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BUSHMEN
The Bushmen (also known as Basarwa in Tswana, or San in Nama) are an indigenous population of the Kalahari Desert, which spans South Africa and neighbouring Botswana and Namibia. They are traditionally a hunter-gather peoples, part of the Khoisan group, and are related to the traditionally pastoral Khoikhoi. 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 has been composed of hunter-gatherers with the people living in temporary wooden shelters amidst the harsh environment of the Khalahari. The Bushmen use a manual communication system while hunting.
Many Bushmen groups suffered when 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 semipermanent 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 into hunter-gatherer territories, overgrazing of wild food plants by cattle, and the availability of alternative lifestyles such as gardening with additional governmental provision such as 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.[citation needed]
[edit] Bushmen and other names for the peoples
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).
The term "San" was historically applied to Bushmen 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 real people." Western anthropologists adopted the word extensively in the 1970s, where it remains preferred in academic circles, although "Bushmen," once politically incorrect, is generally more acceptable in modern English usage today.[1] It is also used by many, but not all Bushmen groups, to refer to themselves in interacting with those outside of their culture. Opinions, however, vary on whether the term "Bushmen" is appropriate – given that the term is sometimes viewed as pejorative.[2]
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 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.[3] In Botswana, the officially used term is Basarwa [4], where it is partially acceptable to some Bushmen groups, although Basarwa, a Tswana language label, also has negative connotations. The term used to be used in the plural, "Masarwa," but this is now almost universally considered offensive. [1]
[edit] 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 Bushmen 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 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, the government has resumed its policy of forcing all Bushmen off their lands in the Game Reserve, using armed police and threats of violence or death.[5] Many of the involuntarily displaced Bushmen live in squalid resettlement camps and some 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.
On December 13, 2006 the Bushmen won an 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 did not compel the government to provide services such as water to any Bushmen who returned to the reserve.
More than 1,000 Bushmen intend to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected nature reserves.[6]
[edit] 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, Bushmen 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. Buffalo were able to knock down their shelters and kill numbers of Bushmen. 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 receding waters.
[edit] 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).
[edit] 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 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.
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.
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.
The 2003 PBS documentary "Journey of Man" discusses a genetic analysis of the San, and asserts their blood contains the oldest genetic markers found on earth. 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.
[edit] Famous Bushmen
[edit] References
- ^ Sailer, S (2002). Name Game Inuit or Eskimo. Retrieved on 2006-11-15.
- ^ "Wrong Term for the Kalahari's People", Washington Post, 7 June, 2005
- ^ Hitchcock, Robert K., and Megan Biesele. "San, Khwe, Basarwa, or Bushmen?: Terminology, Identity, and Empowerment in Southern Africa." Kalahari Peoples Fund. 28 December 2000
- ^ Botswana Gov. - Basarwa Relocation - Intro
- ^ Bushmen forced out of desert after living off land for thousands of years. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved on 2005-10-29.
- ^ Botswana's bushmen get Kalahari lands back. CNN. Retrieved on 2006-12-13.
[edit] External links
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