in the 1860s.
De Prada-Samper, by the way, knows how to pronounce the "/" in /Xam, along with the "!" in !Kung, and so on.
"That was a mind-blowing experience," he says. "I think the stories are among the most beautiful literary creations of any part of the world. They are very poetic."
They have titles like The Mantis Assumes the Form of a Hartebeest, The Cat's Song, #Kaga'Ra and !Haunu Who Fought Each Other With Lightning, and A Song Sung by the Star !Gaunu.
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De Prada-Samper is in Clanwilliam for two months this time, interviewing people for their stories. He uses the term "Bushman" instead of "San", and tries not to use "coloured" at all. "I have coined a name for them, in /Xam, which translated would be 'People of the Land'. So I call them 'the People' ... otherwise it's a problem, 'coloured' is a non-identity."
One of the members of the People he has interviewed is Johanna van Wyk, the 50-something woman who cleans my house two mornings a week and lives on the banks of the Olifants River.
She told him that about 20 years ago when she first arrived in the area, her son Isak, who was six at the time, was down by the river with his friends. "Suddenly a big wind came up," she said, "one gust from the north and one from the south. The two gusts collided and there was a 'bang' like a rifle shot that I heard from my house."
It was the waterbas coming for Isak, because he was new and had not been properly introduced to the creature.
"Fortunately, his friends pulled him away," Van Wyk said. She has seen the creature herself, from a distance of about 200m. "It was a black shape lying on the sandbank, and it shone like a mirror."
I was somewhat hurt that Van Wyk had never told me this story before in all the years I have known her, and that it took a stranger from Barcelona to get her to open up. But as De Prada-Samper says: "When you ask about the stories, they are very reticent, because they fear you may not take them seriously."
He himself takes them very seriously.
"These are beliefs which have been held in this part of the world for possibly thousands and thousands of years. Very old rock paintings show these creatures ... it's very much magic-realism, and it's set in this world. It's not some far-away land, not some never-never land, it's here. Many people tell you of seeing extraordinary things."
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Apart from waterbas, a word in general use only in the Cederberg area, De Prada-Samper knows other Afrikaans words I've never heard of, like baljas, which refers to sorcery or supernatural powers. "Many South Africans don't know this word. It means a special connection to the invisible that some people have ... 'magic' possibly doesn't do justice to the complexity of the subject."
De Prada-Samper says he had an epiphany in 2011 when, somewhere in the Karoo, someone told him a story from the Bleek and Lloyd collection, but in Afrikaans, not /Xam. "I realised that really the /Xam people were not extinct. The genocide had not been as complete as many people imagined, and this culture, even though the language has been lost, the culture has been passed down.
"These people cannot be said to be a rural working class, they're an indigenous people with a culture, who have been reduced to serfdom at some point. They have an oral tradition which is largely undocumented, and that connects with the one that was documented in the 19th century. It's amazing, there's a whole world to discover."
Doing so, De Prada-Stamper believes, could help communities plagued by poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence "realise who they are, and move ahead". The People of the Land who pass out outside the bottle stores on the Clanwilliam Main Street on a Saturday, the People of the Land who sit in the local police cells with black eyes and stab wounds after bouts of drinking - they could certainly use a boost to their self-esteem.
De Prada-Samper says that to understand the culture, he has to keep coming to South Africa. "I found the landscape gave so much more meaning to the stories."
Equally, knowing the stories gives so much more meaning to the landscape. Now I involuntarily accelerate as I drive across the bridge just a few metres downstream from the lair of the waterbas.
