Everything about The Bushmen totally explained
The
Bushmen,
San,
Basarwa,
ǃKung or
Khwe are indigenous people of southern Africa which spans most areas of
South Africa,
Zimbabwe,
Lesotho,
Mozambique,
Swaziland,
Botswana,
Namibia and
Angola. They were traditionally
hunter-gatherers, part of the
Khoisan group, and are related to the traditionally pastoral
Khoikhoi. Starting in the 1950s, through the 1990s, they switched to farming.
Genetic evidence suggests they're one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world — a "
genetic Adam" according to
Spencer Wells, from which all humans can ultimately trace their genetic heritage.
Naming
The terms San, Khwe, Bushmen, and Basarwa have all been used to refer to
hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa. Each of these terms has a problematic history, as they've been used by outsiders to refer to them, often with pejorative connotations. The individual groups identify by names such as
Juǀʼhoansi and
ǃKung (the punctuation characters representing different clicks), and most call themselves "Bushmen" when referring to themselves collectively.
The term "San" was historically applied by their ethnic relatives and historic rivals, the
Khoikhoi. This term means "outsider" in the
Nama language and was derogatory because it distinguished the Bushmen from what the Khoikhoi called themselves, namely the First People.
In
South Africa, the term "San" has become favored in official contexts, being included in the blazon of the new national coat-of-arms. In South Africa "Bushman" is considered derogatory by some groups.
Angola doesn't have an official term for Bushmen, but they're sometimes referred to as Bushmen,
Kwankhala, or
Bosquímanos (the
Portuguese term for Bushmen). In
Lesotho they're referred to as
Baroa, which is where the Sesotho name for "South", "Boroa", comes from. 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, where it's partially acceptable to some Bushmen groups, although Basarwa, a
Tswana language label, also has negative connotations. The term is a class 2 noun (as indicated by the "ba-" class marker), while an older class 6 variant, "Masarwa," is now almost universally considered offensive., a recent court ruling confirmed that the removal was unconstitutional and residents were forcibly removed.
The government's official reasons for adopting the policy is:
"Over time it has become clear that many residents of the CKGR already were or wished to become settled agriculturists, raising crops and tending livestock as opposed to hunting-gathering when the reserve was established in 1961.
In fact, hunting-gathering had become obsolete to sustain their living conditions. These agricultural land uses are not compatible with preserving wildlife resources and not sustainable to be practiced in the Game Reserve.
This is the fundamental reason for government to relocate the CKGR residents."
Opponents to the relocation policy claim that the government's intent is to clear the area – an area the size of
Denmark – for the lucrative tourist trade and for
diamond mining. This is strenuously denied on the government's official web site, stating that although exploration had taken place, it concluded that mining activity wouldn't be viable and that the issue was
not related to the relocation policy.
It is further claimed that the group as a whole has little voice in the national political process and isn't 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 African population, particularly the
Griqua sub-group, which is an
Afrikaans-speaking people of predominantly
Khoisan that has certain unique cultural markers that set them apart from the rest of the Africans.
Court decision
On December 13, 2006, the Bushmen won a historic ruling in their long-running court case against the government. By a 2-1 majority, the court said the refusal to allow the Basarwa into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) without a permit was "unlawful and unconstitutional." It also said the state's refusal to issue special game licenses to allow the Bushmen to hunt was "unlawful" and "unconstitutional" and found that the Bushmen were "forcibly and wrongly deprived of their possessions" by the government. However, the court didn't compel the government to provide services such as water to any Bushmen who returned to the reserve. More than one thousand Bushmen intend to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected nature reserves.
Society
The Bushman kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small, mobile foraging bands. Also, the kinship system is comparable to 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. Since relatively few names circulate approximately only 35 names per gender, and each child is named for a grandparent or other relative, Bushmen are guaranteed an enormous family group with whom they're welcome to travel.
Traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: a hide sling, blanket, and cloak called a kaross to carry foodstuffs, firewood, smaller bags, a digging stick, and perhaps a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby. Women would gather, and men hunted using poison arrows and spears in laborious days-long excursions. Children had no duties besides to play, and leisure was very important to the Bushmen. They spent large amounts of time with conversation, joking around, music, and sacred dances.
Villages ranged in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters 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 concentrated around waterholes, and most plants were dead or dormant. Meat was most important in the dry months, when wildlife could never range far from receding waters.
Traditionally the San were an egalitarian society. Although they did have hereditary chiefs, the chief’s authority was limited and the bushmen instead made decisions among themselves, on a consensus basis. Women's status was relatively equal. Women didn't begin bearing children until about 18 or 19 years of age due to late first menstruation because of the low calorie and low fat diet and had them spaced four years apart, due to lack of enough breast milk to feed more than one child at a time, and the requirements of mobility leading to the difficulty of carrying more than one child at a time.
Children were very well behaved and treated kindly by their parents and group. Children spent much of the day playing with each other and are not segregated by sex, neither sex is trained to be submissive or fierce, and neither sex is restrained from expressing the full breadth of emotion that seems inherent in the human spirit" .
The San economy was a
gift economy, based on giving each other gifts on a regular basis rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services .
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 20,000 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).
Around 1,000 CE Bantu tribes began to expand into bushman occupied areas and pushed the bushmen into more inhospitable areas such as the Kalahari desert.
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). In 1969, the director of this movie,
Jamie Uys, had directed
Lost in the Desert, in which a small boy stranded in the desert encounters a group of wandering Bushmen before, and is helped by them and then abandoned due to a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture.
John Marshall documented the lives of Bushmen in the Nyaer Nyaer 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 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 Juǀʼhrtoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a fierce and vocal proponent of the Bushman cause throughout his life, which was, in part, due to strong kinship ties, and had a Bushman wife in his early 20s.
In
Wilbur Smith's
The Burning Shores, 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 Shores is a volume in the
Courtney's of Africa series.
PBS's series
How Art Made the World compares San cave painting 200 years ago to Paleolithic European painting 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities, the San can help us understand the reasons for ancient cave paintings. Lewis Williams believes that their trance states (traveling to the spirit world) are directly related to the reasons people went deep into caves, experienced sensory deprivation, and painted their visions onto the cave walls.
Spencer Wells' 2003 book
The Journey of Man—in connection with
National Geographic's
Genographic Project—discusses a
genetic analysis of the San and asserts their blood contains the oldest
genetic markers found on earth, making the Bushmen humankind's "genetic Adam". These genetic markers are present on the
y chromosome and are therefore passed down through thousands of
generations in a relatively pure form. The documentary continues to trace these markers throughout the world, demonstrating that all of
humankind can be traced back to the
African continent and that the San are the last, most genetically unadulterated, remnant of humankind's ancient
ancestors.
Notables
Further Information
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