Stark, extreme, magnificent, the Kalahari has a humbling effect on most people. You’d have to be a hard nut not to get it.

A spiritual reconnection with the Earth is something that more and more people are realising is an essential ingredient to humanity’s psychological health. In fact the Wilderness Leadership School makes it their business to sensitise people to this reality.

During a recent sacramental visit I became reacquainted with Belinda Kruiper, widow of Vetkat Kruiper, renowned Bushman artist. Immersed in the society of the formerly dispossessed Belinda is trying, in her own way, to demonstrate to her husband’s people a way of reconnecting with the Kalahari on their terms. These people of the Kalahari have long been marginalized from their land and way of life.  However, a recent land claim awarded a large portion of the Kgaligadi Transfrontier Park to the Khomani San and a community-owned and run lodge has been erected and is operational.

Talking with Belinda I learned that the lodge had been a disappointment to some members of the community. For example, air conditioning isn’t high on the community’s priority list, but management insisted that it was essential if they were to break into the highly competitive tourism market. The complex world of 21st Century luxury tourism is something this community is not yet equipped to understand.

Belinda talked about small groups of the Khomani San going onto their land and being in it for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. She spoke of an elderly woman who couldn’t sit on the ground anymore at home, but when she went back to her ancestral lands had no problem sitting with legs out straight in the traditional manner on the Kalahari’s red sand. She spoke of how the previously divided Kruiper family had reunited and how Oom Dawid would go out into the bush and walk and walk and walk. A great sense of healing is starting to evolve out of these simple acts.

Listening to Belinda as she sat on her neatly made outdoors bed (it’s far too hot to sleep inside in December) at her house near the Kgaligadi Transfrontier Park, and hearing her articulate her hopes and aspirations for her community, I couldn’t help but think of the French maxim “il faut reculer pour mieux sauter”. It is necessary to retreat in order to leap better.

If a retreat into the wilderness is what the Khomani San need to better equip themselves for fast, modern life, then so be it. In fact, they are no different to any other people in this regard. We all need that reconnection. The irony is that the Khomani San, formerly despised outcasts, seem to be more aware of it, more conscious of it, than many other so-called sophisticated societies.