rss feedThis week I wish I was…walking in the footsteps of the San bushmen of the Kalahari
Once upon a time, before we got all smart and chose to shape the environment to our needs, we were just another species that had to learn to survive everything that nature threw at us. We were probably less soft, pink and hairless, and had slightly more impressive teeth and claws. The knowledge we inherited from our forbears included fewer instructions about how to work the microwave and one or two more useful tips about how to nail a mammoth. We spent our days beetling about in search of our next meal rather than recumbent in a squishy couch playing X-box. How times have changed.
But some humans have not sloughed off the knack of living by their wits and in depleting numbers, a few races of people still live as nature once intended – rather more at one with the earth. The San people of the Kalahari are one such tribe.
San is the generic term for a collection of kinship groups, sometimes referred to as Bushmen that are found in parts of Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. They trace their ancestry back over 20,000 years and have left their legacy painted in bile and pigment on the rocks of Africa; scenes of hunts, spoor depicted alongside their respective animals for teaching purposes, records of the arrival of white people in pith helmets with ox-wagons.
No one else in their right mind calls the Kalahari home and it is no small feat to subsist in this hostile landscape. As semi-nomads, the San move with the seasons, their destinations determined by the availability of food and water. It’s hard to imagine that there are still people whose street knowledge includes how to concoct lethal poison from bits of a tortoise, which stunted and desiccated shrub will yield a juicy tuber, and remembering where one buried an ostrich egg filled with water a few months ago. It rather puts a trip to Tesco in perspective.
San folk are lively, cheerful and kind and place a high value on family (particularly children), gift-giving and story-telling – told in their largely unwritten “click” language. Their deep understanding of the environment and its inhabitants goes beyond textbook stuff; hunters are so tuned to the psychology of their prey that they can follow animals where the spoor has long since vanished and still come up with the goods. Walking in the footsteps of the San is a unique privilege and puts a completely different slant on Africa and its wildlife.
Look at safari ideas that include time spent among the San.
See camps that work closely with the San.
Look for more information on the Kalahari.
