Page 1 of 4

1

Article 4

Eating Christmas in

the Kalahari

Richard Borshay Lee

The !Kung Bushmen’s knowledge of

Christmas is thirdhand. The London

Missionary Society brought the holiday

to the southern Tswana tribes in the early

nineteenth century. Later, native cate- chists spread the idea far and wide

among the Bantu-speaking pastoralists,

even in the remotest corners of the Kala- hari Desert. The Bushmen’s idea of the

Christmas story, stripped to its essen- tials, is “praise the birth of white man’s

god-chief”; what keeps their interest in

the holiday high is the Tswana-Herero

custom of slaughtering an ox for his

Bushmen neighbors as an annual good- will gesture. Since the 1930’s, part of the

Bushmen’s annual round of activities

has included a December congregation

at the cattle posts for trading, marriage

brokering, and several days of trance- dance feasting at which the local Tswana

headman is host.

As a social anthropologist working

with !Kung Bushmen, I found that the

Christmas ox custom suited my pur- poses. I had come to the Kalahari to

study the hunting and gathering subsis- tence economy of the !Kung, and to ac- complish this it was essential not to

provide them with food, share my own

food, or interfere in any way with their

food-gathering activities. While liberal

handouts of tobacco and medical sup- plies were appreciated, they were

scarcely adequate to erase the glaring

disparity in wealth between the anthro- pologist, who maintained a two-month

inventory of canned goods, and the

Bushmen, who rarely had a day’s supply

of food on hand. My approach, while

paying off in terms of data, left me open

to frequent accusations of stinginess and

hard-heartedness. By their lights, I was a

miser.

The Christmas ox was to be my way

of saying thank you for the cooperation

of the past year; and since it was to be our

last Christmas in the field, I determined

to slaughter the largest, meatiest ox that

money could buy, insuring that the feast

and trance-dance would be a success.

Through December I kept my eyes

open at the wells as the cattle were

brought down for watering. Several ani- mals were offered, but none had quite the

grossness that I had in mind. Then, ten

days before the holiday, a Herero friend

led an ox of astonishing size and mass up

to our camp. It was solid black, stood

five feet high at the shoulder, had a five- foot span of horns, and must have

weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof. Food

consumption calculations are my spe- cialty, and I quickly figured that bones

and viscera aside, there was enough

meat—at least four pounds—for every

man, woman, and child of the 150 Bush- men in the vicinity of /ai/ai who were ex- pected at the feast.

Having found the right animal at last,

I paid the Herero £20 ($56) and asked

him to keep the beast with his herd until

Christmas day. The next morning word

spread among the people that the big

solid black one was the ox chosen by /

ontah (my Bushman name; it means,

roughly, “whitey”) for the Christmas

feast. That afternoon I received the first

delegation. Ben!a, an outspoken sixty- year-old mother of five, came to the

point slowly.

“Where were you planning to eat

Christmas?”

“Right here at /ai/ai,” I replied.

“Alone or with others?”

“I expect to invite all the people to eat

Christmas with me.”

“Eat what?”

“I have purchased Yehave’s black ox,

and I am going to slaughter and cook it.”

“That’s what we were told at the well

but refused to believe it until we heard it

from yourself.”

“Well, it’s the black one,” I replied

expansively, although wondering what

she was driving at.

“Oh, no!” Ben!a groaned, turning to

her group. “They were right.” Turning

back to me she asked, “Do you expect us

to eat that bag of bones?”

“Bag of bones! It’s the biggest ox at /

ai/ai.”

“Big, yes, but old. And thin. Every- body knows there’s no meat on that old

ox. What did you expect us to eat off it,

the horns?”

Everybody chuckled at Ben!a’s one- liner as they walked away, but all I could

manage was a weak grin.

That evening it was the turn of the

young men. They came to sit at our

evening fire. /gaugo, about my age,

spoke to me man-to-man.

“/ontah, you have always been square

with us,” he lied. “What has happened to

change your heart? That sack of guts and

bones of Yehave’s will hardly feed one

Page 2 of 4

Article 4. Eating Christmas in the Kalahari

2

camp, let alone all the Bushmen around

ai/ai.” And he proceeded to enumerate

the seven camps in the /ai/ai vicinity,

family by family. “Perhaps you have for- gotten that we are not few, but many. Or

are you too blind to tell the difference be- tween a proper cow and an old wreck?

That ox is thin to the point of death.”

“Look, you guys,” I retorted, “that is

a beautiful animal, and I”m sure you will

eat it with pleasure at Christmas.”

“Of course we will eat it; it’s food.

But it won’t fill us up to the point where

we will have enough strength to dance.

We will eat and go home to bed with

stomachs rumbling.”

That night as we turned in, I asked my

wife, Nancy: “What did you think of the

black ox?”

“It looked enormous to me. Why?”

“Well, about eight different people

have told me I got gypped; that the ox is

nothing but bones.”

“What’s the angle?” Nancy asked.

“Did they have a better one to sell?”

“No, they just said that it was going to

be a grim Christmas because there won’t

be enough meat to go around. Maybe I’ll

get an independent judge to look at the

beast in the morning.”

Bright and early, Halingisi, a Tswana

cattle owner, appeared at our camp. But

before I could ask him to give me his

opinion on Yehave’s black ox, he gave

me the eye signal that indicated a confi- dential chat. We left the camp and sat

down.

“/ontah, I’m surprised at you: you’ve

lived here for three years and still ha- ven’t learned anything about cattle.”

“But what else can a person do but

choose the biggest, strongest animal one

can find?” I retorted.

“Look, just because an animal is big

doesn’t mean that it has plenty of meat

on it. The black one was a beauty when it

was younger, but now it is thin to the

point of death.”

“Well I’ve already bought it. What

can I do at this stage?”

“Bought it already? I thought you

were just considering it. Well, you’ll

have to kill it and serve it, I suppose. But

don’t expect much of a dance to follow.”

My spirits dropped rapidly. I could

believe that Ben!a and /gaugo just might

be putting me on about the black ox, but

Halingisi seemed to be an impartial

critic. I went around that day feeling as

though I had bought a lemon of a used

car.

In the afternoon it was Tomazo’s turn.

Tomazo is a fine hunter, a top trance per- former... and one of my most reliable in- formants. He approached the subject of

the Christmas cow as part of my continu- ing Bushman education.

“My friend, the way it is with us

Bushmen,” he began, “is that we love

meat. And even more than that, we love

fat. When we hunt we always search for

the fat ones, the ones dripping with lay- ers of white fat: fat that turns into a clear,

thick oil in the cooking pot, fat that slides

down your gullet, fills your stomach and

gives you a roaring diarrhea,” he rhapso- dized.

“So, feeling as we do,” he continued,

“it gives us pain to be served such a

scrawny thing as Yehave’s black ox. It is

big, yes, and no doubt its giant bones are

good for soup, but fat is what we really

crave and so we will eat Christmas this

year with a heavy heart.”

The prospect of a gloomy Christmas

now had me worried, so I asked Tomazo

what I could do about it.

“Look for a fat one, a young one...

smaller, but fat. Fat enough to make us /

/gom (‘evacuate the bowels’), then we

will be happy.”

My suspicions were aroused when

Tomazo said that he happened to know

of a young, fat, barren cow that the

owner was willing to part with. Was

Tomazo working on commission, I won- dered? But I dispelled this unworthy

thought when we approached the Herero

owner of the cow in question and found

that he had decided not to sell.

The scrawny wreck of a Christmas ox

now became the talk of the /ai/ai water

hole and was the first news told to the

outlying groups as they began to come in

from the bush for the feast. What finally

convinced me that real trouble might be

brewing was the visit from u!au, an old

conservative with a reputation for fierce- ness. His nickname meant spear and re- ferred to an incident thirty years ago in

which he had speared a man to death. He

had an intense manner; fixing me with

his eyes, he said in clipped tones:

“I have only just heard about the

black ox today, or else I would have

come here earlier. /ontah, do you hon- estly think you can serve meat like that to

people and avoid a fight?” He paused,

letting the implications sink in. “I don’t

mean fight you, /ontah; you are a white

man. I mean a fight between Bushmen.

There are many fierce ones here, and

with such a small quantity of meat to dis- tribute, how can you give everybody a

fair share? Someone is sure to accuse an- other of taking too much or hogging all

the choice pieces. Then you will see

what happens when some go hungry

while others eat.”

The possibility of at least a serious ar- gument struck me as all too real. I had

witnessed the tension that surrounds the

distribution of meat from a kudu or

gemsbok kill, and had documented many

arguments that sprang up from a real or

imagined slight in meat distribution. The

owners of a kill may spend up to two

hours arranging and rearranging the piles

of meat under the gaze of a circle of re- cipients before handing them out. And I

also knew that the Christmas feast at /ai/

ai would be bringing together groups that

had feuded in the past.

Convinced now of the gravity of the

situation, I went in earnest to search for a

second cow; but all my inquiries failed to

turn one up.

The Christmas feast was evidently

going to be a disaster, and the incessant

complaints about the meagerness of the

ox had already taken the fun out of it for

me. Moreover, I was getting bored with

the wisecracks, and after losing my tem- per a few times, I resolved to serve the

beast anyway. If the meat fell short, the

hell with it. In the Bushmen idiom, I an- nounced to all who would listen:

“I am a poor man and blind. If I have

chosen one that is too old and too thin,

we will eat it anyway and see if there is

enough meat there to quiet the rumbling

of our stomachs.”

On hearing this speech, Ben!a offered

me a rare word of comfort. “It’s thin,”

she said philosophically, “but the bones

will make a good soup.”

At dawn Christmas morning, instinct

told me to turn over the butchering and

cooking to a friend and take off with

Nancy to spend Christmas alone in the