Betta And The Blue Bus

Betta Steyn and her son left behind the “comfort and money” of Gauteng for a baby-blue bus 17 years ago in order to learn from the Kalahari Bushmen how “dangerous but intensely good” the quiet life can be.

- Johan Van Zyl

'Listen to me, young man. This desert hides nothing. It’s beautiful. Red dunes. Wide and open and stripped and honest. Especially honest – this isn’t a bugger that licks anyone’s arse, it’s not a two-faced jackal… The Kalahari doesn’t behave the way people do.”

She stretches out in the last rays lingering on Koo Pan, 15km north of Askham. Christened Francoise Alexandra Steyn, aka Betta, aka Antie Bettagoed, aka Vet Bet (although she’s lost “several kilo grammes and even more centimetres” since her conversion to the Banting gospel in December 2015), aka Sandmeid – that’s how the late ≠Khomani Bushman leader Dawid Kruiper “cursed me so beautifully”, she says.

She takes a couple of sips of lukewarm water from her two-litre Coke bottle before continuing: “Here you’re at the mercy of the elements. I swear, around January, February, it gets to 50ºC – that’s when you stay indoors between 10:00 and 15:00 and keep your mouth shut. Or otherwise I visit my folks on their farm outside Winterton in KwaZulu-Natal. That’s a whole different world. There I can swim as much as I like and the mornings are so peaceful… I can lie awake for hours just listening to the birds. But here! Here you open your eyes and can’t wait to jump out of bed – you know exactly what the day will bring. And when there’s only the slightest suggestion of a cloud, that’s when every Bushman dons his winter coat.”

FRANCOISE AND THE LAND OF SAND met in 1999. “The lonely ex Mrs Von Lengeling” was an unemployed, divorced single mother to Siemon (then 4) when she drove into the Kalahari with some artist friends and decided on Day One she was there to stay.