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2.2 Bushmen

By Peter Snyders 

We have only used the term Khoe-Sān to show that the Bushmen and Khoe-khoe had a common origin, which is why they both speak the rare click language. Bushmen were so-called by the Dutch as “Bosjesmans” because they did not have actual homes. They couldn’t because - especially in the Kalahari, where they had to be continually on the go for food after they had left enough for more to grow and serve them on their return.

From here, they will meet up with their other lineage, the Khoe, again sometime later when the Khoe-khoe entered South Africa about 300 years BCE (before the common era).

Yes, their women foraged for roots, berries, and other edible foodstuffs while the men tried to hunt a wild animal. And, yes, they sought out a bush or a cave because it was senseless to have the block houses like the 17th century and onward, as the imperialists had. [Imperialists are people who practice or advocate the policy of extending the power and dominion of a nation, esp. by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly: the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence. Merriam-Webster Dictionary] Aside: It sounds like just another word for colonists, settlers, or conquistadors.

So, of all the pejorative [disparaging or belittling] names given to San or Bushmen, they accepted Bushmen as being the closest, in Enlightened terms, that resembled their way of life. But with the Khoikhoi, having become pastoralists [people of a social organisation based on livestock raising as the primary economic activity. Merriam-Webster Dictionary] and calling themselves Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe) [superior men because they owned livestock and did not have to wander in search of food as the Bushmen], added this negativity to the white man’s blind-sided view of the San as also being “connotations of poverty, low status, thievery and scavenging.” 

Writer Megan Biesele who would like to ‘ennoble’ the word Bushmen notes “One Ju/’hoan leader made the ‘Bushmen’ preference to ‘San” at a community meeting in 1991, the year after Namibia’s independence, while Ju/’hoan’s brother at the same meeting said he ‘never wanted to hear the term [San] used again in post-Apartheid Namibia’. Many at the meeting had never heard the word ‘San’, and no one present argued in favour of its use.” In: Alan Barnard 2007: Anthropology and the Bushman, p.7

Let us end by asking: “What do the Bushmen call themselves?” Let us first apply the Perception Pranama and test the validity of our source:

“We (Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and others) have crossed this desert three times, my family and I, on three expeditions, which usually numbered between ten and fourteen people and included my father, my mother, my brother, and myself, as well as several other Europeans who were linguists, zoologists, botanists; or archaeologists; sent by universities of the Union of South Africa (probably University of South Africa, UNISA), England, or the United States, as well as four or five Bantu men - several interpreters, a cook, and a mechanic - who were the staff. 

“We usually travelled in four big trucks and a jeep, and had to carry all our food and water, gasoline, and equipment in supplies to last us for several months. We crossed great drought areas, once crossing four hundred miles of the central desert of Bechuanaland, where there was no water at all, and once travelling every day for two weeks into an unmapped part of the desert of South-West Africa, close to the Bechuanaland border, where we found a waterhole and refilled our empty drums. All this was for the purpose of filming and studying the life and customs of the people of the Kalahari, who are called the Bushmen.”

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas 1959: The Harmless People p.19

She was nineteen years old when Elizabeth Thomas started on their missions and afterwards, in 1979, authored the book, The Harmless People, which has to this day never stopped selling. She was not only untainted by the downgrading racism of the time, but she also brought her non-discriminating family along. 

They came with their Western resources but soon came to realise how ill-equipped the Western one-sided view of the Bushmen's existence was. They were experiencing a touch of it themselves. Why? All for the madness “of filming and studying the life and customs of the people of the Kalahari, who are called the Bushmen.” Quite different from the 97% white-written books concocted in a fancy study using the hearsay of other biased people, some of whom (like Jan van Riebeeck in 1647) had not even seen a Bushman or Khoikhoi indigene in his eight-day stop with a fleet of twelve ships at the Cape, but he referred to them as ‘brutes, savages who cannot be trusted at all.’

But how long was the Elizabeth Thomas group with the Bushmen?

The back cover of the David Philip Africasouth Paperbacks 1988 Print says that Elizabeth Thomas and her family spent four years in all in the Kalahari to study the life of the hunting-and-gathering Bushmen. What does Thomas herself say about this enigmatic community of J/wasi Sān?