A powerful technique for enjoying the present moment
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A powerful technique for enjoying the present moment
Map<br>Aug 10, 2026
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!Gai sitting (1955). Photo by Laurence Marshall. Peabody Museum.1
In 1955, the Marshall family set out into the harsh desert in what is now Botswana. They were there to study the Gwikwe Bushmen hunter-gatherers2, one of the oldest human lineages, who until that time had very limited contact with the world outside the desert. The expedition jolted along for days, and began to wonder if they would find anyone in this apparently empty land, when two Bushmen men appeared at the edge of their camp.<br>Subscribe if you like what you read
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Old Ukwane and the handsome young Gai3 had evaded the expedition, but seeing the trucks so near they thought themselves surrounded and had come to surrender. They had never seen Europeans before and could not properly interpret their body language and facial expressions. They were nervous of these strangers with their pale skin and hulking machines, and of their town-dwelling interpreters. They had heard enough from other bands to know that contact with outsiders usually ended badly. The expedition offered them tobacco and a bucket of water. Gradually their reserve thawed as they talked via the interpreter.<br>Gai and Ukwane eventually brought the strangers to their camp among the high grass. It was empty. Hearing the trucks, the other eight members of the band had all run away and hidden. Gai cupped his hands around his mouth and called for them to come back. The Marshall’s daughter Elizabeth recounts in her excellent book, The Harmless People, what happened next:<br>In a short time we heard a rustle in the veld, and a young woman who seemed to be in her early twenties stepped from the bushes. She was, Ukwane said, Gai’s wife, and on her hip she carried a baby, a naked three-year-old who looked at us from his wide eyes fearlessly, then, realizing that we were strangers, buried his face in his mother’s arm. His mother stroked him calmly and came toward us smiling and nodding her head graciously, although a little pulse was hammering in the V of her throat. We learned later that she had been sitting in the bushes very near us, and when she had seen her husband go by she had assumed that everything was all right and had come to greet us4
This woman was called Tsechwe, and her little son was Nhwakwe. They were soon joined by the others. After some initial hesitation, the Bushmen people proved friendly and welcoming, and the expedition began observing their way of life.<br>Elizabeth became friends with Tsechwe and a sort of aunt to Nhwakwe.<br>[After returning from an outing away from camp] Tsechwe was so glad to see us that she threw her arms around me and held up her baby for me to kiss. She and I were the only young women for miles around, so there was a bond between us. She often gave me her baby to mind—not an easy job because Nhwakwe was as innocent as he was bold, and I had once taken him from under the wheels of a truck that was about to move. I had carried him to the [camp] for safety, but he hadn’t stayed long; in a short time we had seen the grass moving at the edge of camp and Nhwakwe had appeared once more, this time dragging a toy, having walked the long distance all by himself and having navigated purely by a sense of direction, for the thick grass was high above his head.
The Marshall’s son John, then in his early 20s, documented the expedition on film. “Don’t direct, John,” his father Laurence had told him. “Don’t try to be artistic, just film what you see people doing naturally.”5<br>Over the course of the almost two month expedition, John captured reel after reel of film. This eventually became the award-winning documentary Bitter Melons, cataloguing the simple day-to-day life of the band. It features Ukwane singing a lament about the wild desert tsama melons, accompanied by the twang of his hunting bow.<br>Soon after the Marshall expedition left, the world the Bushmen and their ancestors had known for at least 100,000 years began to fall apart. White and Bantu settlers, enabled by modern technology, were pushing deeper and deeper into the Kalahari, taking land for domesticated grazing animals. They commandeered the meager and all-important seasonal water sources that the Bushmen and their game relied upon. They put up fences, drilled bore holes, and killed, captured or forced the Bushmen away into smaller areas and settlement zones. Some Bushmen found work on farms as laborers, but they were often underpaid and abused as little more than slaves.<br>Southern Africa at this time was roiled by civil and revolutionary wars, and several units drafted or enlisted Bushmen as trackers. Thousands of kilometers of fencing was erected through the desert. This denied migration to the great herds whose bones piled by the tens of thousands against the steel wire. As peace, place and meaning were stripped from the Bushmen, so...