Bushmen

The Bushmen (also known as Khwe Khoe, Basarwa, or San) peoples of South Africa and neighbouring Botswana and Namibia, who live in the Kalahari, are part of the Khoisan group and are related to the Khoikhoi. While they have no collective name for themselves in any of their languages, all of which incorporate click consonants, they do identify themselves by group with such names as Ju/’hoansi and !Kung (the punctuation characters representing different clicks). Archeological evidence suggests that they have lived in southern Africa (and probably other areas of Africa) at least 22,000 years, probably longer.

Traditionally the Bushmen culture is hunter-gatherer with the people living in temporary wooden shelters amidst a difficult environment. The Bushmen would use a manual communication system while hunting.

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% of the Ju/'hoansi diet near the village of Dobe, compared to 85% 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.

See John Marshall's film Death By Myth for the struggle of the Ju/'hoansi of Tjum!kui to resist bureaucratic pressure that would see them surrender their new gardens to the tourist industry and enter a sham stoneage lifestyle.

San

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; anthropologist Henry Harpending states that "in the Kalahari, 'San' has all the baggage that the word nigger has in the United States."Language Log: Leave the Bushmen out of it - Sep. 9, 2005 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."Wrong Term for the Kalahari's People", Washington Post, 7 June, 2005

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 Portuguese term for Bushmen). Neither Zambia nor Zimbabwe have official terms, although in the latter case the terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used.Hitchcock, Robert K., and Megan Biesele. "San, Khwe, Basarwa, or Bushmen?: Terminology, Identity, and Empowerment in Southern Africa." Kalahari Peoples Fund. 28 December 2000 In Botswana, the officially used term is Basarwa Botswana Gov. - Basarwa Relocation - Intro, although Basarwa, a Tswana language label, also has negative connotations.

Relocation and government persecution

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. As of October 2005 (Daily Telegraph, London: 29.10.2005), the government has 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 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 Coloured 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 Coloureds.

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.

Society

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.

Traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: 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. Women and men would gather, and men hunted using poison arrows and spears in laborious days-long excursions.

Villages ranged in sturdiness from nightly rainshelters in the warm spring, when people moved constantly in search of budding greens, to formalized rings when they congregated in the dry season around the only permanent waterholes. Early spring, a hot dry period following a cool dry winter, was the hardest season, after autumn nuts were exhausted, villages had concentrated around the waterholes, and most plants were dead or dormant. Meat was most important in the dry months, when wildlife could never range far from receeding waters.

Early history

Bushmen had an advanced early culture evidenced by archaeological data. For example, Bushmen from the Botswana region migrated south to the Waterberg Massif in the era 10,000 to 2000 years ago. They left rock paintings at the Lapala Wilderness area and Goudriver recording their life and times, including characterizations of rhinoceros, elephant and a variety of antelope species (resembling impala, kudu and eland, all present day inhabitants).

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 TV series.

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

John Marshall (see Visual anthropology) 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, shows 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 automonous 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.

In an episode of the Fox animated comedy series Family Guy, one of the children in an adoptive family's home appears to be of Bushman descent.

One of the primary characters in Tad Williams's Otherland series is a bushman named !Xabbu.

In Wilbur Smith's The Burning Shore, the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani, and the bushmen's struggles, history and beliefs are touched upon in great detail. The Burning Shore is a volume in the Courtney's of Africa series.

References

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