The indigenous population of southern Africa has always been the Bushmen - excellent hunters, gatherers and nomads. They are also consummate trackers, dancers, artists and connoisseurs of snakes, insects and plants. No one in Africa can match their knowledge of nature. Bushmen is a collective name applied to several indigenous South African peoples. According to the latest data, they are considered the oldest representatives of humanity.
The Bushmen are a tiny people living on the border of the Kalahari Desert in the states of Namibia and Botswana for more than 30 thousand years.
People from the bush
For most of this time, they were the only inhabitants of South Africa. By the time the first European settlers arrived here, the Bushmen were leading a very primitive life. They hid in bushes and lived in temporary huts or under awnings of branches and grasses. Therefore, they received the name "Bushmen", which in English means "a man from the bushes", "people of the bush" (in English Bush - "bush", "area overgrown with bushes"). This name is sometimes considered offensive (after all, even before the arrival of the British, the colonists from Holland called the locals bosjesman - literally "forest man"). The Bushmen themselves do not have a common self-name and call themselves only by belonging to a certain tribe.
The Bushmen never had kings, chiefs, judges, and priests - in other words, no social hierarchy. Throughout their history, they could not afford the luxury of creating a bureaucratic apparatus of power and religion, living at the expense of society. And the reason for this lies in the very way of life of this people, constantly being in conditions of half-starved vagrancy in the hot desert.
Their place of leaders is taken by elders - or healers, who are traditionally chosen from among the most intelligent and experienced members of the family. They are credited with the ability to communicate with spirits, cause rain, heal diseases, and even control nature. But at the same time, they do not enjoy any material advantages. All decisions in the life of the tribe are made at general meetings by voting. In its conduct, each member of the tribe has one vote. The Bushmen still live in tribal or family democracy. It is possible that this is the oldest democracy in the history of mankind.
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These people are distinguished by their love of freedom and spontaneity. The feeling of mutual help is extremely developed in them. For example, a child, finding a juicy fruit in the desert, will not eat it, but will bring a treat to the camp, and the elders will divide it equally. By their nature, the Bushmen are very truthful, they do not know how to lie and hypocrites, although they remember offenses for a long time. They do not know what money is, have no idea of time and do not look into the future. These are real children of the wild, who, even in a waterless desert, will find themselves water and clothing, strike fire, and if they get meat, they will be the happiest people in the world.
Unpretentious children of nature
A modern man, who has fallen into the depths of the Kalahari Desert, cannot imagine how one can live here: lack of water, scorched earth and heat at 50 °. Nevertheless, people live here. Moreover, the Bushmen believe that in the Kalahari, unlike, for example, the Sahara in northern Africa, it is much easier to live: after all, small bushes grow here and, therefore, a lot of living creatures are found. In addition, there is water underground, which is easy to get with the help of long tubes stuck into the ground.
Bushman men are skillful hunters, women are gatherers of all kinds of plants. They can find up to 300 species of edible berries, tubers, leaves, seeds, and bulbs. Lizards, caterpillars, centipedes, insect larvae, ant eggs, honeycombs and other living creatures are also eaten. Bushmen make porridge from seeds that accumulate in anthills, but fried locusts are still considered an exquisite delicacy.
Despite being omnivorous, the Bushmen's favorite dish is meat. If it is, it is happiness! But it is rarely possible to kill an antelope, therefore, when the hunt ends in luck, the Bushman family can eat a medium-sized animal at one time in a few hours. They eat for future use, like wolves, enjoying their food. And their appetite is excellent!
Despite their short stature and frail build, Bushmen men are proportionally built, and their physical strength and endurance are amazing. Under natural conditions, the Bushmen are the physically strongest people who do not attach importance to even serious injuries. European doctors sometimes performed operations on them without anesthesia and were amazed that at this time the patients were talking animatedly. European settlers have preserved the story of an old disabled Bushman who, as a child, was kicked into a steel trap. The boy did not have the strength to unclench it, and he cut off his foot along the tendon. He lost a lot of blood, but survived and did not fall into the clutches of a leopard.
When the Bushmen find childbirth while moving through the desert, they leave the group for a while, and then with the born child catch up with the relatives who have gone ahead. Usually women breastfeed their babies until the next birth, which may be three or four years from now. Until recently, if a child was born earlier than the specified time, the mother would kill the newborn in order to allow the previous child to survive.
Life in extreme conditions left its mark on the appearance of the inhabitants of the Kalahari. Outwardly, they differ from Africans belonging to the Negroid race. Bushmen have Mongoloid facial features, thin lips, lighter skin with a reddish tint, and slightly puffy eyelids. They belong to the so-called capoid race. They develop wrinkles quickly, usually by the age of 35, and curly hair grows only on the head. Young Bushmen are considered the most attractive and graceful in Africa. However, in adulthood, they lose their charm, standing out with overly large hips and a swollen belly. This is no coincidence - after all, a large layer of subcutaneous fat contributes to survival in times of famine.
The tragic fate of the aborigines
Once upon a time, tribes of Bushmen roamed the entire coast of the Namib Desert in South West Africa, and even earlier they lived in most of the African continent. About one and a half thousand years ago, they encountered the black herders of the Bantu people who came from the north - representatives of the Negroid race. The indigenous population was driven from their hunting grounds into the hot Kalahari desert. The confrontation with the Bantu among the Bushmen was quite tough, but compared to what began when Europeans appeared in Africa, it seems like a real harmony and friendship of peoples.
By the time of the massive appearance of Europeans in South Africa in the mid-17th century, the Bushmen were living in a Stone Age. The local population turned out to be extremely undesirable for the white colonialists. The fact is that the Bushmen innocently believed that everything that grazes in their territory belongs to everyone. They denied any property right not only for themselves, but also for neighboring peoples. And since everything on earth is common, they hunted both wild animals and the livestock of their neighbors if they were poorly looked after. Because of this, the Bushmen could not get along with either their African neighbors or the white-skinned foreigners who settled on their lands.
As a result, the migrant farmers declared a brutal war on the aborigines and began to methodically destroy them. Only the Dutch-Boer and English colonization in the 17th-19th centuries led to the extermination and death of almost 200 thousand Bushmen. The Europeans destroyed them like wild animals: they organized punitive expeditions, organized round-ups, poisoned wells with water, and even burned dry bushes together with the inhabitants hiding in it. One day around one of the poisoned wells, 120 aboriginal corpses were found.
The Bushmen tribes began to fight the Europeans, but they lost all the wars. As a result, from the multi-million people, according to various sources, from 100 or 50 thousand to 7 thousand people remained. They still do not have any property, no reserves or savings, no professions and jobs, no money, of course. Today they are driven into the waterless Kalahari regions, where they seem to be doomed to extinction. However, if they manage to get meat and water, they feel much happier than their white and black enslavers.
Evgeny Yarovoy