The Bushmen: "The Lost Legacy"

The Bushmen

The Bushmen or San was far from being uncivilised. They had a keen sense of perception which includes a sense of smell. They could gather food from nature and had the wisdom to leave a few to grow and feed them on another day. They did not see any need to farm because they were usually in small clans and their habitats did not allow their foods to grow throughout the year.

They shared the same unique click-type languages as the Khoikhoi because they are historically from the same group that had separated at least twenty thousand (20 000) years before they came to South Africa. The Khoi were one group of Hunter-gatherers. Their contact with the Bantu tribes caused them to begin pastoral farming by several of them. The Bushmen / San who ventured south, were able to expand with purposeful techniques, their hunter-gatherer system of obtaining natural food.

They were capable of remaining a long time without food, and could then devour immense quantities of meat without any ill effects. They were careless of the future and were happy if the wants of the moment were supplied.

 George Theal: History of Ethnography p.10

The Bushmen piled up stone walls in the shape of the sides of a triangle, for the purpose of capturing game. There was a narrow open space at the apex. Just beyond this was a deep pit carefully covered over, into which the animals that were driven forward fell without chance of escape. The construction of these walls required much labour, but the hunters were not deficient in energy.

They made pits for entrapping the elephant and the hippopotamus near rivers.  The Bushmen, who lived in the vicinity of streams containing fish, used long baskets shaped like scoop nets made of reeds for the purpose of capturing the smaller kinds and speared the huge barbels and yellow fish with harpoons of bone.

George Theal: History of Ethnography p.11

The Khoikhoi and San have the most mtDNA haplogroup L0 in southern Africa within their genes. Europeans and other peoples also have this gene inside them. Europeans who know this should cast off racism because their roots lie in these so-called ‘savages’ or ‘wild people.’ Within their time, they were not savages but enlightened folk. Despite them being very seldom more than a band of twenty, there was an absence of incest. They practised monogamy. It is not correct to believe that George Theal, in his History of Ethnography p.19, says that the Bushmen were immoral.

The convenient Sān protogroup eventually found their way into South Africa whence they spread out of the country and some of them eventually made their way to the Cape region. Here there was ample food and wild game. They could therefore make drums and musical instruments and could dance and play games in their leisure time. 

At the Cape, they could also live off the sea. They ate seals and whales when these spilt out of the sea. Their women folk, besides the many root plants, could also gather mussels, crayfish and other smaller and larger dishes. Bushmen were so-called “Bosjesmans” by the Dutch because they did not have actual homes. They slept in the open or made a home for themselves from bushes.

When food was absent or they needed to procure more protein in their diets, they would hunt whatever wildlife was available. Their keen sense of perception and smell were assets to the nimbleness and agility to hunt wild animals. They were more civilised than modern humans in that they made no claim to property, they treasured the absence of violence and were merciful, cheerful and never lacked kindness. These chaste people did not have a chief and were blessed not to have any political situation to rule over them.

At the Cape, they were joined by Khoikhoi, who had either been ousted by their clan or tribe or, like the non-eldest sons, would leave to find his own way. With the Bushmen, he or she could be free to live a life without waste. Living without waste is the second of the three treasures of Taoism. Living like birds, they practised without knowing that this was living in the Kingdom of Heaven according to Jesus Christ. They lived an unselfish life, like children, without intellectualism.

The negativity of the white man’s blind-sided view of the San also has connotations of poverty, low status, thievery and scavenging. When one lives within the Kingdom of God, you are never poor. Yes, you keep a low status in the eyes of people who think of themselves as civilised while they use other low-status people to make money for their greed and ambitions. The term scavengers is totally out of place. They were gatherers, like the birds, in the Kingdom of More than Enough.

The Bushmen / San were one with nature. They had insight into nature. During the Stone Age, they were the ones who drilled stones. They had other labours and skills. They made knives of stone. They knew that their arrows would seldom penetrate the hides of the animals they hunted so they fire-hardened bones of smaller animals onto their arrows.

They knew that penetrating the skin of animals would not kill them, so they used natural poison to tip the arrowheads from serpents and trees.

Bushmen were artists. When they found copper – and sometimes iron – they would make ornaments for the body. They used the skins of the hunted animals to make clothing for themselves. They were not thieves. They were humble like saints and knew how to survive in times of scarcity. This led to ingenuous game-catching techniques, like making traps for big animals to fall in. They gave every unnamed thing a name, and they knew them with skill.

They knew where the waterholes were. During times of drought, when there was not a waterhole for several hundred kilometres away, they knew what wild fruit and vegetables they could consume to give their bodies the water they needed. They were not thievish. They wanted to avoid making contact with strangers. When contact with the outsiders of their clan came about, they knew the art of war with just poisoned arrows. When the white settlers chased away their wildlife, they helped themselves to the livestock of the Boers. This led to a quarrel which led to their genocide in South Africa.

Only people like Elizabeth Thomas, for example, who have stayed with Bushmen for some time, can give a correct view of them. To befriend them is quite a task. They could make themselves invisible in nature. Once a few Bushmen were contacted, and after a while, they found the white person to be friendly, will this news cause other Bushmen to reveal themselves to strangers?

The Bushmen were shorter and of a lighter complexion than the Khoikhoi with which they formed the Khoisan. They only wanted to be left in peace. They did not compete in issues which they could not win. They are only frightened by other people and hope to be spared their attention. They think of all strangers as dangerous people. They call all non-Bushmen ‘animals without hooves’, because, they say, non-Bushmen are angry and dangerous like lions and hyenas. And they called themselves ‘the harmless people.”

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas 1959: The Harmless People p.24

This post ends the Bushmen saga. It will be continued under the broader history of the Khoisan.

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