Bushmen

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The San
Bushmen Village, Namibia, 2005
Total population

90,000 +
Regions with significant populations
Botswana (55,000), Namibia (27,000), South Africa (10,000)
Languages
various Khoisan languages
Religion
San Religion
Related ethnic groups
Khoikhoi, Xhosa, Basters, Griqua

The Bushmen, San, Sho, Basarwa, Kung, or Khwe are indigenous people of southern Africa that 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 as a result of government-mandated modernization programs as well as the increased risks of a hunting and gathering lifestyle in the face of technological development.

The Bushmen have provided a wealth of information for the fields of anthropology and genetics, even as their lifestyles change. Genetic evidence suggests the Bushmen's ancestors predate the genetic changes of the rest of the human population — making them a "genetic Adam" according to Spencer Wells, from which all humans can ultimately trace their genetic heritage.[1] But arguably, their Haplogroup A is not the oldest DNA itself, but the oldest divergence from the "genetic Adam"'s DNA. If so, they represent an isolated genetic group, and not a common ancestral group to the rest of humanity.

Contents

[edit] Naming

The terms San, Khwe, Sho, 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 have been used by outsiders to refer to them, often with pejorative connotations. The individual groups identify by names such as Ju/'hoansi and !Kung (the punctuation characters representing different click consonants), and most call themselves by the pejorative "Bushmen" when referring to themselves collectively.[2]

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".[2] Western anthropologists adopted San extensively in the 1970s, where it remains preferred in academic circles. The term Bushmen is widely used, but opinions vary on whether it is appropriate because it is sometimes viewed as pejorative.[3][4]

In South Africa, the term San has become favored in official contexts, and is included in the blazon of the new national coat-of-arms; Bushman is considered derogatory by some groups. Angola does not have an official term for the San, but they are 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.[5] In Botswana, the officially used term is Basarwa,[6] where it is 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.[5]

[edit] Ancestral land conflict with Botswana government

1000- to 2000-year-old San-paintings near Murewa, Zimbabwe.

Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has implemented a relocation policy, aiming to move the Bushmen out of their ancestral land on the Central Kalahari Game Reserve into newly created settlements. Although the government categorically deny that relocation has been forced[7], a recent court ruling confirmed that the removal was unconstitutional and residents were forcibly removed.[8]

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."[9]

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 would not 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 is not one of the tribal groups recognized in the constitution of Botswana. Over the generations, the Bushmen of Southern 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.

[edit] 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 ruled the refusal to allow the Basarwa into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) without a permit, and the refusal to issue special game licenses to allow the Bushmen to hunt was "unlawful and unconstitutional". It also 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. As of 2006, more than 1,000 Bushmen intended to return to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected nature reserves.[8] However, only limited number of Bushmen have been allowed to return to this land. In April 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) criticised Botswana's government for not allowing certain Bushmen to return.

[edit] Hoodia Traditional Knowledge Agreement

The Hoodia gordonii cactus plant used by the San Bushmen was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1998. Without the knowledge of the San, the CSIR patented this plant for its appetite suppressing quality. A license 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.[10]

This benefit-sharing agreement is of great significance as it 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, however, 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).[11] The San have yet to profit from this agreement, as P57 has still not yet been legally developed and marketed.

[edit] Society

Rock paintings from the Western Cape

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 are welcome to travel.

Preparing poison arrows
Starting fire by hand

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 in conversation, joking, 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.[12] Although they did have hereditary chiefs, the chiefs' authority was limited and the bushmen instead made decisions among themselves, by consensus.[13] Women's status was relatively equal[14] Because of their low-fat diet, women typically had late first mensturations and did not begin bearing children until about 18 or 19 years of age.[15] Births were spaced four years apart, due to lack of enough breast milk[16] and requirements of mobility that made feeding and carrying more than one child at a time difficult.

Children were very well behaved and treated kindly by their parents and group.[17] Children spent much of the day playing with each other and are not segregated by sex; neither sex was trained to be submissive or fierce, and neither sex was restrained from expressing the full breadth of emotion.[18]

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. [19]

[edit] Early history

1000- to 2000-year-old San-paintings near Murewa Zimbabwe

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 AD 1,000 Bantu tribes began to expand into bushman occupied areas and pushed the bushmen into more inhospitable areas such as the Kalahari desert.

[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). By the time this movie was made, the ǃKung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the Bushmen hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their abandoned hunting and gathering life.[20] The director of this movie, Jamie Uys, had also directed Lost in the Desert in 1969, in which a small boy, stranded in the desert, encounters a group of wandering Bushmen who help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture.

One of James A. Michener's many works, 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 B.C.E.

John Marshall 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 JuǀʼHoansi 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.[21]

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 Courtneys of Africa series.

The BBC 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, mistakenly describing the Bushmen as a type of "genetic Adam". While the Bushmen's Y-chromosomal DNA haplogroup (type A) is one of the oldest, it is different than the Y-chromosome haplogroup that is the least common denominator for the rest of humanity (type BT). Therefore, the Bushmen likely represents the oldest existing population, but it is one divergent from the rest of humanity and not a sole common ancestor. Genetic markers present on the y chromosome are 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 oldest, most genetically unadulterated, remnant of humankind's ancient ancestors. More recent analysis suggests that the San may have been merely isolated from other original ancestral groups and then rejoined at a later date, re-mixing the human gene pool.[22]

In 2007, author David Gilman published his book The Devil's Breath, a novel partly based on the Bushmen. One of the main characters, a small bushman boy named !Koga, helps the main character Max Gordon to travel across Namibia, using traditional bushman methods to do so.

[edit] Notables

[edit] References in pop culture

"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".

Tad Williams' epic "Otherland" series of novels features !Xabbu, a South African bushman and includes many references to their mythology and culture. He acknowledges that the character is highly fictionalised and apologises for any misrepresentation.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Spencer Wells (2003). The Journey of Man. ISBN 069111532X. Pg. 56-58
  2. ^ a b Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006). The Old Way. Chapter "About Words and Names". ISBN 0374225524.
  3. ^ Sailer, Steve (2002). "Name Game Inuit or Eskimo". http://www.isteve.com/2002_Name_Game_Inuit_or_Eskimo.htm. Retrieved on 2006-11-15. 
  4. ^ "Wrong Term for the Kalahari's People", Washington Post, 7 June, 2005
  5. ^ a b Hitchcock, Robert K., and Megan Biesele. "San, Khwe, Basarwa, or Bushmen? Terminology, Identity, and Empowerment in Southern Africa." Kalahari Peoples Fund. 28 December 2000
  6. ^ Botswana Gov. - Basarwa Relocation - Intro
  7. ^ Government of Botswana Web Site http://www.gov.bw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=59&Itemid=52
  8. ^ a b "Botswana's bushmen get Kalahari lands back". CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/12/13/bushmen.reut/index.html. Retrieved on 2006-12-13. 
  9. ^ Government of Botswana Web Site http://www.gov.bw/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=59&Itemid=52
  10. ^ Wynberg, R. (2004). Rhetoric, realism and benefit-sharing. Journal of World Intellectual Property, 7(6), 851-876. Retrieved September 23, 2008, from Wiley Interscience database.
  11. ^ Tully, S. (2003). The Bonn Guidelines on access to genetic resources and benefit sharing. Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 12(1), 84-98. Retrieved September 23, 2008 from Wiley Interscience database.
  12. ^ Marjorie Shostak, 1983, Nisa: The Life and Words of a ǃKung Woman. New York: Vintage Books. Page 10.
  13. ^ The !Kung Bushmen
  14. ^ Shostak 1983: 13
  15. ^ Shostak 1983: 15
  16. ^ Shostak 1983
  17. ^ Shostak 1983: 49
  18. ^ Shostak 1983: 180
  19. ^ Shostak 1983: 9, 25
  20. ^ N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman. Documentary Educational Resources and Public Broadcasting Associates, 1980.
  21. ^ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006)
  22. ^ "Human line 'nearly split in two'". April 24, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7358868.stm. 
  23. ^ Yániz, Juan Pedro. "Vitrina de la polémica" (in Spanish). ABC.es. http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-06-01-2002/abc/Catalunya/vitrina-de-la-polemica_70155.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-26. 

Tad Williams' epic "Otherland" series of novels features !Xabbu, a South African bushman and includes many references to their mythology and culture. He acknowledges that the character is highly fictionalised and apologises for any misrepresentation.

[edit] References

  • Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006). The Old Way: A Story of the First People.
  • Marjorie Shostak (1983). Nisa: The Life and Words of a ǃKung Woman. New York: Vintage Books.
  • Nancy Howell. (1979). Demography of the Dobe ǃKung. New York: Academic Press.
  • Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (1999). Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the ǃKung San & Their Neighbors. iUniverse.
  • Robert J. Gordon (1999). The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. ISBN 0813335817.

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bushmen
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Bushmen.


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