Heart of Dryness

How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought

In his wide-ranging and entertaining new book, James G. Workman follows the spread of dryness across continents and through time to outline a grim common destiny of climate change and permanent water scarcity.

“We don’t govern water,” he writes. “Water governs us,” and the lack of it will tear us apart if we fail to learn from survivors of millennia in dry lands: people like the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert Game Reserve in Botswana, a small nation sandwiched between South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

Workman, a San Franciscan, isn’t a disinterested observer. A journalist and water adviser to a number of international agencies and African governments, he found it hard to maintain a reporter’s distance from the Kalahari Bushmen’s often-heroic resistance to the Botswana government’s effort to drive them from their remaining homes and traditional ways.

The government strategy was simple: cut off water supplies to force the last remaining traditional bands out of the desert and into settlements – more like reservations – just outside the Kalahari game reserve. No longer independent, no longer tied to the land, the Bushmen would survive on government handouts.

But a small band of Bushmen, led by the wise matriarch Qoroxloo, refused to leave their ancestral home, and Workman tells the moving and sometimes deadly story of their resistance in a parched landscape. Facing an implacable foe, Botswanan President Festus Mogae, the Bushmen had to contend not only with the desert, but also with a vicious belief that their “primitive” way of life doesn’t belong in a modernizing nation. To us, those challenges would be insurmountable. To the Bushmen, tenacity comes with the territory. It’s not heroism; they are just living each day as always.

SF Chronicle