David Robbins
Award-winning author, David Robbins, joins a group of Bushmen on a remarkable expedition in search of their past, and their future.
Namibia’s war of independence was slow and brutal, with Africa’s First People – the Bushmen – caught in the middle. Many were recruited by the South African Defence Force: from hunter-gatherer to 20th-century soldier, these men were used primarily as trackers.
Then, when Namibia won its independence in 1990, these Bushmen soldiers were demobbed. Half took their families south to settle in South Africa, the rest dispersed over northern Namibia or crept across the border into southern Angola. Violently taken from their ancestral homes and separated from families, those living in a tent-town in South Africa stumbled into their future.
Until 2003, when in a remarkable expedition, a few travelled back to Namibia and Angola to seek out the remnants of their families. The Bridge of Goodbye describes this emotionally-charged journey that ends deep in the Angolan bush and, at the same time, explores the processes of acculturation, so severely reinforced by fear and violence, which had been instrumental in destroying the old sureties.
Echoed in the Bushmen’s journey, beneath the troubles of a sub-continent, beneath even the travail of uncontrollable change, there is the shadow of that much longer journey back to a primeval time when our human commonality was being shaped.
David Robbins is also the author of The 29th Parallel and After the Dance. His journalism has been published in leading South African newspapers, as well as South African, British and American journals and he has won South Africa’s most coveted literary award, the CNA prize, as well as numerous awards for his journalism. In 1984, he contributed to the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa.