And then one day, I asked myself: Why do the ǃKung, a member of the San people, live in the desert? Why would, when I thought more deeply on the question, anyone live in the desert in the first place? Yes, as all cultural anthropologists will eagerly tell/teach you, the ǃKung developed very clever ways to survive on very little water and very uninteresting vegetable matter—but why go through all that trouble? Sam Kinison actually made a solid point when he famously said: "You live in a fucking desert! Nothing grows out here!"
Surely, it rightly should be seen as nothing but folly for a group of people (the !Kung) to stick to the desert when only a week's walk will transport them to a place, modern Zimbabwe, that's green, that has lots of fruit trees, interesting vegetables, rivers, waterfalls, lakes, and the like. But even in this country, which was once the breadbasket of Africa, something odd also happened with the human geography.
As I explained in my piece on eating bones, my grandmother lived on and among rocks in the cold and often cloud-covered hills of Manicaland. What on earth were she and others doing up there? Were we a poetical people? Did we love the loftiness of clouds so much that the bad ground didn't matter? We wanted to be like angels rather than live down in the valley where the soil was good for growing things humans liked to eat? You could barely raise goats in these rocky hills where death by lightning is common to this day. What was Monica (my grandmother's name), and so many like her, doing in the useless clouds?
The answer: As her people (Bantus) displaced the group of San people into the desert, her people (indeed, her mother's generation) had been displaced into the harsh hills by Europeans. (There are no pre-tourism Bantus or Europeans in the Kalahari.) The economic system the Bantus brought from the north: pastoralism; the economic system the Europeans later brought from the south (by way of Cape Town): capitalism. Geography is natural, but the human relationship with geography is almost always political.
What I was able to see (as it was compressed) within the tight circle of my own family (parents, grandparents, great-grandparents) was not just enormous cultural and economic changes (ones that occurred over the much wider space of 500 years in Europe—from the commons to primitive accumulation to consumerist society), but also a variety of displacements: blacks displacing brown people; white people displacing black people; and even, when you consider the rapid expansion of the Zulu war machine in the 19th century (the unbeatable soldiers of Mzilikazi), blacks displacing blacks.
My great-grandmother, I'm told, saw the first white face ever. My father's great-grandmother used to flee to caves in the hills when the Zulu war machine raided the rich villages in the valley. By the time my father was 40, he was taking his family to Niagara Falls for a vacation, and my mother had rollers in her hair. We were thoroughly Westernized consumers. But we still ate the bones of yesterday. What that kind of historical compression made apparent to me is that there wasn't a damn thing natural about capitalism or racism. These things, these temporal folds, were cultural, flexible, and impermanent.
