The San made decisions among themselves by consensus,[41] with women treated as relative equals in decision making. Today, the small group that remains has adopted many strategies for political, economic and social survival. Many became farm labourers and some joined Black farming communities, and intermarried with them, which added to the destruction of the social identity of the San people. In South Africa, for example, the !Khomani now have most of their land rights recognised, but many other San tribes have no land rights at all. Laurens van der Post's two novels, A Story Like The Wind (1972) and its sequel, A Far Off Place (1974), made into a 1993 film, are about a white boy encountering a wandering San and his wife, and how the San's life and survival skills save the white teenagers' lives in a journey across the desert. Of prime importance in all San groups is a ritual dance that serves to heal the group.
The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001. Learn more about the fascinatingSan people and theirhunting skills, wealth of indigenous knowledge and rich cultural traditions. In 1955, he was commissioned by the BBC to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the San. Contrary to popular belief, these paintings and engravings of strange human figures and animals, especially the Eland (a species of antelope), did not depict every day life but had a deeper religious and symbolic meaning. Not related to the BaNtu tribes, the San are descendants of Early Stone Age ancestors. Hunting is a team effort and the man whose arrow killed the animal has the right to distribute the meat to the tribe members and visitors who, after hearing about the kill, would arrive soon afterwards to share in the feast. Early spring is the hardest season: a hot dry period following the cool, dry winter. Next Question. "Eh Hee" by Dave Matthews Band was written as an evocation of the music and culture of the San. Until recently, most amateur and professional anthropologists looked at a rock painting of the San and believed that they could decipher it without any problems. These haplogroups are specific sub-groups of haplogroups A and B, the two earliest branches on the human Y-chromosome tree. for insect use in medicine, poison for arrows etc. Tad Williams's epic Otherland series of novels features a South African San named Xabbu, whom Williams confesses to be highly fictionalised, and not necessarily an accurate representation. This would award royalties to the San for the benefits of their indigenous knowledge. Most of the paintings have an underlying spiritual theme and are believed to have been representations of religious ceremonies and rituals. He goes on to describe the song as his "homage to meeting the most advanced people on the planet". Kinship bonds provide the basic framework for political models. Brian Morris (2005). A court case is currently in existence to help the San claim their land. For other uses, see, Members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer people of Southern Africa, Lee, Richard B. and Daly, Richard Heywood (1999), Statement by delegates of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and the South African San Institute attending the 2003 Africa Human Genome Initiative conference held in.
[32] [40] Although they had hereditary chiefs, their authority was limited. The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen,[1] are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho[2] and South Africa. [37], Despite some positive aspects of government development programs reported by members of San and Bakgalagadi communities in Botswana, many have spoken of a consistent sense of exclusion from government decision-making processes, and many San and Bakgalagadi have alleged experiencing ethnic discrimination on the part of the government. For large game, such as Giraffe it could take as long as 3 days. When the San fought against the BaNtu, they were at a huge disadvantage not only in numbers but also in lack of weapons. Disputes are resolved through lengthy discussions where all involved have a chance to make their thoughts heard until some agreement is reached. Enslavement and sometimes mass destruction of San communities, by both White and Black farmers, followed. The San make use of over 100 edible species of plant. John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer documented the lives of the Kung San people between the 1950s and 1978 in Nai, the Story of a Kung Woman. Their selection of food ranges from antelope, Zebra, porcupine, wild hare, Lion, Giraffe, fish, insects, tortoise, flying ants, snakes (venomous and non-venomous), Hyena, eggs and wild honey. San kinship is similar to Eskimo kinship, which uses the same set of terms as in European cultures, but adds a name rule and an age rule for determining what terms to use. Once caught, the Eland is skinned and the fat from the animal's throat and collarbone is made into a broth. He created many things, and appears in numerous myths where he can be foolish or wise, tiresome or helpful. Most plants still are dead or dormant, and supplies of autumn nuts are exhausted. James A. Michener's The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fiction centered on South Africa. The artists started including representations of cattle and sheep as well as of people with shields and spears, in their paintings. In the trance dance, the Eland is considered the most potent of all animals, and the shamans aspire to possess Eland potency. "San" originates as a pejorative Khoekhoe appellation for foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiom dialect. These pastoralists, called Khoikhoi or 'Hottentot' resembled the San in many ways and lived by gathering wild plants and domesticating animals. The men then first danced around the women in a clockwise direction and then vice versa. The Bantu term Batwa refers to any foraging tribesmen and as such overlaps with the terminology used for the "Pygmoid" Southern Twa of South-Central Africa. The Europeans owned horses and firearms. Before long, in both Botswana and Namibia, they found their territory drastically reduced. These trance dances are depicted in the rock art left behind by the San. The San also dug pitfalls near the larger rivers where the game came to drink. In the girls' puberty rituals, a young girl is isolated in her hut at her first menstruation. Alexander McCall Smith has written a series of episodic novels set in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The Kalahari San remained in poverty where their richer neighbours denied them rights to the land. People had not yet acquired manners and culture and only after the second creation, were they separated from the animals and educated in a separate social code. The age rule resolves any confusion arising from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. They help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture. The San feature in several of the novels by Michael Stanley (the nom de plume of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip), particularly in Death of the Mantis. Land is usually owned by a group, and rights to land are usually inherited bilaterally. An empty ostrich egg is used to collect the water. The San interpreted this as a proud and respected reference to their brave fight for freedom from domination and colonization. The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term.
The San of the Kalahari were first brought to the globalized world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post. At a later stage, the girl is anointed with Eland fat. These migratory people do not domesticate animals or cultivate crops, even though their knowledge of both flora and fauna is vast.
The poison is highly toxic and is greatly feared by the San themselves; the arrow points are therefore reversed so that the poison is safely contained within the reed collar. This term was given to the San during their long battle against the colonists. Certain individuals may assume leadership in specific spheres in which they excel, such as hunting or healing rituals, but they cannot achieve positions of general influence or power. While the men hunt, the women, who are experts in foraging for edible mushrooms, bulbs, berries and melons, gather food for the family. Loss of land and access to natural resources continued after Botswana's independence. "The old Dutch also did not know that their so-called Hottentots formed only one branch of a wide-spread race, of which the other branch divided into ever so many tribes, differing from each other totally in language [] While the so-called Hottentots called themselves Khoikhoi (men of men, "Schapera is the author of the convenient term Khoisan, compounded of the Hottentot's name for themselves (Khoi) and their name for the Bushmen (San). By the time this movie was made, the Kung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the San hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their almost abandoned hunting and gathering life.[71]. Birth, death, gender, rain and weather were all believed to have supernatural significance, for example, people acquired good or bad rain-bringing abilities at birth and this ability was reactivated when the person died. Kruger National Park - South African Safari. The Saneat anything available, both animal and vegetable. Some groups also revere the moon. "Bushmen" redirects here. They also often experienced spontaneous nosebleeds at this time. [34]:89 The United States Department of State described ongoing discrimination against San, or Basarwa, people in Botswana in 2013 as the "principal human rights concern" of that country. For larger antelope, this could be 7 to 12 hours. Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is very important to San of all ages. [26][27][28] [18] [7][13][14][15], Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors later switched back to using the name Bushmen. The film was directed by Jamie Uys, who returned to the San a decade later with The Gods Must Be Crazy, which proved to be an international hit. [49], Various Y chromosome studies show that the San carry some of the most divergent (oldest) human Y-chromosome haplogroups. Ostrich eggs are gathered, and the empty shells are used as water containers. San people have vast oral traditions, and many of their tales include stories about the gods that serve to educate listeners about what is considered moral San behaviour. In this period, the number of San was greatly reduced. Few modern San are able to continue as hunter-gatherers, and most live at the very bottom of the social scale, in unacceptable conditions of poverty, leading to alcoholism, violence, prostitution, disease and despair. They may also make important family and group decisions and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. According to San tradition, they were welcome to share the meal and would, in the future, have to respond in the same way. Among some San, it is believed that working the soil is contrary to the world order established by the god. Their skills even enable them to distinguish between the "spoor" of a wounded animal and that of the rest of the herd. [10], The designations "Bushmen" and "San" are both exonyms in origin, but San had been widely adopted as an endonym by the late 1990s. The presenter Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams,[69] whose PhD was entitled "Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings". The compound Khoisan, used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi and the foraging San collectively, was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera in 1930, and anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan,[17] [47], A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BC was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012. The filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television documentary a year later. The first section of the book concerns a San community's journey set roughly in 13,000 BC. 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". It was to be his most famous book. [19] These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organised by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993,[8] the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia,[20] and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organised by the University of the Western Cape. [3], The term "Sann" has a long vowel and is spelled Sn (in Khoekhoegowab orthography). San men have a formidable reputation as trackers and hunters. Government policies from the 1970s transferred a significant area of traditionally San land to majority agro-pastoralist tribes and white settlers [34]:15 Much of the government's policy regarding land tended to favor the dominant Tswana peoples over the minority San and Bakgalagadi. [50][53][54][55], In a study published in March 2011, Brenna Henn and colleagues found that the Khomani San, as well as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, were the most genetically diverse of any living humans studied. [34]:18, Hoodia gordonii, used by the San, was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1998, for its presumed appetite suppressing quality. At about the beginning of the Christian era a group of people who owned small livestock (sheep and perhaps goats) moved into the northern and western parts of South Africa and migrated southward. Coincidently in the eastern parts of the country another migration was occurring - the BaNtu speaking peoples were moving southward bringing with them cattle, the concept of planting crops and settled village life. [11][12] On discovering where a herd has gathered, they immediately test the direction and force of the wind by throwing a handful of dust into the air. Thus, when the white settlers arrived in the mid 17th century the whole country was inhabited by3 different groups - the hunter-gatherers (San), the pastoralists (Khoikhoi) and the farmers (BaNtu). The poison is neuro toxic and does not contaminate the whole animal. This benefit-sharing agreement is one of the first to give royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge used for drug sales. The San people have lived in Southern Africa for at least 20 000 years. ", "The economic wellbeing of the san of the western, central and eastern Kalahari regions of Botswana", "San, Bushmen or Basarwa: What's in a name? The women of the tribe perform the Eland Bull Dance where they imitate the mating behaviour of the Eland cows. The poison is boiled repeatedly until it looks like red currant jelly. Water is important in San life. What did the San eat?
[42] San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services. Another striking feature of the rock art is the embodiment of action and speed. When he is not in one of his animal forms, /Kaggen lives his life as an ordinary San. In 1961, he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative which he admits in the introduction uses two previous works of stories and mythology as "a sort of Stone Age Bible", namely Specimens of Bushman Folklore' (1911), collected by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend. His title comes from the San's belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. Ethnography, mythology and interpretation of San rock art", "Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of Religion", "African Hunter-Gatherers Are Offshoots of Earliest Human Split", Khwa ttu San Education and Culture Centre, Bradshaw Foundation The San Bushmen of South Africa, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs Africa, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_people&oldid=1098726967, "Related ethnic groups" needing confirmation, Articles using infobox ethnic group with image parameters, Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup and no ISO hint, Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup from August 2021, Articles with a promotional tone from July 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Women may be leaders of their own family groups.
Men hunt in long, laborious tracking excursions. White colonists found this very confusing when they tried to establish treaties with the San. In Wilbur Smith's novel The Burning Shore (an instalment in the Courtneys of Africa book series), the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani; Smith describes the San's struggles, history, and beliefs in great detail. Water is sucked into the straw from the sand, into the mouth, and then travels down another straw into the ostrich egg. To make a sip well, a San scrapes a deep hole where the sand is damp, and inserts a long hollow grass stem into the hole. Another way of capturing animals was to wait at Aardvark holes. [4], The endonyms used by San themselves refer to their individual nations, including It is possible to hunt on land not owned by the group, but permission must be obtained from the owners. The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans, is still widely used by others and to self-identify, but in some instances the term has also been described as pejorative. As long as a person lives on the land of his group he maintains his membership. The San are excellent hunters. Once this patent was brought to the attention of the San, a benefit-sharing agreement was reached between them and the CSIR in 2003. In Peter Godwin's biography When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, he mentions his time spent with the San for an assignment. Despite the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropology and genetics. The hunter-gatherer San are among the oldest cultures on Earth,[33] and are thought to be descended from the first inhabitants of what is now Botswana and South Africa. The Kalahari San held similar beliefs and revered a greater and a lesser god, the first associated with life and the rising sun, and the latter with illness and death. Van der Post's work brought indigenous African cultures to millions of people around the world for the first time, but some people disparaged it as part of the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 1960s, stating that he branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even "mystical ecologists". the Kung (Xuun) (subdivisions Kxaoae (Auen), Juhoan, etc.) In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San people (roughly 2.8% of the population) making it the country with the highest number of San people. Terminology, Identity, and Empowerment in Southern Africa", "Africa's Bushmen May Get Rich From Diet-Drug Secret", "Use of the word 'boesman' not hate speech, court finds", "Court: Use of 'boesman' not hate speech", "Bushmen Driven From Ancestral Lands in Botswana", "Ethnic Minorities and Indigenous Peoples", "Botswana historical place names and terminology", Addendum The situation of indigenous peoples in Botswana, "World's most ancient race traced in DNA study", "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans". [39]:1. [36][37][38] Certain San groups are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population clusters"; that is, "groups of populations with common genetic ancestry, who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the properties of their languages". Leadership among the San is kept for those who have lived within that group for a long time, who have achieved a respectable age, and good character. [43], Most San are monogamous, but if a hunter is able to obtain enough food, he can afford to have a second wife as well.[44]. "Bushmen" is now considered derogatory by many South Africans,[13][15][24] to the point where, in 2008, use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burger newspaper was brought before the Equality Court, which however ruled that the mere use of the term cannot be taken as derogatory, after the San Council had testified that it had no objection to its use in a positive context. With the Europeans, they were at an even greater disadvantage. [62] During the case, the San people were represented and assisted by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the South African San Council and the South African San Institute.[22][23]. The historical presence of the San in Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. Also page 188 regarding Kaggen, the Praying Mantis trickster deity who created the moon, "How San hunters use beetles to poison their arrows", Earliest' evidence of modern human culture found, "African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages", "Hierarchical patterns of global human Y-chromosome diversity", "Development of a single base extension method to resolve Y chromosome haplogroups in sub-Saharan African populations", "MtDNA Variation in the South African Kung and Khweand Their Genetic Relationships to Other African Populations", "History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation", "Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, "Gene Study Challenges Human Origins in Eastern Africa", "A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find', "Botswana's bushmen get Kalahari lands back", "The Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing", "Notes on 'Nai: The Story of a Kung Woman'", "How Art Made the World. the Tuu (subdivisions Xam, Nusan (Nu), Khomani, etc.) The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. Representatives of San peoples in 2003 stated their preference for the use of such individual group names where possible over the use of the collective term San. In Angola they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas,[31] or bosqumanos (a Portuguese adaptation of the Dutch term for "Bushmen"). Van der Post grew up in South Africa, and had a respectful lifelong fascination with native African cultures. This comedy portrays a Kalahari San group's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola bottle). These had a running noose that strangled the animal when it stepped into the snare to collect the food that had been placed inside it. or /. [29] Use of the mo/ba- noun class indicates "people who are accepted", as opposed to the use of Masarwa, an older variant which is now considered offensive.[21][30].
This was reviewed by Lawrence Van Gelder for the New York Times, who said that the film "constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem".[66]. At certain times of the year groups join for exchange of news and gifts, for marriage arrangements and for social occasions. San Spirituality: Roots, Expression,(2004) and Social Consequences, J. David Lewis-Williams, David G. Pearce, This page was last edited on 17 July 2022, at 06:16. One broad study of African genetic diversity completed in 2009 found that San people were among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity among the 121 distinct African populations sampled. Villages range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring (when people move constantly in search of budding greens), to formalised rings, wherein people congregate in the dry season around permanent waterholes. Large amounts of time are spent in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances. [35], From the 1950s through to the 1990s, San communities switched to farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs. [58], A DNA study of fully sequenced genomes, published in September 2016, showed that the ancestors of today's San hunter-gatherers began to diverge from other human populations in Africa about 200,000 years ago and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Juhoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. [22][23] [48], Historical evidence shows that certain San communities have always lived in the desert regions of the Kalahari; however, eventually nearly all other San communities in southern Africa were forced into this region. Ultimately, the 'Hottentots' met these black-skinned farmers and obtained from them cattle in exchange for animal skins and other items. The blood of an Eland, an animal of great religious and symbolic significance, was often mixed into the colour pigments. Specific problems vary according to where they live. By putting paint to rock, they would be able to open portals to the spirit world. ", Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Feature: Name game 'Inuit' or 'Eskimo'? Previous Question Lewis-Williams draws parallels with prehistoric art around the world, linking in shamanic ritual and trance states. They fought to the death and preferred death to capture where they would be forced into slavery. A documentary on San hunting entitled, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000), directed by Damon and Craig Foster. In the case of small antelope such as Duiker or Steenbok, a couple of hours may elapse before death. Hunters carry a skin bag slung around one shoulder, containing personal belongings, poison, medicine, flywhisks and additional arrows. Meat is particularly important in the dry months when wildlife can not range far from the receding waters. The San women haveexpert knowledge of the veld, and are known as thechief gatherers. The shamanic figures are often painted in strange 'bending forward' postures. They portray the San as simple, childlike people without a problem in the world. The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe. At first, the San co-existed peacefully with the Nguni (a sub-language group of the BaNtu) speakers (the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi and Ndebele) who intermarried with the San and incorporated some of the distinctive and characteristic 'clicks' of the San language into their own languages. Contact with Nguni and Sotho-Tswana farmers is depicted in the San rock art. [5][6][7][8][9] Another shared belief was the fact that, when the world was first created, animals and people were indistinguishable. It is then allowed to cool and ready to be smeared on the arrows. The westernised myths regarding the San have caused considerable damage. The San kinship system reflects their history as traditionally small mobile foraging bands. It is the deadly poison, which eventually causes the death. During these dances, the women usually sat around a central fire as they sang and clapped their hands.
1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, adopts two orphaned San children, sister and brother Motholeli and Puso. Learn more about the San hunting skills and their outstanding tracking abilities and ingenious hunting techniques. However, /Kaggen is not always a praying mantis, as the mantis is only one of his manifestations. South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number of documentaries on San culture, history and present situation; these include In God's Places / Iindawo ZikaThixo (1995) on the San cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of a Bushman (2002) on the murder of San tracker Optel Rooi by South African police; The Will To Survive (2009), which covers the history and situation of San communities in southern Africa today; and My Land is My Dignity (2009) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001. Learn more about the fascinatingSan people and theirhunting skills, wealth of indigenous knowledge and rich cultural traditions. In 1955, he was commissioned by the BBC to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the San. Contrary to popular belief, these paintings and engravings of strange human figures and animals, especially the Eland (a species of antelope), did not depict every day life but had a deeper religious and symbolic meaning. Not related to the BaNtu tribes, the San are descendants of Early Stone Age ancestors. Hunting is a team effort and the man whose arrow killed the animal has the right to distribute the meat to the tribe members and visitors who, after hearing about the kill, would arrive soon afterwards to share in the feast. Early spring is the hardest season: a hot dry period following the cool, dry winter. Next Question. "Eh Hee" by Dave Matthews Band was written as an evocation of the music and culture of the San. Until recently, most amateur and professional anthropologists looked at a rock painting of the San and believed that they could decipher it without any problems. These haplogroups are specific sub-groups of haplogroups A and B, the two earliest branches on the human Y-chromosome tree. for insect use in medicine, poison for arrows etc. Tad Williams's epic Otherland series of novels features a South African San named Xabbu, whom Williams confesses to be highly fictionalised, and not necessarily an accurate representation. This would award royalties to the San for the benefits of their indigenous knowledge. Most of the paintings have an underlying spiritual theme and are believed to have been representations of religious ceremonies and rituals. He goes on to describe the song as his "homage to meeting the most advanced people on the planet". Kinship bonds provide the basic framework for political models. Brian Morris (2005). A court case is currently in existence to help the San claim their land. For other uses, see, Members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer people of Southern Africa, Lee, Richard B. and Daly, Richard Heywood (1999), Statement by delegates of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and the South African San Institute attending the 2003 Africa Human Genome Initiative conference held in.
[32] [40] Although they had hereditary chiefs, their authority was limited. The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen,[1] are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho[2] and South Africa. [37], Despite some positive aspects of government development programs reported by members of San and Bakgalagadi communities in Botswana, many have spoken of a consistent sense of exclusion from government decision-making processes, and many San and Bakgalagadi have alleged experiencing ethnic discrimination on the part of the government. For large game, such as Giraffe it could take as long as 3 days. When the San fought against the BaNtu, they were at a huge disadvantage not only in numbers but also in lack of weapons. Disputes are resolved through lengthy discussions where all involved have a chance to make their thoughts heard until some agreement is reached. Enslavement and sometimes mass destruction of San communities, by both White and Black farmers, followed. The San make use of over 100 edible species of plant. John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer documented the lives of the Kung San people between the 1950s and 1978 in Nai, the Story of a Kung Woman. Their selection of food ranges from antelope, Zebra, porcupine, wild hare, Lion, Giraffe, fish, insects, tortoise, flying ants, snakes (venomous and non-venomous), Hyena, eggs and wild honey. San kinship is similar to Eskimo kinship, which uses the same set of terms as in European cultures, but adds a name rule and an age rule for determining what terms to use. Once caught, the Eland is skinned and the fat from the animal's throat and collarbone is made into a broth. He created many things, and appears in numerous myths where he can be foolish or wise, tiresome or helpful. Most plants still are dead or dormant, and supplies of autumn nuts are exhausted. James A. Michener's The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fiction centered on South Africa. The artists started including representations of cattle and sheep as well as of people with shields and spears, in their paintings. In the trance dance, the Eland is considered the most potent of all animals, and the shamans aspire to possess Eland potency. "San" originates as a pejorative Khoekhoe appellation for foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiom dialect. These pastoralists, called Khoikhoi or 'Hottentot' resembled the San in many ways and lived by gathering wild plants and domesticating animals. The men then first danced around the women in a clockwise direction and then vice versa. The Bantu term Batwa refers to any foraging tribesmen and as such overlaps with the terminology used for the "Pygmoid" Southern Twa of South-Central Africa. The Europeans owned horses and firearms. Before long, in both Botswana and Namibia, they found their territory drastically reduced. These trance dances are depicted in the rock art left behind by the San. The San also dug pitfalls near the larger rivers where the game came to drink. In the girls' puberty rituals, a young girl is isolated in her hut at her first menstruation. Alexander McCall Smith has written a series of episodic novels set in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The Kalahari San remained in poverty where their richer neighbours denied them rights to the land. People had not yet acquired manners and culture and only after the second creation, were they separated from the animals and educated in a separate social code. The age rule resolves any confusion arising from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. They help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture. The San feature in several of the novels by Michael Stanley (the nom de plume of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip), particularly in Death of the Mantis. Land is usually owned by a group, and rights to land are usually inherited bilaterally. An empty ostrich egg is used to collect the water. The San interpreted this as a proud and respected reference to their brave fight for freedom from domination and colonization. The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term.
The San of the Kalahari were first brought to the globalized world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post. At a later stage, the girl is anointed with Eland fat. These migratory people do not domesticate animals or cultivate crops, even though their knowledge of both flora and fauna is vast.
The poison is highly toxic and is greatly feared by the San themselves; the arrow points are therefore reversed so that the poison is safely contained within the reed collar. This term was given to the San during their long battle against the colonists. Certain individuals may assume leadership in specific spheres in which they excel, such as hunting or healing rituals, but they cannot achieve positions of general influence or power. While the men hunt, the women, who are experts in foraging for edible mushrooms, bulbs, berries and melons, gather food for the family. Loss of land and access to natural resources continued after Botswana's independence. "The old Dutch also did not know that their so-called Hottentots formed only one branch of a wide-spread race, of which the other branch divided into ever so many tribes, differing from each other totally in language [] While the so-called Hottentots called themselves Khoikhoi (men of men, "Schapera is the author of the convenient term Khoisan, compounded of the Hottentot's name for themselves (Khoi) and their name for the Bushmen (San). By the time this movie was made, the Kung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the San hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their almost abandoned hunting and gathering life.[71]. Birth, death, gender, rain and weather were all believed to have supernatural significance, for example, people acquired good or bad rain-bringing abilities at birth and this ability was reactivated when the person died. Kruger National Park - South African Safari. The Saneat anything available, both animal and vegetable. Some groups also revere the moon. "Bushmen" redirects here. They also often experienced spontaneous nosebleeds at this time. [34]:89 The United States Department of State described ongoing discrimination against San, or Basarwa, people in Botswana in 2013 as the "principal human rights concern" of that country. For larger antelope, this could be 7 to 12 hours. Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is very important to San of all ages. [26][27][28] [18] [7][13][14][15], Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors later switched back to using the name Bushmen. The film was directed by Jamie Uys, who returned to the San a decade later with The Gods Must Be Crazy, which proved to be an international hit. [49], Various Y chromosome studies show that the San carry some of the most divergent (oldest) human Y-chromosome haplogroups. Ostrich eggs are gathered, and the empty shells are used as water containers. San people have vast oral traditions, and many of their tales include stories about the gods that serve to educate listeners about what is considered moral San behaviour. In this period, the number of San was greatly reduced. Few modern San are able to continue as hunter-gatherers, and most live at the very bottom of the social scale, in unacceptable conditions of poverty, leading to alcoholism, violence, prostitution, disease and despair. They may also make important family and group decisions and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. According to San tradition, they were welcome to share the meal and would, in the future, have to respond in the same way. Among some San, it is believed that working the soil is contrary to the world order established by the god. Their skills even enable them to distinguish between the "spoor" of a wounded animal and that of the rest of the herd. [10], The designations "Bushmen" and "San" are both exonyms in origin, but San had been widely adopted as an endonym by the late 1990s. The presenter Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams,[69] whose PhD was entitled "Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings". The compound Khoisan, used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi and the foraging San collectively, was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera in 1930, and anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan,[17] [47], A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BC was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012. The filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television documentary a year later. The first section of the book concerns a San community's journey set roughly in 13,000 BC. 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". It was to be his most famous book. [19] These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organised by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993,[8] the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia,[20] and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organised by the University of the Western Cape. [3], The term "Sann" has a long vowel and is spelled Sn (in Khoekhoegowab orthography). San men have a formidable reputation as trackers and hunters. Government policies from the 1970s transferred a significant area of traditionally San land to majority agro-pastoralist tribes and white settlers [34]:15 Much of the government's policy regarding land tended to favor the dominant Tswana peoples over the minority San and Bakgalagadi. [50][53][54][55], In a study published in March 2011, Brenna Henn and colleagues found that the Khomani San, as well as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, were the most genetically diverse of any living humans studied. [34]:18, Hoodia gordonii, used by the San, was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1998, for its presumed appetite suppressing quality. At about the beginning of the Christian era a group of people who owned small livestock (sheep and perhaps goats) moved into the northern and western parts of South Africa and migrated southward. Coincidently in the eastern parts of the country another migration was occurring - the BaNtu speaking peoples were moving southward bringing with them cattle, the concept of planting crops and settled village life. [11][12] On discovering where a herd has gathered, they immediately test the direction and force of the wind by throwing a handful of dust into the air. Thus, when the white settlers arrived in the mid 17th century the whole country was inhabited by3 different groups - the hunter-gatherers (San), the pastoralists (Khoikhoi) and the farmers (BaNtu). The poison is neuro toxic and does not contaminate the whole animal. This benefit-sharing agreement is one of the first to give royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge used for drug sales. The San people have lived in Southern Africa for at least 20 000 years. ", "The economic wellbeing of the san of the western, central and eastern Kalahari regions of Botswana", "San, Bushmen or Basarwa: What's in a name? The women of the tribe perform the Eland Bull Dance where they imitate the mating behaviour of the Eland cows. The poison is boiled repeatedly until it looks like red currant jelly. Water is important in San life. What did the San eat?
[42] San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services. Another striking feature of the rock art is the embodiment of action and speed. When he is not in one of his animal forms, /Kaggen lives his life as an ordinary San. In 1961, he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative which he admits in the introduction uses two previous works of stories and mythology as "a sort of Stone Age Bible", namely Specimens of Bushman Folklore' (1911), collected by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend. His title comes from the San's belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. Ethnography, mythology and interpretation of San rock art", "Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of Religion", "African Hunter-Gatherers Are Offshoots of Earliest Human Split", Khwa ttu San Education and Culture Centre, Bradshaw Foundation The San Bushmen of South Africa, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs Africa, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_people&oldid=1098726967, "Related ethnic groups" needing confirmation, Articles using infobox ethnic group with image parameters, Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup and no ISO hint, Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup from August 2021, Articles with a promotional tone from July 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Women may be leaders of their own family groups. Men hunt in long, laborious tracking excursions. White colonists found this very confusing when they tried to establish treaties with the San. In Wilbur Smith's novel The Burning Shore (an instalment in the Courtneys of Africa book series), the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani; Smith describes the San's struggles, history, and beliefs in great detail. Water is sucked into the straw from the sand, into the mouth, and then travels down another straw into the ostrich egg. To make a sip well, a San scrapes a deep hole where the sand is damp, and inserts a long hollow grass stem into the hole. Another way of capturing animals was to wait at Aardvark holes. [4], The endonyms used by San themselves refer to their individual nations, including It is possible to hunt on land not owned by the group, but permission must be obtained from the owners. The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans, is still widely used by others and to self-identify, but in some instances the term has also been described as pejorative. As long as a person lives on the land of his group he maintains his membership. The San are excellent hunters. Once this patent was brought to the attention of the San, a benefit-sharing agreement was reached between them and the CSIR in 2003. In Peter Godwin's biography When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, he mentions his time spent with the San for an assignment. Despite the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropology and genetics. The hunter-gatherer San are among the oldest cultures on Earth,[33] and are thought to be descended from the first inhabitants of what is now Botswana and South Africa. The Kalahari San held similar beliefs and revered a greater and a lesser god, the first associated with life and the rising sun, and the latter with illness and death. Van der Post's work brought indigenous African cultures to millions of people around the world for the first time, but some people disparaged it as part of the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 1960s, stating that he branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even "mystical ecologists". the Kung (Xuun) (subdivisions Kxaoae (Auen), Juhoan, etc.) In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San people (roughly 2.8% of the population) making it the country with the highest number of San people. Terminology, Identity, and Empowerment in Southern Africa", "Africa's Bushmen May Get Rich From Diet-Drug Secret", "Use of the word 'boesman' not hate speech, court finds", "Court: Use of 'boesman' not hate speech", "Bushmen Driven From Ancestral Lands in Botswana", "Ethnic Minorities and Indigenous Peoples", "Botswana historical place names and terminology", Addendum The situation of indigenous peoples in Botswana, "World's most ancient race traced in DNA study", "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans". [39]:1. [36][37][38] Certain San groups are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population clusters"; that is, "groups of populations with common genetic ancestry, who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the properties of their languages". Leadership among the San is kept for those who have lived within that group for a long time, who have achieved a respectable age, and good character. [43], Most San are monogamous, but if a hunter is able to obtain enough food, he can afford to have a second wife as well.[44]. "Bushmen" is now considered derogatory by many South Africans,[13][15][24] to the point where, in 2008, use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burger newspaper was brought before the Equality Court, which however ruled that the mere use of the term cannot be taken as derogatory, after the San Council had testified that it had no objection to its use in a positive context. With the Europeans, they were at an even greater disadvantage. [62] During the case, the San people were represented and assisted by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the South African San Council and the South African San Institute.[22][23]. The historical presence of the San in Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. Also page 188 regarding Kaggen, the Praying Mantis trickster deity who created the moon, "How San hunters use beetles to poison their arrows", Earliest' evidence of modern human culture found, "African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages", "Hierarchical patterns of global human Y-chromosome diversity", "Development of a single base extension method to resolve Y chromosome haplogroups in sub-Saharan African populations", "MtDNA Variation in the South African Kung and Khweand Their Genetic Relationships to Other African Populations", "History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation", "Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, "Gene Study Challenges Human Origins in Eastern Africa", "A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find', "Botswana's bushmen get Kalahari lands back", "The Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing", "Notes on 'Nai: The Story of a Kung Woman'", "How Art Made the World. the Tuu (subdivisions Xam, Nusan (Nu), Khomani, etc.) The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. Representatives of San peoples in 2003 stated their preference for the use of such individual group names where possible over the use of the collective term San. In Angola they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas,[31] or bosqumanos (a Portuguese adaptation of the Dutch term for "Bushmen"). Van der Post grew up in South Africa, and had a respectful lifelong fascination with native African cultures. This comedy portrays a Kalahari San group's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola bottle). These had a running noose that strangled the animal when it stepped into the snare to collect the food that had been placed inside it. or /. [29] Use of the mo/ba- noun class indicates "people who are accepted", as opposed to the use of Masarwa, an older variant which is now considered offensive.[21][30].
This was reviewed by Lawrence Van Gelder for the New York Times, who said that the film "constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem".[66]. At certain times of the year groups join for exchange of news and gifts, for marriage arrangements and for social occasions. San Spirituality: Roots, Expression,(2004) and Social Consequences, J. David Lewis-Williams, David G. Pearce, This page was last edited on 17 July 2022, at 06:16. One broad study of African genetic diversity completed in 2009 found that San people were among the five populations with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity among the 121 distinct African populations sampled. Villages range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring (when people move constantly in search of budding greens), to formalised rings, wherein people congregate in the dry season around permanent waterholes. Large amounts of time are spent in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances. [35], From the 1950s through to the 1990s, San communities switched to farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs. [58], A DNA study of fully sequenced genomes, published in September 2016, showed that the ancestors of today's San hunter-gatherers began to diverge from other human populations in Africa about 200,000 years ago and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Juhoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. [22][23] [48], Historical evidence shows that certain San communities have always lived in the desert regions of the Kalahari; however, eventually nearly all other San communities in southern Africa were forced into this region. Ultimately, the 'Hottentots' met these black-skinned farmers and obtained from them cattle in exchange for animal skins and other items. The blood of an Eland, an animal of great religious and symbolic significance, was often mixed into the colour pigments. Specific problems vary according to where they live. By putting paint to rock, they would be able to open portals to the spirit world. ", Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Feature: Name game 'Inuit' or 'Eskimo'? Previous Question Lewis-Williams draws parallels with prehistoric art around the world, linking in shamanic ritual and trance states. They fought to the death and preferred death to capture where they would be forced into slavery. A documentary on San hunting entitled, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000), directed by Damon and Craig Foster. In the case of small antelope such as Duiker or Steenbok, a couple of hours may elapse before death. Hunters carry a skin bag slung around one shoulder, containing personal belongings, poison, medicine, flywhisks and additional arrows. Meat is particularly important in the dry months when wildlife can not range far from the receding waters. The San women haveexpert knowledge of the veld, and are known as thechief gatherers. The shamanic figures are often painted in strange 'bending forward' postures. They portray the San as simple, childlike people without a problem in the world. The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe. At first, the San co-existed peacefully with the Nguni (a sub-language group of the BaNtu) speakers (the Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi and Ndebele) who intermarried with the San and incorporated some of the distinctive and characteristic 'clicks' of the San language into their own languages. Contact with Nguni and Sotho-Tswana farmers is depicted in the San rock art. [5][6][7][8][9] Another shared belief was the fact that, when the world was first created, animals and people were indistinguishable. It is then allowed to cool and ready to be smeared on the arrows. The westernised myths regarding the San have caused considerable damage. The San kinship system reflects their history as traditionally small mobile foraging bands. It is the deadly poison, which eventually causes the death. During these dances, the women usually sat around a central fire as they sang and clapped their hands.
1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, adopts two orphaned San children, sister and brother Motholeli and Puso. Learn more about the San hunting skills and their outstanding tracking abilities and ingenious hunting techniques. However, /Kaggen is not always a praying mantis, as the mantis is only one of his manifestations. South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number of documentaries on San culture, history and present situation; these include In God's Places / Iindawo ZikaThixo (1995) on the San cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of a Bushman (2002) on the murder of San tracker Optel Rooi by South African police; The Will To Survive (2009), which covers the history and situation of San communities in southern Africa today; and My Land is My Dignity (2009) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.