Botswana’s vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), covering an area larger than Denmark, is home to the San Bushmen, one of mankind’s most ancient ethnic groups with a history stretching back 35,000 years – rock art in Namibia, painted by their ancestors, dates back some 25,000 years. As Southern Africa’s earliest inhabitants, the San are also the most direct descendants of the late Stone Age.
Traditional San bands consisted of between fifteen and eighty members. Decisions were made communally by all members of the band – women participated equally in the day-to-day life of the group – and there were no chiefs. Their structure was entirely flexible and individuals were free to come and go as they pleased. Relationships between men and women were highly prized and often based on mutual sharing. Bands varied in size – small dispersed groups were more likely to survive if food proved scarce.
San beliefs centre around the concept that everything is part of the same great web of nature and all have an equal right to existence. Humans, as mere parts of the cosmos, have no special claims over the animals and the birds.
The San have never been excessive hunters, choosing to get most of their nutrition, often up to 90%, from plants, nuts, roots and fruit foraged by the women. Hunting is an important social activity as it repeats and underlines the custom of sharing – all the meat is given out to the different members of the band through a complex code of rules. Killing an animal is seen as simultaneously sad, in that a fellow creature had died, and joyous – a spiritual unification had taken place. Wanton killing is totally taboo and will only encourage evil. The San, in keeping with their beliefs, are sensitive to the suffering of other beings and will go out of their way to spare pain. A dung beetle heading for a camp fire will be turned to prevent injury. A scorpion will always be spared unless it is about to sting. No-one, not even Reserve officials, share the San’s extensive knowledge of the animals of Botswana – knowledge which has been passed down from generation to generation
At the centre of San religion are shamans or medicine people. By entering into a trance, which links them to the spiritual world, they are able to heal, to drive away evil spirits and sickness, foretell the future, control the weather, ensure good hunting and generally look after the well-being of the group.
The night-long trance dance is the San means of dealing with evil and opens the necessary corridor of communication with the spirit world. Women, sitting around a central fire, clap the rhythm of the songs. Men move in a circle around the women in a formalised dance named after different species of animal. The sound of the dancing, combined with the chanting of the women, activates a supernatural healing power – known as n/um – which resides both in the songs and in the shamans themselves.
During trance, the shamans would take on the potency of various animals, especially the eland, so that they are able to communicate and plead with the spirits. They would often see spirit animals, attracted by the dance, standing out in the darkness.
The paintings which the San have left us – notably in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills, made famous in Laurens van der Post’s “The Lost World of the Kalahari” – are usually found on flat rock walls of exposed horizontal strata known as cave sandstone because of the way it weathers to form overhangs or rock shelters. These painting sites invariably face somewhere between north and east. The San believe that the good god, a distant being not much concerned with the everyday pranks of us mortals, lives in the east, and that the evil god, a meddlesome trickster with an overly active interest in our affairs, inhabits the west. The red pigment used in painting was obtained from ochre or an iron oxide known as haematite. Various shades are obtained by heating the oxide in a fire. White was made from silica, white clay and gypsum, black from charcoal, soot and minerals such as manganese. The paint was diluted with antelope blood, fat, urine, egg-white, plant-sap and water and was applied with fingers, quills, feathers or very small bones.
It is likely that the artists were the shamans and that the paintings are the images which they had seen during their trances. Shamans often experienced after-images which recurred for months after the original trance experience. Projected onto a rock wall such mental images could have provided the inspiration for their paintings. Such painted sites were – and are – storehouses of power that make further contact with the spiritual world possible.
Over the past 1,500 years, the San Bushmen have faced persecution both by the cattle herding Bantu tribes and white immigrants to the region. Discrimination, eviction from their ancestral lands, murder and oppression have reduced their numbers from several million to just 100,000, mainly based in Botswana and Namibia.
But now this unique way of life and culture could be on the brink of destruction. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve, ceded formally to the San Bushmen by the British in 1961, was created specifically as a safe haven for the San and the animals on which they depend. Valuable diamond deposits were discovered immediately outside the reserve soon after Botswana’s independence in 1966. Intensive exploration for diamonds began inside the Reserve in 1980s.
In 1996, the government of Botswana started to move the San from their homes to the resettlement camps of Kaudwane and New Xade outside the Game Reserve where, it was claimed, education and healthcare facilities could be more easily provided. Boredom, alcoholism and despair are rife in the camps, described by one San occupant as “a place of death”. However, many San went through choice, and this has created more difficulties, as there is now a division between Headman Beslag of New Xade and his supporters, who want to remain in New Xade, and those who want to return to the CKGR.
In 1997, test mining near the Bushmen villages of Gope and Gugama, inside the Reserve, revealed new diamond deposits. Towards the end of that year, officials moved out over 1,000 Bushmen by force. The entire settlement of Xade, which was equipped with a borehole, clinic and primary school, was destroyed. There were many reports of brutal treatment including torture.
The few San Bushmen remaining on their ancestral land were forbidden to hunt unless they possessed a licence allowing each hunter only three large antelope per year. Springbok plus the other game hunted by the San are more than plentiful in the Reserve and the government actively encourages sport hunting by rich tourists elsewhere in the country.
By early 2002, less than 1,000 San Bushmen remained on their land. In February 2002, in an operation overseen by a retired army general, trucks moved in, the San’s water pump was disabled="disabled" and their water tanks emptied. The San had become increasingly dependent on this water supply – the increasing encroachment of cattle ranches on their lands had lowered the water table and curtailed their ability to move over large areas of desert to find a supply. Many of the San inside the Reserve had their own livestock, dependant on the water, which raised questions over whether they should be allowed to keep them in a Game Reserve. The government claimed that they were stopping the water service because it was too expensive, and that no livestock is allowed in any Game Reserve in Botswana. Similarly, if the San were free to hunt in a Game Reserve, then why not members of other tribes?
The position of the San has always been difficult across Southern Africa, as their traditional hunting lands have shrunk and the comforts of modern life have enticed many to towns and cities. This has meant that they are automatically in a disadvantaged position, despite the Botswanan government’s policy of not favouring one ethnic group over another – a policy which has meant that the country has avoided the ethnic strife that has dogged so many other African countries. The Botswanans are stung by outside criticism, saying that they only want what is best for their citizens. Nevertheless, it seems extraordinary that the Botswanan government cannot see the damage that has been caused to their reputation by the relocations.
It would be impossible for all San to return to the life they had less than 100 years ago, given dwindling wildlife numbers and pressures of land ownership, and indeed many would not want to, but one thing is clear – the future of the San, as with many peoples across Africa, is inevitably going to be dictated by how they can somehow engage with the modern world on their own terms. There are schemes run by different organisations that recognise that their enormously rich culture is an attraction in itself, and that this can generate revenue for their communities. These schemes may be the only chance the San Bushmen have of a secure future.