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On the northern fringe of the Kalahari Desert, in an area including Angola, Namibia, and Botswana, lies the country of the San people, who numbered 50,000 to 80,000 at the start of the twenty-first century. Linguistically, they are related to the great Khoisan language family, whose speakers have lived throughout eastern and southern Africa for many millennia.The immediate ancestors of the San have inhabited southern Africa for at least 5,000 years. Economically, Khoisan-speaking peoples practiced a gathering and hunting way of life with a technology of stone tools that was recognizable to their twentieth-century San descendants. Another cultural practice of long standing was the remarkable rock art of southern Africa, depicting people and animals, especially the antelope, in thousands of naturalistic scenes of hunts, battles, and dances. Dating to as far back as 26,000 years ago, this tradition persisted into the nineteenth century, making it the “oldest artistic tradition of humankind.” Modern scholars suggest that this art reflected the religious experience of trance healers, who were likely the artists who painted these images. In these and other ways, contemporary San people are linked to an ancient cultural tradition that is deeply rooted in the African past.
Most Khoisan gathering and hunting peoples had long ago been absorbed or displaced by the arrival of Bantu-speaking peoples bearing agriculture, domesticated animals, and iron tools, but the San, living in a relatively remote location, endured. Even the colonization of southern Africa by Europeans left the San largely intact until the 1960s and later, but not completely, for they traded with their agricultural neighbors and sometimes worked for them. The San also began to use iron arrowheads, fashioned from metals introduced by the newcomers. Drums, borrowed from their Bantu-speaking neighbors, now supplemented their own stringed instruments and became part of San musical tradition. Despite these borrowings, when anthropologists descended on the San in the 1950s and 1960s and studied every aspect of their culture, they found a people still practicing an ancient way of life. The following account of San culture is drawn largely from the work of Richard Lee, an anthropologist who lived with and was adopted by one of the San groups who called themselves the Ju/’hoansi. The term literally means “real people”; the slash and the apostrophe in the name denote “clicks,” which are a distinctive sound in the San language.
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Map of modern distribution of "Khoisan languages" ; the languages shaded blue and green are traditionally viewed as San languages.
Subsistence & Daily Life
Subsistence & Daily Life
The basic unit of social organization was a band or camp of roughly ten to thirty people, who were connected by ties of exchange and kinship with similar camps across a wide area. These camps are not permanent, as they move frequently in search of resources, but they typically stay within a central area. The harsh land is particularly difficult in the dry season (early spring) when plants have not yet grown back after winter. At this time, meat is especially important.
The San are familiar with some 260 species of wild animals, and hunting is done by men using bows and arrows and spears dipped in poison from beetle larvae. More than 100 species of wild plants, including various nuts, berries, roots, fruits, melons, and greens, are collected, largely by women. Insects (like caterpillars and grasshoppers) provide perhaps 10% of animal proteins consumed, most often during the dry season.
Anthropologist Richard Lee described San life as a “happy combination of an adequate diet and a short workweek.” He calculated that they consume 2,355 calories on average every day, about 30% from meat and 70% from vegetables, well balanced with sufficient protein, vitamins, and minerals—and, he concluded, they “[did] not have to work very hard” to achieve this standard of living. An average workweek involved about seventeen hours of labor in getting food and another twenty-five hours in housework and making and fixing tools, with the total work divided quite equally between men and women.This left plenty of leisure time for resting, visiting, talking, and conducting rituals and ceremonies. At the same time, certain factors, like drought or unexpected movement of animals, made life unpredictable.
The San around a fire at a camp
Preparing poison arrows for a hunt
Society & Social Organization
Society & Social Organization
San society is based mobility, sharing, and equality in a kinship system. They rarely stay in one place for more than a few months at a time, and flexibility allows them to adjust more easily to changing environmental conditions.
Decisions are made by individual families and camps after much discussion. Women and men both have a high status in San society, are greatly respected, and women may be leaders of their own family groups. They make important family and group decisions and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. Women are mainly involved in the gathering of food, but may also take part in hunting. Men cannot marry any woman who bears the same name as his sister or mother.
San economy is a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services. This system of exchange has more to do with establishing social relations than with accumulating goods. One famous and highly respected hunter named Toma “gave away everything that came into his hands. . . . [I]n exchange for his self-imposed poverty, he won the respect and following of all the people.” It was an economic system that aimed at leveling wealth, not accumulating it.
Maintaining cooperation and equality are vital to San society. One technique, known as “insulting the meat,” involved highly negative comments about the size or quality of an animal killed by a hunter in order to prevent the hunter from thinking too highly of himself. As one man put it:
"When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill someone. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle."
Another practice allows the owner of the arrow that killed an animal, not necessarily the hunter himself, to distribute the meat of that animal. Because arrows were widely shared, and sometimes owned by women, this custom spread the prestige of meat distribution widely within the society and countered any possibility that the hunter might regard the meat as his private property.
Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is very important to San of all ages. Large amounts of time are spent in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances.
Beliefs
Beliefs
The San believe in a creator god who gave rise to the earth, men, women, animals, waterholes, and all other things. In some San societies, it seems that this god has a dual nature and can be benevolent and helpful and also deceitful and foolish. They also seem to believe in lesser gods and ancestor spirits. The most serious threat to human welfare came from the ghosts of dead ancestors, the gauwasi, who were viewed as primarily malevolent because they envy the living.
The San also engage in a great 'medicine or healing dance' and the rain dance were rituals in which everyone participated. During these dances, the women usually sat around a central fire as they sang and clapped their hands. The men then first danced around the women in a clockwise direction and then vice versa. As the dance increased in intensity, the dancers reached trance-like, altered, states of consciousness and were transported into the spirit realm where they could plead for the souls of the sick. These trance dances are depicted in the rock art left behind by the San.
San Rock Art
Conflict
Conflict
Frequent arguments about the distribution of meat or the laziness or stinginess of particular people generate conflict, as do rivalries among men over women. Lee identified twenty two murders that had occurred between 1920 and 1955 and several cases in which the community came together to conduct an execution of particularly disruptive individuals. Lesser tensions were handled through discussion and deliberation; more serious disputes might result in separation, with some people leaving to join another camp.
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