Bushmen

Bushmen
Bushman woman in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve
Total population	82,000
Regions with significant populations	Botswana (55,000), Namibia (27,000)
Language	Various Khoisan languages
Religion

The Bushmen (also known as Khwe, Basarwa, or San) peoples of South Africa and neighboring Botswana and Namibia, who live in the Kalahari Desert, are part of the Khoisan group and are related to the Khoikhoi. They have a remarkably complex language characterized by the use of click sounds. While they have no collective name for themselves in any of their languages, they identify themselves as a larger group with such names as Ju/’hoansi and !Kung (the punctuation characters representing different clicks). Traditionally the Bushmen culture is hunter-gatherer with the people living in temporary wooden and rock shelters and caves amidst the difficult environment of the Kalahari and beyond in southwest Africa. About half of the modern Bushmen live this way today. They have a rich folklore, are skilled in drawing, and they are famous for beautiful cave paintings left from this early advanced civilization. Archaeological evidence suggests that they have lived in southern Africa (and probably other areas of Africa) at least 22,000 years, probably longer.

San or Bushmen?

The term "San" was historically applied to Bushmen by their ethnic relatives and historic rivals, the Khoikhoi. This term means "outsider" in the Khoikhoi language, and was derogatory. For this reason, some of this group still prefer to be called Bushmen. Opinions, however, vary on whether the term "Bushmen" is appropriate – given that the term is sometimes viewed as pejorative.

Bushmen community at Gope, Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana

In South Africa, the term San has become favored in official contexts. Angola does not have an official term for Bushmen, but they are sometimes referred to as Bushmen, Kwankhala, or Bosquímanos (the PortugalPortuguese term for Bushmen). Neither Zambia nor Zimbabwe have official terms, although in the latter case the terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used. In Botswana, the officially used term is Basarwa , although Basarwa, a Tswana language label, also has negative connotations.

Traditional Life

Bushmen from the Botswana region migrated south to the Waterberg Massif 10,000 to 2,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence indicates that most Bushmen migrated southward from an unknown location to the Kalahari desert areas within this time range. Half the current African population live traditionally, essentially like their ancestors lived. The only concession most Bushmen have made to the modern era is wearing clothes. Much has been learned about the ancient ways from the current Bushmen. They have been nomadic hunters and gatherers of wild food in traditional social units of small hunting bands. They usually possess only what they can carry, transporting water in ostrich-egg shells.

Hunting and gathering

Hunting is exciting and dangerous and Bushmen hunt enthusiastically in their ancient fashion. They are good marksmen and use small bows and tiny, unflighted arrows whose barbs are smeared with poison from the larvae of Chrysomelidae beetles. They use a manual communication system while hunting. They are often out several days at a time, since big game like the kudu or eland may take four or five days to become exhausted and able to be felled. Most prized is the eland, the largest antelope in southern Africa, which is significant not only because of its size but it also because of its fat. This fat is very important to the diet of the Bushmen, and also they believe it has supernatural potency. Because of the excitement, teenagers and young men of the Bushmen generally prefer hunting to drifting off to the nearby towns.

They have many stories and songs about hunting. Young teenagers may play guitar and even form bands playing modern music, but the content of their songs remains about the hunt. When the men return from the hunt, all gather and the women sing and beat various poly-rhythmic patterns while the men dance in celebration of their victories.

Sometimes Bushmen may form larger organizations for special occasions, but these groups are loose and temporary.

The women are usually gathering, often while the men are out hunting, and traditional gathering gear is simple and effective. They use a hide sling, blanket, and cloak called a kaross to carry foodstuffs, firewood, or young children, smaller bags, a digging stick, and perhaps a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby. Empty ostrich egg shells are used to collect and store water following good rains, in anticipation of the hot, dry season.

For those who remain nomadic, villages range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring, when people move constantly in search of budding greens, to formalized rings when they congregate in the dry season around the only permanent waterholes. Early spring, a hot dry period following a cool dry winter, is the hardest season, after autumn nuts are exhausted, villages concentrate around the waterholes, and most plants are dead or dormant. Meat is most important in the dry months, when wildlife can never range far from receding waters.

A current, un-named Bushman tells us

A long, long time ago, we, the Bushmen, roamed these mountains, masters of the unpredictable ways of nature. We were nomads then, moving with the great herds of game and the changing of seasons. When the animals migrated we followed, leaving no houses or roads to mark our presence here. All we left behind was our story painted in the rock, in the shelters, the story of sacred animals and our journeys to the spirit world. These mountains once gave us shelter and the herds of antelope gave sustenance, and meaning to our lives. Especially the eland, for it is the animal of the greatest spiritual power. For us, it is the animal of well being and healing, of beauty and peace and plenty. The eland could take us on journeys to the world beyond and connect us to God."

Paintings

They have left over 20,000 individual rock paintings at over 500 different sites, all preserved in caves. Originally,when Europeans first encountered the rock art of the Bushmen about 350 years ago, they considered it primitive and crude, like the people who made it. They considered them flat perspective, two-dimensional accounts of hunting and fighting and daily life. Twentieth-century scholars developed an appreciation for their aesthetic aspects, with fine detail and exquisite color, but still believed them to be simply portrayals of hunter-gatherer life.

Another dimension to these paintings has emerged. In the Kamberg Nature Reserve of South Africa, a type of Rosetta Stone for the paintings was found and appeared in the Scientific American in 1915. These painting showed how hunters gained power from the animals that they killed. As more paintings were studied in this light, anthropologists decided to interview current Bushmen. It was confirmed that these paintings also represented evocation of a spiritual power. The ancient paintings show someone stretching their arms out in an odd way toward and over a fire, and it resembles current day shamans who paint and draw after entering into a trance. They believe they open portals to the spirit world through these practices, and they can gain power in their lives and in the hunt through these practices.

An unknown Bushman of today tells us, "No more do we bushmen hunt in these hills. The fire is cold. Our songs are quiet. But listen carefully. You will hear us in the water. Look carefully. You will see us in the rock." The ancient paintings often paint hunters and species of animals still existent such as rhinoceros, elephant and a variety of antelope species (resembling impala, kudu and eland).

Social structure

The Bushman kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small, mobile foraging bands. They use the Eskimo kinship system, with the same set of terms as in Western countries, and also employ a name rule and an age rule. The age rule resolves any confusion arising around kinship terms, because the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. According to the name rule, if any two people have the same name, for example an old man and a young man both named /Twi, each family uses the same kin term to refer to them: Young /Twi's mother could call Old /Twi "son," Old /Twi would address young /Twi's sister as his own, Young /Twi would call Old /Twi's wife "wife," and Old /Twi's daughter would be strictly forbidden to Young /Twi as a potential bride. Since relatively few names circulate, and each child is named for a grandparent or other relative, Bushmem are guaranteed an enormous family group with whom they are welcome to travel.

Current situation

Relocation and government persecution

Many Bushmen groups have suffered as formerly open land became game preserves or cattle ranches, restricting their access to wild foods, while governments continued to assume that they gathered most of their diet. In 1965, a fence along the Namibia-Botswana border divided the formerly continuous Kalahari foraging lands. During the 1970s, most of the Ju/'hoansi group abandoned their wandering lifestyle to raise loaned cattle in semi-permanent villages. Foraging currently supplies around 30 percent of the Ju/'hoansi diet near the village of Dobe, compared to 85 percent in 1964, reflecting the increasing untenability of hunting and gathering in the face of population expansion, overgrazing of wild food plants by cattle, and the availability of alternative lifestyles such as gardening with the government's provision of bored wells. Domestic animals, sugar products, garden produce, and mealie-meal are now major foods. Of grave concern are tenuous land control and the destruction of vital water pumps by elephants.

Since the mid-1990s, the central government of Botswana has been trying to move Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, even though the national constitution guarantees the people the right to live there in perpetuity. The Game Reserve was originally created in 1961 to protect the 5,000 Bushmen living there who were being persecuted by farmers and cattle-rearing tribes. The government's position is that it is too costly to provide even such basic services as medical care and schooling, despite the reserve's existing tourism revenues. It has banned hunting with guns in the Reserve and has said that the Bushmen threaten the Reserve's ecology. Others, however, claim that the government's intent is to clear the area—the size of Denmark—for the lucrative tourist trade and for diamond mining. The government resumed its policy of forcing all Bushmen off their lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, using armed police and threats of violence or death. Many of the involuntarily displaced Bushmen have been forced to live in squalid resettlement camps and have resorted to prostitution, while about 250 others remain or have surreptitiously returned to the Kalahari to resume their independent lifestyle.

The group as a whole has little voice in the national political process and is not one of the tribal groups recognized in the constitution of Botswana. Over the generations, the Bushmen of South Africa have continued to be absorbed into the Colored population, particularly the Griqua sub-group, which is an Afrikaans-speaking people of predominantly Khoisan stock that has certain unique cultural markers that set them apart from the rest of the Coloreds.

Around 240 Bushmen have pressed a court case against the government, for the right to return to their lands. The case is ongoing in late 2005 and has not yet been settled.

In Namibia, the primary health threat comes from tuberculosis. In Tsumkwe East, a British aid agency, Health Unlimited, has accomplished what they believe is a world record in treating the Bushmen with "barefoot" doctors in their own villages and getting an 84 percent cure rate. As nomads, they find it impossible to come to a traditional hospital for the required six months of treatment. They seem to live far enough away from towns to still be fairly safe from alcohol and AIDS, but given situations like the forced re-locations in Botswana and the development of prostitution as a life-style, this problem cannot be avoided without political intervention to secure their independence.

In the media

The Bushmen of the Kalahari were first brought to the western world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post, with the famous book The Lost World of the Kalahari, which was also a BBC television series.

The 1980 comedy movie The Gods Must Be Crazy portrayed a Kalahari Bushman tribe's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola bottle).

The anthropologist and filmaker, John Marshall, documented the lives of Bushmen in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over more than a 50 year period. His early film The Hunters, released in 1957, showed a giraffe hunt during the 1950s. N!Ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman, (1980) is the account of a woman who grew up while the Bushmen were living as autonomous hunter-gatherers and was later forced into a dependent life in the government created community at Tsumkwe. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/’hoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000.

External links

• Official Botswana Government Website
• Survival International
• National Geographic
• Bleek and Lloyd Archive of |xam and !kun texts online
• Specimens of Bushmen folklore - tales collected by Bleek and Lloyd
• The Kalahari Peoples Fund

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