The Oldest Inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert: the San People.
I had the great opportunity to meet and observe the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa, a region they have inhabited for at least 20,000 years.
Although many of them have been moved from their traditional homeland, small groups continue the resilient ways of their ancestors. They have to make certain compromises to modern living, which means they can’t live their nomadic life by hunting and gathering anymore. However, some members of these groups can still survive in traditional ways and live in one of the world’s driest environments.
Formidable Survival Skills
One day soon after dawn, I followed some of them on a “simulated” hunt. It was the best chance I had to understand better their ancestors hunting strategies used to find food in this desolate landscape. In that part of the desert, there were only sporadic game sightings, but enough to make the San use their incredible skills.
That morning three of them were onto the fresh spoor of a herd of kudus. One of the San flicked his wrist as he spotted more kudu footprints. Next, they were trotting altogether silently and resolutely beside the tracks, heading across the sunburnt sand of the Kalahari and into the climax of the day.
By throwing a handful of dust into the air, the San tested the direction and force of the wind. These skillful people recognize the habits of the indigenous animals, and in no time, they are able to find out where the herd gathers. Their formidable survival and hunting skills enable them to follow the spoor of an animal across virtually any kind of terrain.
Tracking game is what they have been doing since they were born: they communicate in sign language with their hands while moving quietly in the bush, showing each other the tracks and reading the animal stories. It’s a team effort.
The San people say, “Tracking is like dancing because your body is happy, telling you that the hunt will be good.”
Tracking is like dancing because your body is happy, telling you that the hunt will be good.
The San People Say
A Persistent Hunting
I was surprised to see that they didn’t scan the horizon to see the animals; they kept looking down at the sand. They were entirely immersed in the chase. They go into a trance-like state of concentration to be able to resist fatigue and they run with such length and ease of stride. Sometimes it’s very difficult to see any signs of the kudu tracks because the animal runs into thick cover, and the hunters can only imagine the path that it has taken.
One of the techniques the San are known for is called persistent hunting.
Humans can’t compete with the speed, power, teeth, or claws of the greatest African carnivores, but to their advantage, men have a lighter and agile body.
Bushmen can’t outrun faster animals like antelopes, but they are able to persist on following them, and by doing so, they exhaust their prey before they can make a kill.
Running on two feet is more efficient over long distances than running on four. A man sweats all over his body, so it cools itself down. A kudu doesn’t sweat as much, so it has to finds shade to cool down. By releasing sweat from all parts of the body, hunters like the San can endure the intense heat of the blazing sun of the Kalahari for longer than the kudu they were after.
Water for the San, Desert People
A man has hands to carry water; thus, during the chase, the Bushmen are able to replace the liquid they lost in sweat. Survival, for desert people, has always been about finding water. The San know which desert plants have the ability to retain water.
The Kalahari water tube, the wild Tsamma melon, and the eland cucumber can be squeezed for its precious liquid. They are very thirst-quenching and refreshing. It’s the San’s water in the arid desert.
The San people know how to store water for even drier times. They drill a hole in one end of an ostrich shell and make an empty vessel. Consequently, when they find a water source, they can easily fill up this water vessel. Being able to carry around ‘sip wells’ in these ostrich shells, means they have a constant water supply.
Sometimes they leave a path of stored water underground; who knows how far they can travel! Archeologists have unearthed fragments of ostrich eggshell sip wells from thousands of years ago.
The San use an ancient technology handed down from the past. This is one of the most remarkable aspects of how they easily come up with techniques to thrive in this extreme environment.
A Test of Endurance
They know every tree and it seems every blade of grass over thousands of square miles of identical sand and bush. They recognize the rhythm of animal movements from the spacing of their tracks. The kudus they have been following were not moving fast. They were after the bull. Because of its heavy set of horns, the male gets drained faster. Skillfully they separated their target from the herd to be able to not confuse its tracks. In the next stage of the chase, only one man, the runner, continues the hunt. He must bear and persist until the animal is the first to collapse.
This was how men hunted before they had weapons when they had nothing but their own physical endurance to gain their reward.
The chase could last many hours. Once the animal collapses exhausted, and it is close to death, the hunter could spear his prey. Then, in a ceremonial gesture, the man used to pay his tribute to the animal’s courage and strength by pouring some sand over the carcass. This action will assure that the spirit of the animal will return to the desert sand from which it came and will provide in the future the sustenance for his family waiting for him.
Food of the Ancestors
Back at the settlement, women were milling one of their delicacies, the Mongongo nuts, which they roasted on the fire or ground into a tasty paste. Like wild game, berries and nuts were also the food of our ancestors.
The San, desert people, preserve the customs of our ancestors who lived in this harsh environment. I followed a couple of them to observe their ancient gathering practices. They walk in different directions with their grubbing sticks to look for food in the desert sands.
The intelligence, persistence, and speed with which they harvest the ground are astonishing. They can spot a tiny leaf, almost invisible in the grass and thorns, just above the surface of the red sand; they kneel down and dig carefully with their wooden sticks; wild carrot, potatoes, leeks, turnips, sweet potatoes and, depending on the season, artichokes.
The San are natural botanists and chemists and have an unbelievable knowledge of the properties of desert plants. They make a robust rope used in their bows, snares, and other weapons. They do this by extracting from the wild Kalahari sisal, long silky strands, which they braid, and turn into ropes of all lengths and thicknesses.
I watched one of them producing a length of rope with only a springbok horn, using his toes and fingers as instruments and his thighs as a worktable. When finished, we made jokes about its quality, trying to break it. It was impossible.
The San preserve their customs
Listening to them, talking is delightful. Their pronunciation has the characteristic “clicks.” I sat next to the older women, close to a thorny bush, while they were making beads out of broken ostrich eggshell, stringing them into necklaces or the broad shining bands which they wear around their heads for ceremonial occasions.
Hour after hour, they would sit chipping skillfully and gracefully, with the sharp end of a springbok bone at a fragment of shell, in order to produce one little round, white disk from the brittle and fragile raw material. As a headband needs hundreds of beads, the task obviously is amazingly onerous and long.
Every woman and child has several necklaces, and at least one splendid headband, apart from the beads used to decorate the leather wrap, shawl and shoulder satchel which in the past were their only covering. Sometimes they carve even greater beads out of a red root amber wood.
Fire!
With the arrival of dusk, watching them make a fire was an experience not to be missed. They did it with just a couple of sticks and a little bundle of very dry, thin grass. They used a thin, straightened, wooden reed which is spun with the hands, and grind the inside of a notch against the soft wooden base of a fireboard. The repeated spinning and downward pressure cause black dust to form in the notch of the fireboard, eventually creating a lump of hot, glowing coal. The coal was then carefully placed among dense, fine firewood, which is pressed against it as one blows directly onto the coal until the fuel begins burning and eventually explodes into a flame.
For the San people, to make a fire with no modern lighters, is an easy task; for me, instead, it would be almost impossible.
After a little while, immersed in their amusing clicking conversations, an engaging performance began in front of my eyes. The women started singing and clapping while sitting in a circle around the fire. The men gathered and danced around the singers, taking small steps, with feet barely raised off the ground, punctuating their progress with percussive stamps, in time to the songs. The movements were accompanied by a high clatter of rattles made from dry cocoons strung together with cords that were tied to their legs. The dance was a pattern of voices and rhythms that were varied and precise.
The San people learn these songs and dances when they are children, and they work hard to develop their skills. Their trance dance is important in order to understand their culture. It’s not a religious ceremony, as we would imagine in the west.
The dance brings everybody together. It’s a kind of healing ceremony that is essential to the fabric of the community. The music helps the spiritual healer to enter into a trance. Men and women chant, sing, and clap rhythmically, and when the music heats up enough to send the healer into a state between the human and spirit world, all who attend the dance are healed of their illnesses.
Witnessing an elder entering a trance is quite spectacular: they enter into an almost out-of-body experience, and this is evident when they even dance on hot coals and fire!
The New Wild
It was a privilege to witness, experience, and feel the intense and spiritual energy of the San dances in the many forms it took: around the fire, tracking animals, or treasuring the bounties of the wild nature.
Spending time with the San is like going back to our natural and original form, as hunters and gatherers. The San people were one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies living in the 20th century. Anthropologists believe that their lifestyle, until relatively recent times, was similar to humans’ most ancient ancestors.
It was unnatural for the San people to be forced out of nomadic living (which is how they have lived for thousands of years) and into permanent residences, and their sustainability is still very unstable.
However, some of them make a living by getting involved in ecotourism activities. In Botswana some tourism operators offer interpretive nature walks and other traditional activities to experience with the San people. By being engaged in ethical ecotourism activities, the San are able to provide an income for themselves and their household. Furthermore, the younger family members have the opportunity to learn from the elders, how their way of life used to be.
A nature experience with these knowledgeable and interesting people will not only enhance anyone’s safari and a trip to Southern Africa, but it might just change one’s approach to life!