San people

"Bushmen" redirects here. For other uses, see Bushman.

San people

San children, Namibia.
Total population
(90,000)
Regions with significant populations
Botswana (55,000), Namibia (27,000), South Africa (10,000), Angola (<5,000), Zimbabwe (1,200)
Languages
all languages of the Khoe, Kx'a, and Tuu language families
Religion
San religion
Related ethnic groups
Khoikhoi, Xhosa, Basters, Griqua

The San people (or Saan), also known as Bushmen or Basarwa, are members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer people of Southern Africa, whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. There is a significant linguistic difference between the northern people living between the Okavango River in Botswana and Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, extending up into southern Angola; the central people of most of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the southern people in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo River, who are the last remnant of the previously extensive indigenous San of South Africa.

The ancestors of the hunter-gatherer San people are considered to have been the first inhabitants of what is now Botswana. The historical presence of the San in Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. In this area, stone tools and rock art paintings date back thousands of years. The San were traditionally semi-nomadic, moving seasonally within certain defined areas based on the availability of resources such as water, game animals, and edible plants. As of 2010, the San population in Botswana numbers about 50,000 to 60,000.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, the San switched to farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs. Despite the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropology and genetics. One broad study of African genetic diversity completed in 2009 found that the San were among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity among the 121 distinct African populations sampled. The San are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population clusters". That is, "groups of populations with common genetic ancestry, who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the properties of their languages".

Despite some positive aspects of government development programs reported by members of the San and Bakgalagadi communities in Botswana, many have spoken of a consistent sense of exclusion from government decision-making processes, and many San and Bakgalagadi have alleged experiencing ethnic discrimination on the part of the government. The United States Department of State described ongoing discrimination against San, or Basarwa, people in Botswana in 2013 as a "principal human rights concern".

Ethnic nomenclature

See also: Exonym and endonym

The indigenous hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa prefer to be identified by the names of their individual nations, for example the:

• ǃKung,
• ǀXam,
• ǂKhomani,
• Nusan (Nǀu),
• Khwe (Khoi, Kxoe),
• Naro,
• Haiǁom,
• Tsoa,
• Auen,
• Juǀ'hoan,
• Kua and,
• Gǀu and Gǁana.

Various terms—including San, Bushmen and Basarwa—have been used to refer to them collectively. Each of these terms has a problematic history, as they have been used by others to refer to them, often with pejorative connotations. In the 1970s, many Western anthropologists adopted the term San (or Saan) to refer to the people collectively, although some later switched back to the term Bushmen. Historically San was a derogatory term meaning "foragers" (saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiǁom dialect), applied to them by pastoralist Khoikhoi rivals. The term became associated with people without cattle or people who stole cattle, and is still an ethnic slur in the central Kalahari. The term Bushmen is still widely used by others and to self-identify; however, opinions vary on whether it is appropriate as it is sometimes viewed as pejorative.

The consensus of delegates representing the people at various meetings held in the 1990s was in favour of using the term San to refer to them collectively, as it was considered the most neutral term. These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organised by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993, the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia, and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organised by the University of the Western Cape. According to anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee, the term San was in general use by the people themselves by the late 1990s. Representatives of the people from WIMSA and the South African San Institute attending the 2003 Africa Human Genome Initiative conference held in Stellenbosch reiterated that they prefer to be described by either their individual group names or the collective term San.

There are regional variations in acceptable nomenclature:

• The term most commonly used for them in Botswana is Basarwa (Mosarwa in singular form), where it is accepted reluctantly. Being a Tswana word meaning "those who do not rear cattle", it also has negative connotations. The term is in a noun class representing people who are accepted (as indicated by the mo/ba- class marker), while an older variant Masarwa is considered offensive now.
• In 1996 the different San language groups of Namibia met and agreed to allow the term San to be used externally to refer to them collectively, and the term has been used in Namibia since then.
• There are no official terms for them in Angola, Zambia or in Zimbabwe. In Angola they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas, or bosquímanos (the Portuguese term for Bushmen). The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe.
• The term San has become favoured in South Africa, and is used in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. The South African San Council representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001. The people are also referred to as Twa by Xhosa people and Baroa by Sotho people. Bushman is considered derogatory by many South Africans, regardless of their race. A 2008 Equality Court ruling nevertheless found that the use of the Afrikaans equivalent boesman by Die Burger newspaper did not amount to hate speech in the context used.

Society

Further information: San healing practices and San rock art

Drinking water from the bi bulb plant

Starting a fire by hand

Preparing poison arrows

San man.

The San kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small mobile foraging bands. San kinship is comparable to Eskimo kinship, with the same set of terms as in European cultures, but also uses a name rule and an age rule. The age rule resolves any confusion arising from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. Relatively few names circulate (approximately 35 names per sex), and each child is named after a grandparent or another relative.

Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is very important to San of all ages. Large amounts of time are spent in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances. Women have a high status in San society, are greatly respected, and may be leaders of their own family groups. They make important family and group decisions and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. Women are mainly involved in the gathering of food, but may also take part in hunting.

The most important thing in San life is water. Droughts may last many months and waterholes may dry up. When this happens, they use sip wells. To get water this way, a San scrapes a deep hole where the sand is damp. Into this hole is inserted a long hollow grass stem. An empty ostrich egg is used to collect the water. Water is sucked into the straw from the sand, into the mouth, and then travels down another straw into the ostrich egg.

Traditionally, the San were an egalitarian society. Although they had hereditary chiefs, their authority was limited. The San made decisions among themselves by consensus, with women treated as relative equals. San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services.

Subsistence

Villages range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring (when people move constantly in search of budding greens), to formalised rings, wherein people congregate in the dry season around permanent waterholes. Early spring is the hardest season: a hot dry period following the cool, dry winter. Most plants still are dead or dormant, and supplies of autumn nuts are exhausted. Meat is particularly important in the dry months when wildlife can not range far from the receding waters.

Women gather fruit, berries, tubers, bush onions, and other plant materials for the band's consumption. Ostrich eggs are gathered, and the empty shells are used as water containers. Insects provide perhaps 10% of animal proteins consumed, most often during the dry season. Depending on location, the San consume 18 to 104 species, including grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites.

Women's traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: a hide sling, a blanket, a 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.

Men hunt in long, laborious tracking excursions. They kill their game using arrows and spears tipped in diamphotoxin, a slow-acting arrow poison produced by beetle larvae of the genus Diamphidia.

Early history

Wandering hunters (Basarwa Bushmen), North Kalahari desert, c. 1892.

A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 44,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012.

Historical evidence shows that certain San communities have always lived in the desert regions of the Kalahari; however, eventually nearly all other San communities in southern Africa were forced into this region. The Kalahari San remained in poverty where their richer neighbours denied them rights to the land. Before long, in both Botswana and Namibia, they found their territory drastically reduced.

Genetics

Various Y chromosome studies show that the San carry some of the most divergent (oldest) human Y-chromosome haplogroups. These haplogroups are specific sub-groups of haplogroups A and B, the two earliest branches on the human Y-chromosome tree.

Mitochondrial DNA studies also provide evidence that the San carry high frequencies of the earliest haplogroup branches in the human mitochondrial DNA tree. This DNA is inherited only from one's mother. The most divergent (oldest) mitochondrial haplogroup, L0d, has been identified at its highest frequencies in the southern African San groups.

In a study published in March 2011, Brenna Henn and colleagues found that the ǂKhomani San, as well as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, were the most genetically diverse of any living humans studied. This high degree of genetic diversity hints at the origin of anatomically modern humans.

Recent analysis suggests that the San may have been isolated from other original ancestral groups for as much as 100,000 years and later rejoined, re-integrating the human gene pool.

Ancestral land conflict in Botswana

Much tribal land in Botswana, including land occupied by the San people (or Basarwa), was lost during colonization, and the pattern of loss of land and access to natural resources continued after Botswana's independence. The San have been particularly affected over time by encroachment on the part of majority tribes and non-indigenous farmers onto lands traditionally used by the San. Government policies beginning in the 1970s transferred a significant area of traditionally San land to White settlers and majority agro-pastoralist tribes. Much of the government's policy regarding land tended to favor the dominant Tswana tribe over the minority San and Bakgalagadi peoples. James Anaya, as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people for the United Nations, describes loss of land as a major contributor to many of the problems facing Botswana's indigenous people, citing the San's eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) as an especial example.

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) was established in 1961 to protect wildlife populations and provide the San an area to continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Over time, the lifestyles of the San and Bakgalagadi residents of the CKGR changed as wells were drilled and a school and health post were established there, which encouraged an agro-pastoralist lifestyle and led to the keeping of some livestock within the reserve. The government determined that the lifestyles of communities within the CKGR were no longer consistent with the aims of the reserve and that providing services within the reserve was too costly to continue. The government therefore decided to relocate all of those living within the CKGR to settlements outside the reserve.

While the government maintains that the relocations were voluntary, Anaya describes the consultation process as "inadequate" and notes "serious concerns" about whether consent to relocate was freely given. In particular, harassment of residents, dismantling of infrastructure, and bans on hunting appear to have been used to induce residents to leave the reserve. A countrywide ban on hunting, announced in January 2014, "effectively ends thousands of years of San culture", according to The Guardian. The government's hunting ban does not apply to private game ranches catering to tourists. In 2002, the government ceased all services to residents of the CKGR, and capped the borehole that had provided water to inhabitants of the reserve.

Since the mid-1990s, the central government of Botswana has implemented a relocation policy aimed at moving the San out of XamKhomani Heartland, their ancestral land on and near the CKGR into newly created settlements such as New Xade. The government's official reason for adopting the policy states:

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.

Anaya writes that while some former residents of the CKGR chose not return to the reserve due to a lack of services, including water, those living in the reserve have stated a desire to be able to hunt and gather, since these activities are an important part of their culture. A sense of a deep personal connection to the land in the reserve was evident among both those San living in the CKGR as well as those San and Bakgalagadi who had been resettled outside the CKGR. These latter groups expressed a desire to return to the reserve despite the challenges of living there. Jumanda Gakelebone, a spokesman for the San in Botswana, told The Guardian:

We have survived for millennia in one of the world's driest areas but they treat us as stupid. We are hunter-gatherers yet we get arrested. We cannot damage the wildlife. If we kill one animal we eat it for a month. We are not allowed to hunt but others can.

The human-rights group Survival International quotes Gakelebone as saying:

We are still hunter-gatherers. We want to be recognized as hunter-gatherers. If you say don’t hunt, it means don’t eat. If you are going to ban hunting, you have to consult us. You’re going to turn us into poachers. But hunting for us has never been about poaching. We hunt for food.

The government has explicitly denied that any of the relocation was forced. The government's website states:

Government's policy has at all times been based upon the consent of those concerned, at no time has government contemplated the use of force.

A 2006 ruling by the High Court of Botswana confirmed, however, that residents had been forcibly and unconstitutionally removed. The court held in Roy Sesana and Others v. The Attorney General that the San plaintiffs were, "forcibly or wrongly and without their consent", deprived of possession of land that they lawfully occupied. The judgement noted conflicting and confusing statements and actions by the government. According to Anaya, the case "highlights the failure of the government to adequately consult with indigenous peoples in significant decisions affecting them and to respect their rights to traditional lands and resources".

Opponents of 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 diamond mining. Government representatives have stated that allowing even small communities to live within the game reserve is incompatible with the reserve's aims of wildlife conservation. Anaya, however, writes that the government's position on this issue appears to conflict with its decision to permit diamond mining by Gem Diamonds within the reserve. The mining operation is planned to last several decades and could involve an influx of 500 to 1200 workers into the reserve, according to the mining company. The government's official web site states that although exploration had taken place, it concluded that diamond mining would not be viable and that the relocation policy had nothing to do with mining. However, in 2014 the Ghaghoo mine, operated by Gem Diamonds, began extracting ore in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. As stated by the news division of the Rapaport Diamond Report, a diamond-industry pricing guide, "Ghaghoo's launch was not without controversy [...] given its location on the ancestral land of the Bushmen". Survival International director Stephen Corry said that with the mine's opening:

Botswana’s commitment to conservation is window dressing. The government falsely claims that the Bushmen’s presence in the reserve is incompatible with wildlife conservation, while allowing a diamond mine and fracking (hydraulic fracturing) exploration to go ahead on their land.

In 2005, John Simpson of BBC News described the people of New Xade as suffering from drunkenness and sexually transmitted diseases, saying, "When the Botswana government takes foreign guests to New Xade on fact-finding trips, it shows them the showcase schools and clinics which have been built for the Bushmen. The VIP buses take a detour in order to miss the shebeens [bars]." Simpson said he suspected the relocations were partly motivated by plans for diamond mining.

In a 2005 embassy communication released in 2011, United States Ambassador to Botswana Joseph Huggins condemned the forced evictions, saying: "While it is probably the case that two-three years on since the move, the greatest trauma is past, it is also clear that people have been dumped in economically absolutely unviable situations without forethought, and without follow-up support. The lack of imagination displayed on the part of the GOB [Government of Botswana] is breathtaking. The GOB views New Xade as similar to many sites of rural poverty, deserving no special treatment. But the special tragedy of New Xade's dependent population is that it could have been avoided."

2006 High Court decision

On 13 December 2006, the San won a historic ruling in their long-running court case against the government. According to the San's lawyer Gordon Bennett, "Nobody thought the Bushmen had any rights" before their court victory. "Nobody even cared."

By a 2–1 majority, the court ruled the refusal to allow the Basarwa into the CKGR without a permit, and the refusal to issue special game licences to allow the San to hunt, was "unlawful and unconstitutional". It also found that the San were "forcibly and wrongly deprived of their possessions" by the government. Two of the three justices referred to the relative powerlessness of the San, partly as a result of discrimination, that had resulted in low literacy and little to no political or economic clout relative to majority tribes. The justices concluded that even voluntary decisions to relocate on the part of the San were not based on informed consent, in light of evidence that the government had not adequately informed the San about compensation or their right to return to the reserve after relocation. The court did not compel the government to provide services, such as water, to any San who returned to the reserve. As of 2006, more than 1,000 San intended to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected nature reserves.

The government interpreted the ruling narrowly, however, and only limited numbers of San have been allowed to return to this land. The government further required the children and other relatives of the original applicants in the case to obtain permits in order to return to their ancestral land. In April 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) criticised Botswana's government for not allowing certain San to return, as well as for denying Bushmen the right to hunt in the reserve, despite their having used the land for hunting for thousands of years.

High Court appeal

A number of San brought a new legal action to reopen the water borehole in the reserve, which was capped in 2002. In 2011 the Court of Appeals awarded the Basarwa (San) the right to reopen or drill new boreholes to gain access to water for domestic use. Prior to the ruling, the government banned the Basarwa from accessing wells, which prevented them from returning home to the CKGR. Following the ruling, the government granted the appropriate permits for workers and machinery to enter the CKGR to drill boreholes. Barrister Gordon Bennett represented the San in court as the judges declared the Botswana government guilty of ‘degrading treatment’ and described the case as ‘a harrowing story of human suffering and despair’. Furthermore, the Government was ordered to pay the costs of the San's appeal. As of 2013, however, the government was still blocking San people's access to water in the CKGR. According to a case study published in June 2012 by Minority Rights Group International, Gope mine owner Gem Diamonds was to work with CKGR residents in order that they would benefit from the mine: the company was to drill four new boreholes, hire residents, and establish a community trust, but only one waterhole had been drilled by year's end.

2012–2013 conflict

In May 2012 the Basarwa appealed to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, asking the United Nations to force the government to recognize their land and resource rights. The forum approved a set of nine draft recommendations addressing the impact of land seizures and government disenfranchisement of indigenous people. Government relocations continued during the year in the western settlement of Ranyane. In May 2013, the High Court ruled the government must stop the relocation of families from the Ranyane settlement. NGOs reported that the government relocated several families from Ranyane after the High Court ruling and alleged that government officials installed themselves in Ranyane in order to conduct a campaign to induce residents to move from their village, in part by blocking access to the settlement’s only water supply.

Survival International reported that some San in Ranyane were slated to be evicted from their ancestral land in order to create a wildlife corridor, known as the Western Kgalagadi Conservation Corridor. Botswana government representative Jeff Ramsay denied any forced eviction plans. A Survival International campaigner said, "I don’t know how the government can say [...] that they are not planning to evict them when the Ranyane Bushmen are taking the government to court to stop from being removed." A new case was filed on behalf of the residents. In response to a complaint filed on behalf of residents, the court issued a restraining order in June 2013 prohibiting the government from relocating residents from Ranyane and from blocking access to the water pipe, entering any household without occupants’ permission, and removing residents without first notifying the community’s lawyers.

In August 2013 attorneys for the Basarwa people filed a High Court case in which the original complainants from the 2006 CKGR case appealed to government for unrestricted access to the CKGR for their children and relatives (i.e. without permits). The case was dismissed for technical reasons, with permission given by the court to refile with a new application. In a move criticized by civil society and local media, the government added the Basarwa applicants’ lawyer, a United Kingdom citizen affiliated with Survival International, to a list of individuals who must apply for visas to enter the country. While the government denied allegations that it planned to bar the lawyer from the country, it did not grant his visa in time for him to participate in the August High Court hearing. The lawyer, Gordon Bennett, said, "The right to a fair trial normally includes the right to be represented by counsel of your choice. Not in Botswana, apparently – or at least not if you sue the Government." A Botswana government Facebook post stated that the Department of Immigration had turned down Bennett's request for a visa, describing it as "submitted on short notice[.]" A follow-up Facebook post said that the Minister of Labour and Home Affairs, the Honourable Edwin Batshu, defended this move as being "in the interest of national security." The trial began on 29 July.

Hoodia traditional knowledge agreement

Hoodia gordonii, used by the San, was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1998, for its presumed appetite suppressing quality. A licence was granted to Phytopharm, for development of the active ingredient in the Hoodia plant, p57 (glycoside), to be used as a pharmaceutical drug for dieting. Once this patent was brought to the attention of the San, a benefit-sharing agreement was reached between them and the CSIR in 2003. This would award royalties to the San for the benefits of their indigenous knowledge. During the case, the San people were represented and assisted by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the South African San Council and the South African San Institute.

This benefit-sharing agreement is one of the first to give royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge used for drug sales. The terms of the agreement are contentious, because of their apparent lack of adherence to the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing, as outlined in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The San have yet to profit from this agreement, as P57 has still not yet been legally developed and marketed.

Representation in mass media

Rock paintings in the Cederberg, Western Cape.

San paintings near Murewa, Zimbabwe.

San paintings near Murewa, Zimbabwe.

Early representations

The San of the Kalahari were first brought to the globalized world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post. In 1955, Van der Post was commissioned by the BBC to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the San. The filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television documentary a year later. Driven by a lifelong fascination with this "vanished tribe", Van der Post published a 1958 book about this expedition, entitled The Lost World of the Kalahari. It was to be his most famous book. In 1961, he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative which he admits in the introduction uses two previous works of stories and mythology as "a sort of Stone Age Bible", namely Specimens of Bushman Folklore' (1911), collected by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend. Van der Post's work is largely discredited, as it is the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 1960s. His opinions branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even "mystical ecologists".

Documentaries and non-fiction

John Marshall, the son of Harvard anthropologist Lorna Marshall, documented the lives of San in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over a more than 50-year period. His early film The Hunters, released in 1957, shows a giraffe hunt. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a vocal proponent of the San cause throughout his life. His sister Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote several books and numerous articles about the San, based in part on her experiences living with these people when their culture was still intact. The Harmless People, published in 1959 (revised in 1989), and The Old Way: A Story of the First People, published in 2006, are the two primary works. John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer documented the lives of the !Kung San people between the 1950s and 1978 in Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman. This film, the account of a woman who grew up while the San lived as autonomous hunter-gatherers, but who later was forced into a dependent life in the government-created community at Tsumkwe, shows how the lives of the !Kung people, who lived for millennia as hunter gatherers, were forever changed when they were forced onto a reservation too small to support them.

South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number of documentaries on San culture, history and present situation; these include In God's Places/Iindawo ZikaThixo (1995) on the San cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of a Bushman (2002) on the murder of San tracker Optel Rooi by South African police; The Will To Survive (2009), which covers the history and situation of San communities in southern Africa today; and My Land is My Dignity (2009) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Coca-Cola sponsored a documentary on San hunting entitled, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000), directed by Craig and Damon Foster. This was reveiewed by Lawrence Van Gelder for the New York Times, who said that the film "constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem"

Spencer Wells's 2003 book The Journey of Man—in connection with National Geographic's Genographic Project—discusses a genetic analysis of the San and asserts their genetic markers were the first ones to split from those of the ancestors of the bulk of other Homo sapiens sapiens. The PBS documentary based on the book follows these markers throughout the world, demonstrating that all of humankind can be traced back to the African continent (see Recent African origin of modern humans, the so-called "out of Africa" hypothesis).

The BBC's The Life of Mammals (2003) series includes video footage of an indigenous San of the Kalahari desert undertaking a persistence hunt of a kudu through harsh desert conditions. It provides an illustration of how early man may have pursued and captured prey with minimal weaponry.

The BBC series How Art Made the World (2005) compares San cave paintings from 200 years ago to Paleolithic European paintings that are 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities, the San works may illustrate the reasons for ancient cave paintings. The presenter Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams, whose PhD was entitled "Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings". Lewis-Williams draws parallels with prehistoric art around the world, linking in shamanic ritual and trance states.

Films and music

A 1969 film, Lost in the Desert, features a small boy, stranded in the desert, who encounters a group of wandering San. They help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture. The film was directed by Jamie Uys, who returned to the San a decade later with The Gods Must Be Crazy, which proved to be an international hit. This comedy portrays a Kalahari San tribe's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola bottle). By the time this movie was made, the ǃKung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the San hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their almost abandoned hunting and gathering life.

"Eh Hee" by Dave Matthews Band was written as an evocation of the music and culture of the San. In a story told to the Radio City audience (an edited version of which appears on the DVD version of Live at Radio City), Matthews recalls hearing the music of the San and, upon asking his guide what the words to their songs were, being told that "there are no words to these songs, because these songs, we've been singing since before people had words". He goes on to describe the song as his "homage to meeting... the most advanced people on the planet".

Memoirs

In Peter Godwin's biography When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, he mentions his time spent with the San for an assignment. His title comes from the San's belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun.

Novels

Laurens van der Post's two novels, A Story Like The Wind (1972) and its sequel, A Far-Off Place (1974), are about a white boy encountering a wandering San and his wife, and how the San's life and survival skills save the white teenagers' lives in a journey across the desert.

James A. Michener's The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fiction centered on South Africa. The first section of the book concerns a San tribe's journey set roughly in 13,000 BCE.

In Wilbur Smith's novel The Burning Shore (an installment in the Courtneys of Africa book series), the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani; Smith describes the San's struggles, history, and beliefs in great detail.

Tad Williams's epic Otherland series of novels features a South African San named ǃXabbu, whom Williams confesses to be highly fictionalised, and not necessarily an accurate representation. In the novel, Williams invokes aspects of San mythology and culture.

In 2007, David Gilman published The Devil's Breath. One of the main characters, a small San boy named ǃKoga, uses traditional methods to help the character Max Gordon travel across Namibia.

Alexander McCall Smith has written a series of episodic novels set in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana. The protagonist of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, a Motswana woman, adopts two San children, sister and brother Motholeli and Puso.

Notable individuals

• N!xau ǂToma
• Roy Sesana
• Royal /Ui/o/oo
• Dawid Kruiper
• Saartjie Baartman

See also

• First People of the Kalahari
• San religion
• Kalahari Debate
• Negro of Banyoles

Bibliography

• Shostak, Marjorie (1983). Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-7139-1486-6. 

Further reading

• Gordon, Robert J. (1999). The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. ISBN 0-8133-3581-7. 
• Howell, Nancy (1979). Demography of the Dobe ǃKung. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-357350-5. 
• Lee, Richard; Irven DeVore (1999). Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the ǃKung San & Their Neighbors. iUniverse. ISBN 0-674-49980-8. 
• Solomon, Anne (1997). "The myth of ritual origins? Ethnography, mythology and interpretation of San rock art". The Antiquity of Man. South African Archaeological Bulletin. Retrieved 12 January 2014. 
• Minkel, J. R. (1 December 2006). "Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of Religion". Scientific American. Retrieved 12 January 2014. 
• Choi, Charles (21 September 2012). "African Hunter-Gatherers Are Offshoots of Earliest Human Split". LiveScience. Retrieved 12 January 2014. 
• San Spirituality: Roots, Expression,(2004) and Social Consequences, J. David Lewis-Williams, David G. Pearce, ISBN 978-0759104327
• Barnard, Alan. (1992): Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521411882.

External links

• The site of the Khoisan Speakers
• !Khwa ttu – San Education and Culture Centre
• Kuru Family of Organisations
• South African San Institute
• Bradshaw Foundation – The San Bushmen of South Africa
• Cultural Survival – Botswana
• Cultural Survival – Namibia
• International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs – Africa
• Kalahari Peoples Fund
• Survival International – Bushmen
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