Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
barely 100,000 individuals in total, which may include many mixed San. Of these, around
60% live in Botswana (the !Kung, G//ana, G/wi and !xo being the largest groups), where
they make up just 3% of Botswana's population, and 35% in Namibia (the Naro, !Xukwe,
Hei//kom and Ju/'hoansi), with the remainder scattered throughout South Africa, Angola,
Zimbabwe and Zambia.
For a window on the life of the San, join local hunter !Nqate in Craig and Damon
Foster's film
The Great Dance
, an inspiring collaborative project that involved the local
community at every stage of the filming and editing.
And a word on terminology: in Botswana you'll often hear the term 'Basarwa' being
used to describe the San, but this is considered by the San to be pejorative as it literally
means 'people of the sticks'.
THE PAST
Traditionally the San were nomadic hunter- gatherers who travelled in small family bands
(usually between around 25 and 35 people) within well-defined territories. They had no
chiefs or hierarchy of leadership and decisions were reached by group consensus. With no
animals, crops or possessions, the San were highly mobile. Everything that they needed
for their daily existence they carried with them.
Initially, the San's social flexibility enabled them to evade conquest and control. But as
other powerful tribes with big herds of livestock and farming ambitions moved into the
area, inevitable disputes arose over the land. The San's wide-ranging, nomadic lifestyle
(some territories extended over 1000 sq km) was utterly at odds with the settled world of
the farmers and soon became a source of bitter conflict. This situation was rapidly acceler-
ated by European colonists, who arrived in the area during the mid-17th century. The
early Boers pursued an extermination campaign that lasted for 200 years and killed as
many as 200,000 indigenous people. Such territorial disputes, combined with modern
policies on wildlife conservation, have seen the San increasingly disenfranchised and dis-
possessed. What's more, in the modern world their disparate social structure has made it
exceedingly difficult for them to organise pressure groups to defend their rights and land
as other groups have done. Even so, they have enjoyed a measure of success in fighting
their expulsion from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
THE FUTURE
Like so many indigenous peoples the world over, the San are largely impoverished. Many
work on farms and cattle posts or live in squalid, handout-dependent and alcohol-plagued
settlements centred on boreholes in western Botswana and northeastern Namibia, as de-
