San people

The San are the Indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa. They have no collective word for themselves: they use the names of their own nations, such as the ǃKung (including the Juǀʼhoansi), ǀXam, Nǁnǂe, Khwe, Haiǁom, Gǁana and Gǀui, and in 2003 their representatives asked that these names be used where possible. “San” comes from a derogatory Khoekhoe word for foragers without cattle, and “Bushmen”, from the 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans, is considered pejorative by many, though some San use it of themselves. In Botswana they are called Basarwa. Their languages belong to the Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa families and have click consonants.

There is a general consensus that the modern San descend from the oldest societies of southern and eastern Africa. Some 10,000 years ago such groups were spread from Tanzania, Zambia and Angola down to Cape Agulhas, and in the first millennium BCE, by Mellet’s account, the Tshua San held the Shashe-Limpopo basin while the Khwe San lived further west. Tools almost identical to those of modern San, found at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, date to 42,000 BCE.

Genetics shows great depth. The San carry some of the earliest-branching Y-chromosome and mitochondrial lineages, among them haplogroup L0d, and the ǂKhomani San are among the most genetically diverse living humans. Estimates of when their ancestors diverged from other people differ: about 200,000 years ago in a 2016 study, 360,000 to 260,000 years ago in a 2017 study of three 2,000-year-old genomes from KwaZulu-Natal.

The San were traditionally semi-nomadic, moving with the seasons within defined areas according to water, game and edible plants. Camps ranged from nightly rain shelters in spring, when people moved constantly in search of budding greens, to formal rings around permanent waterholes in the dry season; early spring, hot and dry, was the hardest time. Women gathered fruit, berries, tubers and bush onions, carrying food, firewood and babies in a hide cloak called a kaross and digging with a stick, and insects gave perhaps a tenth of the animal protein eaten. Men, and sometimes women, hunted on long tracking trips with bows, arrows and spears tipped with diamphotoxin, a slow-acting poison from the larvae of Diamphidia beetles.

Society was traditionally egalitarian. Where there were hereditary chiefs their authority was limited, and decisions were taken by consensus, with women treated as relative equals; women could lead family groups and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. The economy was a gift economy, built on regular giving rather than trade. Children had no duties besides play, and people of all ages spent much time in conversation, joking, music and dance.

Kinship follows a name rule and an age rule: the older of two people decides what to call the younger. About 35 names circulate for each sex, and a child is named after a grandparent or another relative, never a parent.

Neighbouring peoples held that the San had a closer bond with the old spirits of the land and often turned to them for rainmaking, as at Mapungubwe. San shamans entered a trance and went into the spirit world themselves to capture the animals associated with rain. On this ground Mellet argues that the San took part in the early foundations of the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and of the states that followed it, such as Great Zimbabwe and the Mutapa Empire. Sacred dances remain part of San life.

San religion has been linked to very old practice: a find interpreted in 2006 as perhaps the world’s oldest ritual has been taken as evidence that San culture is the oldest still practised. Their stories and mythology were recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911) and by Dorothea Bleek in Mantis and His Friend. One San belief holds that a solar eclipse happens when a crocodile eats the sun.

David Lewis-Williams has studied the symbolic meanings of southern San rock paintings and drawn parallels between them and prehistoric art around the world. Outsiders have often romanticised San belief: Laurens van der Post called the Bleek collections “a sort of Stone Age Bible”, and his critics said that his books cast the San as “children of Nature” or “mystical ecologists”.

Early San societies left a rich legacy of paintings on rock across southern Africa, showing hunting, battles, domestic life and mythological events. A BBC series of 2005 set San paintings made about 200 years ago beside Palaeolithic European paintings 14,000 years old, drawing on David Lewis-Williams’s work on their symbolic meanings, and Richard Wicksteed’s film In God’s Places (1995) follows the San cultural legacy of the southern Drakensberg. The Tsodilo Hills of northern Botswana bear particular witness to the long presence of the San there.

San crafts serve a life on the move: the kaross cloak, the hide sling and smaller bags, the digging stick, ostrich eggshells used as water containers, and bows, arrows and spears for the hunt, with the poison that comes from beetle larvae. Music, sacred dance and storytelling fill much of the time of people of every age, and San languages, rich in click consonants, carry a large body of stories and myths.

The San have also been filmed and written about for more than half a century. John Marshall documented the Juǀʼhoansi of Nyae Nyae from 1951 to 2000, and his sister Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote The Harmless People (1959). Jamie Uys’s comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy was made when the ǃKung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and its San actors were confused by instructions to act out exaggerated versions of a hunting life they had almost abandoned.

As herders and farmers moved south, the San met them. Both the Tshua and the Khwe San dealt with migrant herders, who later became the Khoekhoe, and with herder-farmers of the Bantu expansion (2000 BCE–1000 CE), and were partly driven from their ancestral lands or absorbed into Bantu-speaking groups. After 650 CE, and in the Western Cape after 1000 CE, most San left the coasts for the interior.

When the Dutch settled at the Cape in 1652, the Cape San numbered an estimated 30,000 to 50,000. From about 1714 the Dutch East India Company’s loan farms sent Trekboer stock farmers into San lands, where they took the waterholes, shot the game and overgrazed the land. The San resisted by attacking the Boers and raiding their stock, and the Trekboers answered with commandos. From the 1770s to the late 1790s commandos surrounded camps at night and attacked at dawn, killing all the men and killing or capturing women and children; some raids killed hundreds. In 1777 the Company endorsed the eradication of the San.

Under British rule the killings fell but did not stop. By the 1850s most San had been tied to farmers by threats, the holding of wives and children, and starvation, and the Korana wars of 1868–69 and 1878–79 ended the last San of the Cape. In German South West Africa, after the governor endorsed the shooting of San, over 400 patrols went out in 1911–1913, and the San between Otavi and Gobabis fell from 8,000–12,000 in 1913 to 3,600 in 1923.

Whether the destruction of the Cape San was a genocide has been debated. Historians before the word was coined wrote of a war of extermination; N. Penn prefers “partial genocide”, and Miklós Szalay argued that the commandos chiefly sought labour, but Adhikari shows the evidence against him, above all the high ratio of San killed to those captured in 1770–1795. Official records, certainly incomplete, count 2,480 San killed and 654 captured in the last decade of Dutch East India Company rule.

In Bechuanaland the Ghanzi district was divided among white cattle farmers, making San into “farm Bushmen”. From the 1950s to the 1990s government programmes moved many San to farming. In Botswana, policies from the 1970s gave San land to majority agro-pastoralist groups and white settlers, and the government moved the residents of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to settlements outside it, by harassment, the dismantling of services and bans on hunting, though it denies that any relocation was forced; a legal battle followed. In 2013 the United States called discrimination against the San Botswana’s “principal human rights concern”.

The San have organised to defend their rights. The Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa held its first general meeting in 1996, the South African San Council was founded in 2001, and in 2003 the San won a benefit-sharing agreement with South Africa’s CSIR over the hoodia plant, one of the first to pay royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge. The word San stands in the blazon of South Africa’s coat of arms.