2.1 Bushmen

2.1 Bushmen

By Peter Snyders © 7Th March 2024

The Bushmen

There are several connotations given to the Words San and Bushmen. Alan Barnard of his Anthropology and the Bushmen writes: “The word ‘Bushman’ is certainly not without its problems. Indeed, the same can be said for the currently more politically correct term ‘San’, which historically and in the Khoekhoe dialects in which it is found has carried connotations of poverty, low status, thievery and scavenging, as well as purposeful food-gathering (that being perhaps its most literal translation).”  Alan Barnard: Anthropology and the Bushmen 2007 on p.x.

Alan Barnard survives our pramana test of personal perception because he has spent some time among some Bushmen (we write the term with the capital letter it deserves). As usual, we start at the foundation. This will be covered in more detail under the section on the Evolution of Humans, but we will use only a small amount of it to create our basis here.

Remember that we only point out the direction to you. Those of you who want a firmly founded identity will go out and build your house upon a rock (Matthew 7:24-25). So, Google “Khoisan” and download what interests you, but be sure to download the article from Wiki under the same name. What I so much like about Wiki is that all the very high-quality writings are authorless, in other words, completely selfless, one of the main ingredients to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Wiki: Khoisan: “Khoisan, or Khoe-Sān, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen (formerly "Hottentots") and the Sān peoples (formerly "Bushmen"). Khoisan populations speak click languages and are considered to be the historical (pre-Bantu) communities in the South African Cape region, through to Namibia, where Khoekhoe populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups, and Botswana.”

We are going to change this mention of the early group of people to Khoi (men or people) more correctly, Khoe. This is because they were all hunter-gatherers. In Kora’s Kora to English dictionary, the word khoe, is pronounced khowe or [khowε]. The suffixes b, s, and i determine gender, where khoeb is male, khoes is female, and khoei is neutral. (In German, a neutral person is under the age of eighteen.)

We are so fortunate today that science has discovered that the mtDNA haplogroup L0 is found in the southern African ancestral Khoisan, and that everyone, irrespective of race, has this gene within them. The Khoe, later Khoi-khoi (men of men) and Saan, or Bushmen, were one group, some 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. The MIS 5 mega drought struck this central, southern African group 130,000 years ago, and the ancestral population was obliged to find survival means elsewhere. (Still from Wiki, but simplified)

 It is at this time that the Khoe split came with part of the Khoe (later to become Bushmen or San) moving southwards, where they expanded their purposeful techniques of gathering natural food. It is wrong for whites to typify the existence of the Khoekhoe and Bushmen (San) as primitive and savage, as they often had what the Europeans did not have, even at this time. Despite occasional droughts, they always had food, unlike the poor today.

The Khoe (the splitting of the diphthong is where Khoi was created by Europeans) trekked northwards. Here, they were not welcomed by the bearers of the haplogroup L1-6 in central and eastern African regions. Wiki also has a reference 13: [Crowe, Tim (4 February 2016)]. “How the origin of the KhoiSan tells us that ‘race’ has no place in human history.” The Wiki writer goes on to add that this Khoe group went on to populate Europe and Asia by stating: “this group carried DNA from Eurasian as well as some Neandertal groups.” (If you search this Wiki article, all you have to do is just click on the blue wording, and you will be taken right away to the reference.)

The convenient part of the Khoe protogroup eventually found their way into South Africa, whence they spread out over the country, and eventually some of them made their way to the Cape region. When a group is separated from its source, its culture and language change. The next generation, forgetting their source, gave themselves a name. We do not know exactly what name the Cape Khoi gave themselves, but everywhere they preferred the European name "Bushmen" (people living in bushes) to the term "San," which they considered derogatory.

The Kalahari Kung Bushmen called themselves zhu twa si, the harmless people. Twa means “just" or "only" in the sense that you say: "It was just the wind” or “It is only me.”

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas 1959: The Harmless People p.34