• cf. Namib desert, much drier
• rain widely variable; 239 mm in drought of 1963-64, 600 mm in 1967-68
• Okavango Swamp near center, Okav. Riv, but mainly dry/ephemrl rivers

Peoples of Kalahari

• ling, econ, biology, self-ID categories crosscut
• to extent that this disagrees w/Gordon, follow this

NIGER-KARDOFANIAN PHYLUM	KHOISAN PHYLUM
Bantu lang family	Khoe lang family	!Kung lang family
Herero (herders; western stream) Tswana (herders, mixed econ; eastern stream)	Khoekhoen ("Hottentots") in Kal. Desert & Okavango Swamps (herders) Khoe Bushmen (foragers, mixed economy; e.g., G/wi, Kua in central Kalahari)	Bushmen (foragers, mixed economy, cattle workers) mainly in northwest Kalahari (e.g., Ju/'oansi)

Bantus

• 2 major groups ARE Herero & Tswana
• Herero f/western stream of bantu exp, basically pure pastoralist, into cows

  Herero women

• dress emulates turn-cent German garb; remarkable as Germans exterminated most of them (see related article)
• Germans in Namibia. 1904, herero attacked settlers. Germ sent general known for butchery; pushed them into desert, poisoned waterholes, shot many, put rest in labor camps. Pop went from 80k in 1907 to 15k in 1911.
• Herero women forced into sexual slavery so many mixed-race offspring; German studies in teens classify them as genetically inferior. Hitler reads the studies in prison in 1923 and used its notion of subhuman races in Mein Kampf.
• (Gravity's Rainbow has fictional Herero batallion in Netherlands; see related website)
• Tswana eastern stream, more numerous, politically dominant (Bechuanaland renamed in 1966, ba-tswana)
• most Tswana have 3-part econ: farmlands, cattle posts, town houses

Khoisan

• look at livlihood, language, ethnicity
• Khoisan coined in early 20th Cent, referring to 2 groups in central kalahari: Khoi herders, San foragers. So "Khoi-San" now considered ling. phylum
• distinctive feature = clicks. Also click speakers in Tanz; Hadza best known but also Sandawe (mainly foragers too; click languages but syntactic etc. very dif)
• Khoi/Khoe have long history of herding here. Sheep, cattle come in few thou yrs ago, before Bantu expansion (basic pastoral vocab of S Afr herders, INCLUDING BANTUS, is Khoe) - formerly Hottentots (name given by early Dutch visitors to Southern Africa) - but Khoe languages don't correspond to herders; there are Khoi foragers too, and some back & forth & change through history

San

• early 20th cent studies (Bleek, Passarge)
• 1950, Laurence Marshall retires f/engineering, started travelling in kalahari w/family. Son John = filmmaker, wife Lorna published scholarly work
• mostly they focused on area in NE Namibia known by herero as Onyainyai, now on maps as NyaeNyae (see images in D.E.R. archive)
• 1963-64 Richard Lee, Harvard doc student, research in Dobe (Botswana) ; Lee students work there too; wife N Howell demography, many others do later fieldwork; others write f/archival perspective
• starting in 80s, new set of researchers opposed to Lee; some fieldwork, some archival
• ferocious debate
• Sol-Lee 1990 paper resolves much of it

Names

• !Kung lang group; !Kung is word for person, but only used as self-label by Northern Kung in Angola
• San is dergoatory Khoi term for foragers
• Bushmen preferred by Gordon; infuse words w/new meaning rather than banning them
• but not nec. derogatory; Bush often simply means countryside, and anyway at Windhoek meeting, forager groups settled on name "Bushmen"
• Ju/'oasi is self-ID for Lee's group

Perspectives on Bushmen

• ecol anth (studies human-env) concerned w/HG system; how system works; what foods, what technology, soc org, movement
• arch studies HG; similar interests but esp settlements, material remains
• students of evolution of econ may put HG economy into comparative perspective
• f/these perpectivess, interest in Bushmen's good nutrition, light workload -- challenge to notion of HG struggling to survive; may be inclined to overlook Bushmen economic linkages with farmers/herders & others
• but dif set of concerns arose in 70s; concern for how rural life is affected by stronger econ forces far away, usually more powerful, and usually negative effects on rural people
• f/that perspective, interest in Bushmen history of being pushed around, barred f/lucrative pastimes; see them as rural proletariat
• f/this persp, the nutrition/workload is not imp, in fact distorted; like telling ghetto poor it's good they don't have long doctors' hours

Lee

• Lee began with ecological interest in HG, as reflected in his intro:
  

  a book like this one can only hint at the fragility of this quality of life as it attempts to adapt in the face of onrushing change. Working with a people like the !Kung is like a race against time: only four years after my arrival teh first trading store opened, six years later a school and a clinic were built. By the 1980s, transitor radios and Western clothing were evywhere. I was able to observe a foraging mode of life during the last decades of its existence.

• Howell pointed out they weren't there to see rural proletariat so overlooked signs of it.
• Given their perspective, summarize findings:
  • Resources: low pop density; under .5/mi2 but hard to measure; mongono (mangetti) nuts; morama "nut" (bean), melons; hunt too but around 3/4 subsistence f/gathering plants
  • Settlement: live mainly in bands, maybe 25 people but variable; move frequently, little accumulation
  • Workload: working ca. half-time -- 2.5 days a week, but note difficulty in measuring
  • Health: generally very good; avg adult intake 300 M. nuts, calories of 2.5# rice & protein of 14 oz lean beef; water f/melons
  • Demography: no contraception, but long birth spacing, probably linked to frequent nursing and lactational amenorrhea (on cattle posts, birth interval drops)
  • Egalitarianism: not all HG were egalitarian (Kwakiutl example), but Kung are, and became famous example
  • Bottom Line: Lee (1968) calls "persistent and well adapted way of life"

• Impact
  • 1966 Man Hunter conference (1968 book), revolutinized thinking on HG; !Kung became the classic case of well adapted, light workload
  • arch at this time revolutionize theory of origins of ag
  • and whole rethinking of poverty: Stone Age Economics (M.Sahlins 1972:36)
    

    The world's most primitive people have few posessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

Were the Ju/'oasi a separate economic system?

Caption by Documentary Educ. Resources: In 1978, the South African army began to recruit Ju/wasi for their war against the guerilla forces of SWAPO (South West African Peoples' Organization). By 1982, there were about 250 Ju/wa soldiers earning 600 Rand per month. Given the conditions at Tshum/kwe, it was a hard offer to refuse. The high salaries soon created sharp divisions between "haves" and "have-nots", fueling the sense of frustration and despair, and worsening conflict. The army's public relations stereotype of a Bushman soldier was that of an instinctive tracker and fierce killer "with a SWAPO kill-ratio of 63-1." Ju/wasi have never in their history organized themselves for war. The irony is doubled by the fact that those young men born since 1960 have never learned how to track.

• even when Lee was there, they were increasingly linked; during 70s,80s linkages increased
• e.g., 70s-80s SW Afr Peoples Org (SWAPO) pushes into Kalahari, hire Bushmen (S African forces do too)
• cattle posts also bring about new linkages:
• herding always limited by water; early herders would have been restricted to seasonal incursions, or year-round herding in wettest areas like Okavango River
• new boreholes, up to 800' deep, deisel pumps, support cattle posts; bring in herders (esp Hereros) year-round
• Lee described some Ju/'oasi in 60s attaching to cattle posts; more pronounced since; so concentrating Bushmen sett (causing problems for tourism)

But during 80s, deeper criticism emerges from Wilmsen, Gordon, Denbow, others:

• Bushmen in regional econ networks thousands of yrs ago, and ceased to exist as independent societies long before the historic period
• their recent situation doesn't reflect "persistent well adapted way of life"; reflects instead how marginalized, subjugated people in poor environments respond. better seen as rural proletariat.
• Kalahari foragers is anthro invention; Denbow on "romantic accounts of Bushman isolation and independence", "an ahistorical and timeless cariacature".
• in this view, !Kung Bushmen are Namib-Bots underclass, getting food f/bush because excluded f/sources of prosperity;

Did Lee concoct foragers?

• he did document Ju/'oansi interaction w/Herero, and later described other e.g.'s of econ links: e.g. mafista herding; but Solway & Lee argue this doesn't contradict earlier analysis of Dobe Ju/'oansi;
• for 1 thing, occasional trade for outside exotics centuries ago doesn't render them appendages to regional/global econ; they still lived in bush off of wild goods
• even Mafista herding; Kung who did this did so voluntarily, and they retained rights to communal hunting areas, and still HG, so that didn't make them into non-foragers
• 2nd, more important: these Bushmen aren't all the same; compare 2 Kwaneng & Nyaenyae
• fur trade of mid-19th C among Kwaneng + long interaction w/larger econ systems mainly characteristic of Bushmen south of Nyaenyae
• So hard to dismiss depictions of 1960s Ju/'ansi foraging, but by same token can't use as model for HG in general; Solway & Lee don't even want to extend to Kwaneng area of Kalahari (Nyaenyae IS more isolated; no Iron Age evidence until 20th century)
• notion of "Kalahari forager" an invention if it means PURE forager; real key to getting by in Kalahrai is flexibility. Sometimes fish, herd own cows, hire yrself out, garden, forage, live off hand- outs or wages

Bushmen Issues today

• Kagga Kamma "Place of the Bushmen" human zoo
• The Nation, "Search for Authenticity": better dead than zoo attractions?
• actually Khomani San won only indigenous land claim in Africa, in S Africa
• but other Bushmen expelled from Central Kalahari (partly for eco-tourism), lost case recently
• so Bushmen do have a past, and a present