A Halloween Story, Sort Of

At a party Thursday evening I sat next to a lekgoa like me. (″Lekgoa″ is a Setswana word that might originally have meant ″European,″ but nowadays means anybody who′s white.) He began telling me about his explorations in the hills around our village, and what he′s found there. Caves he says were inhabited by bushmen in prehistoric times, with paintings on the walls. Of course, he said, so many of them have been ruined, desecrated and defaced by vandals, and even though he′s tried to get the authorities to do something to protect the archeological heritage of the area, there′s little interest and less action.

″They′re hunting diamonds,″ he said.

Diamonds? I thought that was a different part of South Africa, Kimberly, away in the Northern Cape province, not around here.

″These are alluvial diamonds,″ he said, ″washed out by the rivers.″ We do live on the edge of a wide valley, obviously formed by a sizable river over the course of many thousands of years, though the river is now shrunk to insignificance.

″These were real gems, big ones,″ he said. ″The bushmen would find them, and collect them, and play with them. Their traditional healers all included a couple of alluvial diamonds in their ′bones,′ the collection of objects they cast to tell fortunes and predict futures.″

″And the healers were always buried with their bones,″ he said.

And now people, greedy people, are looking for those alluvial diamonds. ″They dig up ancient graveyards. They dig out the earth over an area a hundred meters on a side, and who knows what they do with the contents. But they leave holes with skeletons exposed, bones sticking out of the sides of the pit, that they fill in with rubbish.″

I haven′t seen any diamonds, but rubbish, at least, I′m very familiar with. It′s everywhere in South Africa. Everything that will burn casts a haze in the sky, and everything that won′t litters the environment. Bottles, cans, containers, plastic bags, construction debris deface even the most beautiful places. There′s enough trash by the side of any road to fill several pits.

Are the diamond-hunters finding anything? Who knows. But bulldozing ancient graves in search of quick riches is surely bad karma, especially in a country that places such a high value on respect for elders. Whatever the truth of alluvial diamonds, my companion′s story rang true. And on Halloween, I thought about those bones sticking out of the sides of pits. Surely those disturbed graves, filled with rubbish, won′t go unrevenged.