Monthly Archives: August 2020

Question 1

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What kind of San culture and traditions survive today and what has changed in your daily life after your experience together with Bushmen?
The above question leads me first to qualify my thinking on the calling of these people San or Bushmen.
San, for me, is nothing more than a convenient anthropological generic. In the South African context it is the same as calling all black people ‘Bantu’. I believe that this is an inappropriate insult … these people’s have names, tribal names, and I insist that we learn what they are and use them accordingly.
The last Bushman tribe that I lived with for three years in the early 1980’s called themselves /Gwikwe. In their own language /Gwi means ‘bush’, and kwe means ‘people’, and so I correctly call them Bushmen. If I lived amongst the /Aiekwe who have been academically and wrongly labeled as the Naro, I would correctly call them /Aiekwe – ‘the people who walk on stones’.
These simple respects are a beginning to building a relationship of understanding.

Question 2

Is it correct to consider the todays Bushmen as the descendants of ancient San people who left the great rock art paintings in the Drakensberg?

It is correct to assume that the people’s we collectively call Bushman today are directly descended from the ancient race before them, a stream of humanity changing and evolving through it’s time on earth.  The ‘ancient race’ may be understood as those who came before the ‘first people’, and who were, if anything, the archetypal human, still bound to the animal nature within.  This is the time when ‘the animals were people’, the time of animal-man, and one hears in many of the stories told of the ancient race of how they gradually extricated the animal nature out of themselves, out of the ‘rising’ human being, and of how they finally banished the animal nature out of themselves so that they could become fully human, the First People . . . the first Self-conscious humans. The stories told by the elders bear witness to this relationship with the animal kingdom.

I refer to stories relayed in my book regarding The Ancient Race as well as the animal nature in the evolving human being; ‘The Bushman Winter Has Come’ on pg. 73, 74, 75.