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It
was 1967 in Just
Like Camels |
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All
week long, it rained while our teacher lectured us on museum etiquette. We
had to remember to raise our hands to ask questions, to walk in single
file, to talk in library voices. There was to be no pushing or pinching,
and if we needed to ask directions to go to the toilet, we should use
the word cloakroom, not toilet. We should never say toilet in public
places. At
last, the day arrived, and we pushed and pinched and jumped as we waited
for the bus that would take us to the Cape Town Natural History museum
to learn about Bushmen. After a week of having to eat our sandwiches at
our desks because of the rain, we didn’t care where we going - only
that we were finally free. We
already knew quite a lot about Bushmen, like the fact that they lived in
the Inside
the museum, it was quieter than a library and we stood around in silent
clumps on the polished floor, waiting to be told where to go and what to
do. A
lady with peacock feathers painted on her blouse came over and showed us
where to leave our lunchboxes and hats. We followed her up two flights
of stairs, our blue dresses no more than two inches above our knees, our
shoes shiny black, our hair pulled off our faces in tight braids or
pigtails. Nobody pushed or pinched. At
the top of the stairs was a very white, high-ceilinged room, with a big
cage in the middle. Inside were four small brown people - a man, a woman
and two children. “This
is a Bushman family, girls,” the museum lady told us. “Take your
time and look at them carefully. Notice how they dress, the tools they
use, how they live in the desert.” The
Bushmen children were completely naked. The man and the woman were also
naked, except for tiny rags they wore in front of their private parts.
The woman had nothing covering her breasts, which were like small
balloons that had lost almost all their air. Their hair looked like caps
of peppercorns that had been knitted out of wool. There
was sand on the floor of their cage, a small hut made of wood and twigs,
a scattering of ostrich eggs in the sand, and a black pot on a pretend
fire. A giant painting of the sun setting in the The
Bushman mother stirred something in the black pot on the pretend fire,
and the father leaned against a rock, a bow and arrow at his side. It
was hard to tell how old the Bushman girl was, but she must have been
older than me because she was starting to grow breasts. She was sitting
on an antelope skin that was draped over a tree stump, making lines in
the sand with a stick. The
little boy, who was kneeling on the sand, kept banging an ostrich egg on
a rock. He had a nice fat stomach. I wanted them to talk to each other
in their clicks and pops, but they were quiet. Our
teacher took a big camera out of her bag and pointed it at the Bushmen.
We watched as she took their pictures, moving around their cage,
sometimes crouching, sometimes standing in one spot for a long time.
They didn’t even look up. They hardly even blinked. “Can
any of you tell me why their bottoms are so big?” our teacher asked
when she was finished and her camera was back in her bag. Some
girls giggled, a few even laughed out loud. All of us raised our hands.
This was easy – she’d told us the answer just the day before. Their
bottoms were so big because they lived in the desert where they
couldn’t find water for sometimes many days, so when they did, they
had to store water in them, just like camels. I
wondered if the Bushmen family knew we were talking about their bums,
and how they felt, sitting in a cage, being stared at by so many people.
Something about the whole thing felt funny to me, a hot prickly kind of
funny that made me wish we were near the sea so I could run into it and
then shake myself like a dog does when he comes out. I
looked at my teacher, who looked just the same, as usual, with her pale
soft skin and her dark eyes that, on certain days, smiled at you, even
when you didn’t get the right answer. After
we’d finished looking at the Bushmen, we were allowed to go downstairs
for a quick look at the dinosaurs. Each one was as big as three
elephants put together. One dinosaur was grabbing another one by the
neck and taking a big meaty bite out of him. The
mouth of the wounded dinosaur was open in a scream of pain. Blood
dripped and ran and oozed all over both of them. I wished my little
brother could see this. I walked up to our teacher and touched her on
the elbow. “Can
you take a picture of them?” I asked, pointing to the grisly scene.
That way, she could give it to me so I could show it to my brother. She
looked at me for a moment, gave me that little smile of hers, then shook
her head. “We’re
not learning about dinosaurs today, Brigid,” she said. “Only
Bushmen.” |