By Malena Sánchez Moccero
Translation: Guy Simpson

“The first time I went, I did it because I wanted to get to know the place. When I got there, I couldn’t believe it. At that time, I wasn’t yet an anthropologist, but I anthropologized myself,” Carlos Valiente Noailles says, and chuckles at his neologism. A man who whose clear boyish eyes tell you that he is enjoying his 75 years.
Valiente Noailles exemplifies the observation that one’s vocation can be quite different from one’s career. He found his own by combining two careers: law and anthropology. At 23, he qualified as a lawyer and in 1966, obtained his doctorate in Law and Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. He taught Constitutional Law and won important cases at his legal practice.
In 1969, while man was landing on the moon, Valiente Noailles landed for the first time on African soil. “I had always thought about going to Africa, but I didn’t know the first thing about it. I used to go to Europe every year and in Portugal I became friends with a lot of important people. The Portuguese no longer had colonies, but they maintained relations with the African people,” he related to MYRIADES 1. When Noailles expressed his interest in visiting the African continent, the Portuguese helped make it happen. And so he came to Angola, “a vast country where ragged armies fought wars. I saw things there that I would never have believed existed.”
This first visit was followed by a second, and then a third. Little by little, this prestigious Buenos Aires lawyer was submerging himself in the dark continent. He made several expeditions to Angola, Mozambique, the Sahara, Senegal, Mauritania and different areas of the great desert of the Kalahari in Botswana, which extends over 20,000 square miles.
“The first time I went to Africa I saw in the distance three big termite mounds. When I got closer, I realized that they were home to people quite literally squatting: women sitting on their heels with their children, looking at us with big, round eyes, but unafraid. It was an ova-k-wisi family, in harmony with nature. It made a big impression on me and I thought: ’I’ve got to come back here’, although I knew nothing about anthropology,” he recalls. Carlos had been captivated.
The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris awarded Noailles his doctorate in Social Anthroplogy and Ethnology at the age of 62, in 1994. His thesis dealt with the bushmen of the Kalahari desert. His expeditions there brought him close to these people, talking with them and living with them. His ignorance of their language was never an obstacle. “I was able to express some things and I had an interpreter, as well. We understood each other by facial expressions and gestures; we were very close. Although we didn’t have a language in common, I felt a link.” His blue eyes are lost in the memory.
The people of the Kalahari lived alone in the desert. “They had no contact with the modern world. Transport was difficult because of the lack of paths and tracks. The heaviness of the sand slowed our march; we went along at six miles an hour when there was a way through, and half that if we had togo round bushes.” Carlos sighs nostalgically, because all that was to change. In 2002, the Botswana government expelled the African tribes from their homelands. “They destroyed their culure. They sent the boys to school and let them drink alcohol, far away from the influence of their parents. They drank a lot, raped the women, and began a rhythm of life they hadn’t known in the Kalahari.” Valiente would later write a book about this deportation. He visited them where they had been taken. What we saw was heartrending. “They were desparate; it was a brutal change of life for them and they couldn’t escape their situation.” In the end, he won a court ruling against the government that allowed the bushmen to return home, which they are now doing. “But when they were taken away, they were mistreated and learned bad habits and nothing will be the same again,” he fears.
 
Coming together: the law and the man
Although, for reasons of time and space, he splits his day into mornings of law and afternoons of anthropological investigations, Carlos Valiente Noailles doesn’t stop being a lawyer when he is anthropologist, or anthropologist when he is lawyer. He summarizes in few words how each profession complements the other: “Law provided me with a lot of money, which allows me to devote myself to anthropology. Thanks to the law, I am able to go travelling.” Money apart, he maintains that his legal knowledge gives him ideas for preparing reports, for relating with different people and for anthropology in general. “When the Kalahari tribes told me about their expulsion, and I saw them where they had been deported, I started to study their laws, thanks to the resources I have as a lawyer.”
He admits that the work has been hard going; but that doesn’t stop him from saying that combining the two disciplines has been “the best thing I ever did in my life.” Carlos believes it has made him into another person, because “being with those tribes is a way of getting to know, not only the world, but people generally. Understanding other peoples has helped me to understand what human beings are, and to be more tolerant. Anthropology caused me to see things completely differently, and that has been very good for me.”