Bushmen

I have just read three books about Bushmen (or, as anthropologists tend to call them, the San people), the inhabitants - possibly even the original inhabitants - of large swathes of southern Africa, now almost entirely restricted to parts of Namibia, South Africa and Botswana.  The three books are very different, and their differences help me understand the issues they deal with - and also stress how little we know about some things on which we have been pronouncing with certainty for 200 years.  They are Laurens van der Post's 1958 classic, The Lost World of the Kalahari; Sandy Gall's The Bushmen of Southern Africa; and an academic work by R J Gordon, called The Bushman Myth (1992).  I enjoyed the van der Post for its writing, its enthusiasm, and its pioneering joy.  And Sandy Gall's book, though very derivative, is concerned, humane, and reasonably balanced.  But the Gordon, though no doubt excellent in every way, is sometimes dense to the point of unreadability - why do some academics persist in writing as if putting people off, making the plain idea impenetrable, was a badge of honour?

The van der Post is the most famous, the first of his extensive writings on the Bushmen, and justly iconic. It's finely written, in a style which is now a bit dated, but not aggressively so, and it's full of warmth and sympathy for the Bushmen.  Sadly, it's also credulous and mystical, which I personally find off-putting: the objectively true tales of these people are staggering enough - managing to live off water hidden deep in the desert and sucked to the surface through grass stems, hunts in which they run down antelopes such as the mighty eland, their most revered prey - without stories of cameras jamming at the Tsodilo Hills because the spirits were angry.   But he succeeded in inspiring a whole host of other people to care about the Bushman's terrible plight, and occasionally something - never enough - has been done.

Both Gall and Gordon describe that plight forcefully, but Gall, though purely a personal reminiscence and secondary account of history, is readable and straightforward, whereas the Gordon is jolly hard going.  Both describe the way in which the Bushmen were pushed away from the Cape by Dutch and then British settlers, and then effectively hunted and enslaved by Germans in Namibia and Boers in South Africa; nor was the violence white on black, as the Bushmen have been victimised by the Zulu in the past and the Tswana in more modern times.  They have been regarded as animals - less than animals, because the settlers often had a semi-religious regard for game animals - and as thieves and worthless layabouts.  Efforts to help have often been obstructed by governments - even the highly regarded Botswana government has an extremely poor record - and have sometimes been misplaced (turn hunters into settlers) or foolishly idealistic.  But there have been brave men and women prepared to fight for them, and in some areas, there are signs of modest progress.  For example, the South African government has given them land rights (an example which the other two countries have yet to follow, I understand), and murder and rape are no longer regarded as trivial because they involve Bushmen as victims, an attitude which persisted in some areas well into modern times.

They are a noble people, the indigenous inhabitants of much of sub-Saharan Africa (some of their languages have close relatives in East Africa), and they live in and on the desert.  They have gods, arts and the dance, and they seem to have loose knit social structures which are effective at cooperation but which do not rely on a chief.  They are brave and effective hunters, but until they were forced off their lands by the Dutch settlers, no military history.

The pictures on this post are of the eland, one of the largest animals dwelling in the desert, and the remarkable rock paintings of Tsodilo, isolated hills in the far west of Botswana near the Namibian border.