Khwe San

Today, we visited one of the many “living museums” of Namibia, model villages set up by the cultural ministry to preserve traditional knowledge and practices. Not unlike Colonial Williamsburg here in the US. The one we visited is for the Khwe tribe of the San people. 

The San are the original inhabitants of this region and have been here at least 100,000 years. Geneticists have traced their DNA that far back (go ask ChatGPT, I’m not going to attempt to explain that, especially since it’s over my head), farther than any other people on earth. For that time they have lived in balance with nature, very egalitarian, no permanent settlements, no government, no commerce, no agriculture, no accumulation of possessions, none of the crap that civilization has foisted on us. Unlike us, they take only what they need, from nature. The bush is their supermarket.

The San lived in small bands of 10 or so people. The women gathered fruits, nuts and herbs from the forest for food and medicine while the men hunted game. Everything they needed was provided by the land, rivers, plants and animals around them. Shelter was simple huts constructed from sticks held together with twine that they made from fibrous plants and covered with grasses. If the hunters killed a large animal like an eland that was too large to move, the whole band moved to where the animal was so they could process the hide for clothing and preserve the meat by drying.

They showed us some crafts and tools, made fire with two sticks (way faster than the Maasai people we saw in Tanzania), made twine from a fibrous plant (exactly like the Bribri people we saw in Costa Rica), enacted a healing ceremony. It was interesting, and sad at what has been lost. 

Starting around 2000 BC, Bantu people from Central Africa began to move into the region. With larger, more organized cultures, they began to displace the San, who ended up in the Kalahari desert of southwestern Africa, which could not support a large settled population. There the San lived for a thousand years until colonial times when European settlers came and treated the San as they have treated “primitive” cultures wherever they went; enslaving, killing, exploiting, you know the history. Small bands of San survived in the extremes of the desert until the 1950s and 60s when they were removed from the land so we could have national parks.

I have asked two Bantu people why they couldn’t leave the San in the parks, their footprint is tiny, they would only take an impala here and there and they could continue their life. One said that the animals would become fearful of humans and then the tourists couldn’t see them and the other said that if a San were killed by an animal, there would have to be a big investigation into the death, the animal would be put down. Both of these explanations are really just reasons justifying ownership of the parks, “ownership” being a concept the San don’t really subscribe to. Whatever the reason, governments have decided that the supermarket is closed and the San way of life is just a tiny shrinking dot waiting for its dissipation into the past.