The Bushman [San] of the Kalahari

by Sandy Gall

From: The Ecologist Sept. 2003

On the sideboard in my dining room in Kent [England] there is a small bowl of very fine, reddish sand from the southern-most tip of the Kalahari Desert and a large, gleaming white ostrich egg with a hole drilled in the top. The two objects, so far removed from their place of origin, conjure up for me and my daughter ...vivid if nostalgic memories of the Kalahari and the Bushmen who still live in it. But they symbolise much more: they speak of an ancient civilisation that existed and flourished for thousands of years under the great dome of the African sky.

The Kalahari "sandface", as the Bushmen call it, stretches across seven countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Zambia in the north, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia in the centre,and South Africa in the south. Unlike the Sahara and Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter, it is partly covered with thick bush and trees and criss-crossed by underground rivers that support a wide variety of plant and animal life--including the ostrich. To the bushmen the ostrich is a legendary bird--it first gave fire to man--and also the butt of many stories and jokes. They prize it as a source of protein and for its tough eggshells. The latter have both artistic and practical applications; they are used in the manufacture of jewelry and as containers to store water under the sand against times of drought.

So for the Bushmen, far from being a hostile environment, the sands of the Kalahari are a life-giving force. One day early in 1998, sitting in the shade of a big acacia tree in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve community of Molapo, I listened to elder Mathambo Sesana describing how profoundly attached he and the rest of his people were to their ancestral land--a land from which the Botswana government was trying to evict them. "We all want to stay," he began. Then, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it trickle through his fingers, he said:"We are made the same as the sand. So this is our land, because we were born here. " Two and a half years later he was dead from a suspected heart attack after a violent raid on the village by Botswana wildlife officials and police (of which more later).

Another villager, Ganema--the sprightly middle-aged wife of the local shaman or medicine man, told me she and her family were also determined to stay despite government threats. "They say they will drop a bomb on us if we don't move...[They say] 'This is not your land, you stole this land. You are finishing the game, you have stolen the land and killed the game.' But I was born here, my mother suckled me here, so I will not move. I want to die here."

As my daughter and I traveled through the Kalahari reserve (created by the British in 1961 as a permanent home for the Bushmen 'to allow them the right of choice of the life they wish to follow') we repeatedly heard both men and women say they could not leave 'because the graves of our ancestors are here'. This was of paramount importance because the Bushmen used sand from their family graves for healing, rain-making and even, one woman said, to put on their crops if they were doing badly.

The Bushmen's affinity with the natural world, and above all with the animals they hunted, was most strikingly expressed in two ways: through their rock art and the trance dance. The paintings and engravings go back thousands of years and are found all over the southern half of Africa--from Zimbabwe and even farther north in Tanzania to the Cape. Throughout this vast area you can find caves and overhangs decorated with still extraordinarily vivid pictures of animals, hunters, and mysterious half-human half-animal hybrids. The latter are shamans: the medicine men-priests who may well have been the artists as well, and who achieved potency as healers through the trance dance--the most important of all Bushman rituals.

One of the most famous rock paintings is the Laurens van der Post panel at Tsodilo, a huge repository of Bushman art in north-western Botswana. There, high up on a rock face, gazing out across the Kalahari, is the image of a magnificent red eland bull, 'painted,' wrote van der Post in The Lost World of the Kalahari, 'only as a Bushman who had a deep identification with the eland could have painted him'. Below, and facing the other way stands a female giraffe, motionless as if alarmed by some predator. The rock face bears the images of several other animals and two still vivid and fresh blood-red handprints--the signature, van der Post presumed, of the unknown artist.

My first visit to Tsodilo made a deep impression on me. I discovered that a vibrant Bushman culture, producing a wealth of art, existed there a least 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and that the Bushmen (or their ancestors) had lived there more than 30,000 years ago. This, of course, was not a civilisation of great public buildings and conquering armies, but a society of hunter-gatherers [foragers] who had learned to survive and even flourish in daily osmosis with the natural world--even in the harsh confines of the Kalahari. Based on the extended family, it was perhaps the first democratic society on earth--with no kings, chiefs or even headmen. Each man considered himself as good as the next. All decisions were taken by consensus and only after discussion among all the adults in the family group--both men and women.

To survive as a hunter-gatherer (we were all hunter-gatherers once) you have to be pragmatic and flexible. Bushmen are sometimes incorrectly described as nomads. Nomads [pastoralists] have flocks and herds and travel long distances in a predictable pattern of seasonal migration. Bushmen, who have no flocks or herds and only a minimum of personal possessions, travel much shorter distances in pursuit of food and water and always in their own territory. Each territory, known as 'nyore' in Nharo (one of the many Bushman click languages) was jealously and often fiercely guarded because it contained the resources on which the Bushmen depended for survival: water, game and the wild plants of the Kalahari.

The Bushman know and use more than 100 plants, many of which are highly nutritious. But sadly their vast knowledge of the natural world, which is now proving so valuable to modern medicine, is rapidly being lost as they are forced by a ruthless and indeed racist Botswana government out of their ancestral territories like the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and into resettlement camps that the Bushmen call 'places of death'.

Years of threats and intimidation culminated in August 2000 in a raid by half a dozen wildlife officials and tribal policemen on Molapo. Thirteen Bushmen were arrested for alleged poaching, taken to a camp in the bush and held without food or water for three days. There, according to a Survival International report that was based on an on-the-spot investigation by one of the indigenous peoples' pressure group's senior staff, the detainees were kicked and beaten until they 'confessed' that they had killed giraffe and eland. One victim called Kebatseisa Thekiso said that he was 'tied to the bush bars of [a] vehicle and beaten all over the body ... with fists and kicked', and that he was told 'if you don't say you killed a giraffe you will die'.

Then at the beginning of February 2002 the Botswana government cut off the water supply to the six communities in the Kalahari reserve--even emptying half-full water tanks into the sand, and evicted the remaining inhabitants. Hunting, the lifeblood of Bushman life, had already been banned. Now, if Bushmen want to revisit their old homes in their ancestral territory they have to obtain a permit. In the two drab resettlement villages of New Xade and Kauduane, on the fringes of the reserve, there is no hunting and, because there is no plant food, no gathering--only government handouts, unemployment, alcoholism, and despair.

Despite all these obstacles and restrictions, about 120 Bushmen have slipped back into the reserve; they are determined to cling to their old way of life. To defy a government that has shown (at Molapo, for example) that is is more than willing to use storm-trooper tactics takes courage. But to survive the lack of water takes determination and resourcefulness. The Bushmen who have stayed on or gone back will have to re-learn to exist in the traditional way--by using the old sip wells (from which water was sucked up from deep in the sand through a hollow reed), or by storing ostrich eggshells full of water under the sand.

Shamefully, consecutive British governments (including the present one), the EU, ...anthropologists (with some honourable exceptions) and (perhaps more understandably given the internal pressure) Botswanan human rights' organisations have all turned their backs on the Bushmen.

Since Bushmen are the most studied human social group on earth, it is particularly odd that the anthropological world has either kept silent or, like the young South African anthropologist James Suzman (who has close connections with the diamond giant De Beers), argued against bestowing ancestral land rights on indigenous peoples. One outstanding exception is the US anthropologist professor Susan Kent, who has pointed out that it is only very recently that the Botswana government has started to stop the Bushmen hunting and gathering 'with an aggressive programme of assimilation to the Botswana agro-pastoralist way of life. Only now, under an involuntary resettlement scheme, has the extinction of the [Bushman] culture become imminent'.

Another notable exception is the British academic and member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Dr. Mark Leven, who says that the Botswana government could face charges of genocide at the International Criminal Court. Survival International, the only human rights' organisation apart from Botswana's First People of the Kalahari that is prepared to fight for the Bushmen's cause, says that many Bushmen fear that the loss of their land will lead to their extinction.

One Bushman, living in the New Xade resettlement camp told Survival:'My children have been taken off their land. Our culture, which I wanted to teach them, is just about to die. My children are like an unknown nation. Nobody knows where they are from. They are lost. They are like dead people. We are all--me, my children and my people--in prison. It's genocide. It's like a big hole has been dug and all the Gana and the Gwi [Bushmen] have been tipped inside and buried.'

Recently, the Botswana president Festus Mogae (who has twice visited Britain in the past two years as a guest of the government to promote Botswanan diamonds as 'clean') was picketed in Oxford by Survival protesters. Asked by a student if the Bushmen would be allowed to return to their ancestral territory in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, he replied: 'No, it is only for animals.' In a formal statement issued to counter the Survival campaign, Mogae claimed that the resettlement programme had been carried out 'in the most sensitive and constructive manner possible.' Tell that to the Bushmen who were tortured at Molapo.

In my book, The Bushmen of Southern Africa: Slaughter of the Innocent, I ask whether the Botswanan government's campaign to remove the Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is genocide 'by stealth'. It is genocide, alright, but not by stealth. It is open, unashamed and contemptuous of world opinion. [In fact, a better word might be ethnocide.]

NOTE: In late 2006, the Botswana High Court ruled that the San had been illegally removed from their land by the Botswanan government. However, the San have still been unable to return. For more information, see Controversy Stalks Gem Diamonds Botswana Project , and Diamonds and Distorted Development in Botswana.