The San

The most advanced civilisation on earth, soon to be extinct.

I studied the San while I was doing a Bachelor's of Social Science at the University of Cape Town in the early 90's. I studied their culture in Anthropology and their folklore in English Lit.

It is a harrowing and tragic tale, that of the San, and it really highlights the biblical analogy of the Garden of Eden. The San have eaten of the fruit of the "tree of knowledge" when they came into contact with European settlers (what indigenous races has ever benefited from the effects of "civilisation" brought be Europeans?) and now they have been banished from the Garden, never to return.

The South African Army has used the San (or the less Politically-correct term "Bushmen") as trackers for many generations, and the influence of the money they were paid and the trappings of civilisation it paid for has been a major factor in the demise of the San. Instead of being able to survive and thrive in the type of environment that would kill any other human, the San are now dependant of money gained from jobs so that they can buy the clothes, tools and food which they used to find or make themselves.

This is not the only factor. One of the most endearing things about the San is that they have absolutely no concept of ownership of property. If one clan member has something, e.g. a pestle or a bow and arrow, then another can ask them for it, knowing full well that it will be given (not loaned, not bartered or swapped, not hired and definitely not sold) with good grace, just as the donor will know that s/he (and everybody else) is entitled to anything that any other clan member possesses. A perfect economic system.

You can imagine how impressed farmers (of all creeds) were when the San would apply this logic to their cattle or sheep... hence the declaration of the San as "vermin" and their wholesale slaughter with rifles from horseback. The San also saw the settlers (African migrants from the North as well as European) as a threat to the game in the area, which they depended on for survival, and would often attack them with venom.

The only areas where you would now find "true" San are the areas where nobody wants to farm and where there are no Game Reserves...i.e. nowhere in Southern Africa! And now they live on Farms or in ghettos near cities, doing menial jobs and spending whatever money they earn on alcohol, another "benefit" of civilisation. All the knowledge that was passed from generation to generation to ensure the survival of the San is now lost forever, and the San are not far behind.

The San were the true "Children of Gaia". They worshipped God through their environment and respected it because they knew that their very existence depended on it. They never took more than they needed always apologised to and thanked the animal they killed, explaining that they had to feed their clan and would move from area to area, following the rains and allowing the land to recover from the effects of their presence.

The San were the highest level of human evolution. Their bodies were adapted to survive long periods without food or water, their knowledge of the uses of the plants and insects in their environment was phenomenal, their hunting abilities unsurpassable, their music and art highly sophisticated and beautiful and their society was one without war, famine, disease or crime. There are stunning san cave paintings in the Drakensberg and other mountain ranges and there exists the mummified bodies of San who were packed in leaves from a plant which they new to have preservative properties, Mummies which outdate even the mighty Egyptians'.

They lived in perfect harmony with one another and with Gaia, and now they are all but gone. If you want to see a "real" San settlement today, you can drive about 400km North East of Cape Town and there you can stay in an air-conditioned hotel and be taken on guided tours through a protected San reserve. It's a bit like a Game reserve or Zoo, and things seem a little contrived, because the San would have moved away long ago and so there is not enough animal and plant life to support them, so they use the money from the tourists to buy food and clothing.

But it's all that's left. The San cannot live as they did, because everywhere they go, there are fences between them and the animals they need to survive and Framers and Game Guards who will shoot them for have them arrested for stock theft or for hunting on a Game Reserve. Even if they did find a proper place to live, they wouldn't be able to survive, because too many generations have gone off to track for the Army and work on farms and in cities and the knowledge was not passed to that absent generation, or to their descendents.

All I've said here was written during my lunch hour, dredged from what I can remember from Uni, all those years ago, without any fresh research so I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I wish that something could be done to protect the San, maybe the reservation of a territory big enough to support them, and their complete isolation from everybody else in the world. Hopefully there are some San who have never seen a European and have been taught the survival skills of their parents and grandparents instead of going to school and getting a job, but I seriously doubt that.

Maybe the San's time has come and gone. The world has changed and they're adapting to it in order to survive, as they always have. But it's a terrible shame to think that such an efficient and harmonious way of life is being replaced with dependency on a centralised economic system, designed to enrich a few at the expense of many.

OK, so what do we do now, us descendents of the race who eradicated the most beautiful people ever to wall this beautiful planet? Well, we can learn from them, for a start. Read as much as we can about them. Read their folklore, read the stories documented by Anthropologists, about how their society was structured. Go and see their cave paintings listen to their music and to their stories and songs told in that beautiful, complex clicking language. There is a lovely, slightly frivolous and not totally accurate film about the San, called "The Gods Must be Crazy" By Jamie Uys - not exactly an anthropological study, but very informative and a good start. Any South African university's anthropological department should be able to provide plenty of film documentaries about the San, not to mention scores of books and papers. Learn about the San, follow their example as much as you can, tell your children about them, don't let them be forgotten.