KHOMANI DESERT SAN
The San are the aboriginal people of South Africa. Their distinct
hunter-gatherer culture stretches back over 20 000 years, and their genetic
origins reach back over one million years. Recent research indicates that the
San are the oldest genetic stock of contemporary humanity.
Today, the two largest San groups in South Africa are immigrants from Angola via
Namibia. These are the !Xû and the Khwe, currently living at Schmidtsdrift, 80
km outside the Northern Cape provincial capital, Kimberley. There are 3 500 !Xû
and 1 100 Khwe. Both groups claim an indigenous identity on the basis of their
languages and cultures.
The next largest group is the San population of the southern Kalahari. Today,
most San in this area (Lower Orange District) describe themselves as the ‡Khomani.
The group is descended from several original San groups, including the ||Ng!u
(close relatives of the !Xam who lived south of the !Gariep River), the ‡Khomani
who spoke the same language as the ||Ng!u but had distinct lineage, the |’Auni,
the Khatea, the Njamani and probably others whose names are now lost to us. Most
San of this bloodline now speak Khoekhoegowap and /or Afrikaans as primary
language. There are 23 confirmed speakers of the ancient N|u language. They
constitute some of the few surviving aboriginal South African San. Approximately
1 500 adults are spread over an area of more than 1 000 km in the Northern Cape
Province. Most people live in the northern reaches of Gordonia, at Witdraai,
Ashkam, Welkom, Rietfontein and surrounding villages. Others live in and around
Upington and Olifantshoek.
A small pocket of aboriginal South African ||Xegwi San lives on farms in
Mpumalanga Province near Lakes Banager and Chrissie and around the towns of
Lothair and Carolina. Their numbers are not known, though estimates run between
30 and 100 adults. These ||Xegwi San are descendants of a displaced group of
Drakensberg San, famous for the rock paintings made by their ancestors up until
the middle of the last century. Their original language is extinct.
There is a group of about 70 adult !Kung San living across the border from South
Africa at Masetleng and Ngwaatle Pans in Botswana. These people originally lived
next to the ‡Khomani in what became the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (KGNP).
They were displaced by the KGNP and driven into Botswana. They have lodged a
land claim in South Africa though they have yet to resolve the issue of their
citizenship. !Kung is a Northern San language.
There are thousands of people in the Northern Cape who are to some degree aware
that they are direct descendants of the largest South African San population of
the 18th and 19th centuries, the !Xam. In the area of Prieska there are
semi-nomadic farm labourers known as Karretjiemense (Cart People). These people
know they are of San descent and may have spoken San languages in the previous
century.
Recently, the Khoisan Representative Council has attempted to claim
responsibility for !Xam representation. It is unclear at this stage if there are
any coherent community structures that have maintained a !Xam identity or
whether this is a form of revisionism.
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Elsie Vaalbooi (One of the most famous Khomani San people)
Born approximately August 1895 on the farm Grondneus outside Upington, Gordonia
District. Died 7 October, 2002
Her parents were !Uxe "Vaal" and ||Qoisi "Marie", both of them N||n=e San. They
were hunters and gatherers who later became itinerant farm workers.
Mrs Vaalbooi was present at several key historical events in the Kalahari. In
her early memories she recalls seeing the officers of the German Imperial Army
with their feathered helmets during their hot pursuit of Simon Koper's Nama
rebel army into South Africa in 1908. In 1911, Elsie and her mother were
interviewed by the famous linguist, Dorothea Bleek. The photographs or Elsie and
||Qoisi are at the University of Cape Town.
During the Second World War, Elsie had to flee a farm where the police were
trying to arrest the Nazi spy, Robbie Leibrandt. During the 1950s, Elsie's
nephew Jan became a prophet in Noenieput. He predicted that the San people would
get their land back and that the news would travel overseas in a silver bird.
Mrs Vaalbooi was afraid the European farmers would kill them and told her cousin
to keep quiet. Later Jan was murdered.
In 1997, the Khomani San community was busy with their land claim. They were
sad that their ancestral language had died out and asked people if any elders
remembered the language. Mrs Vaalbooi was living in Rietfontein, and said she
spoke "die Boesmantaal". In February 1997, Professor Anthony Traill interviewed
Mrs Vaalbooi and confirmed she was able to speak the extinct language of the
Kalahari which had been recorded in 1936 at Twee Rivieren. Later, the South
African San Institute worked with Mrs Vaalbooi to find another 25 people who
could speak N|u or understand the language. Today there are 8 living fluent N|u
speakers in the province.
In 1998, Elsie provided the Northern Cape with its new motto: Sa ||'a !ainsi
uinsi (We are going to a better life). In March 1999, Elsie watched at Deputy
President Thabo Mbeki signed over 40 000 hectares of land to the =Khomani
community. The news was broadcast across the world. Mrs Vaalbooi conducted a
number of radio and film interviews including with the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation and National Geographic.
N|u, Elsie's language, is the last language of the !Ui language family, that was
once spoken across South Africa by hunter-gatherer peoples. The most famous
example of a !Ui language was |Xam, the language of the Karoo San people. The |Xam
language went extinct in the early 20th century. The National motto is now in |Xam:
!Ke e: |xarra ||ke (Diverse peoples united)
Ouma Elsie is survived by her two sons, Petrus and Hendrik, her grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren.
Source: www.san.org.za/sasi/
Anthony Traill (linguist)
Professor Anthony Traill was a linguist (specifically a phonetician), who was
the world's foremost authority on a San (more broadly, a Khoisan) language
called !Xóõ. He published widely on this language, including a dictionary of the
language. !Xóõ is famous for having probably the largest consonant inventory of
any language on the planet.
For the most part, Traill's publications addressed the phonetics of !Xóõ in
relation to related San languages. He also contributed importantly to the
Khoisan and Bantu instrumental phonetic literature on tone (linguistics) with
respect to voice (phonetics) and breathy voice.
Anthony Traill was Professorial Research Fellow at Wits University for nearly
the decade since he was Professor and Chair of Linguistics (until 1998), in the
Department of Linguistics, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
South Africa. He spoke highly competent !Xóõ, having conducted research in the !Xóõ
communities of Botswana on nearly 100 field trips over more than 35 years. He
also spoke Zulu, Tsonga, Tswana and Afrikaans.
After a long illness, Professor Tony Traill died on April 26, 2007, in
Johannesburg, at 8am. His towering knowledge of Khoisan languages and general
phonetics, and above all his sense of humour in !Xóõ, Zulu, Tswana, Tsonga,
Afrikaans and English, will be missed. He is survived by wife, Jill, and
children Stephen, Carol and Patrick.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
Bushmen or San - the "Aboriginal" or "First" people of the Kalahari and Southern
Africa
The Bushmen or San as they are known to Science, are part of the so-called Khoi-San
races. The word KhoiSan denotes the two related groups of people, namely the
larger KhoiKhoi people, also called Hotentotte who were a physically larger and
more yellow people than the San or Bushmen, and who were cattle-herders and
pastoralists.
There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the Khoisan derided the
hunter-gatherer Bushmen or San, to some extend. I vaguely remember having read
somewhere that , the name San, is actually a slightly derogative name that the
KhoiKhoi used for the Bushmen. The two terms are however so widely used today,
that it would be difficult to change.
The San or Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari around Witdraai, are called the "Khomani
San" by scientists, although the remaining speakers of the language, of which 25
have now been identified, say that this refers to a specific clan. Academics
from the turn of the century had used the name Khomani san for them, but the
community says it is the name of a related clan, that does not really apply to
them. They refer to themselves in the aggregate as "Saasi", and their language
as "!Kabee".
The following main groups of Kalahari Bushmen still live in the Kalahari region
and on its borders: the !Kung Bushmen. the Khomani San, the Vasekela bushman,
the Mbarakwena, the /Gwi, //Ganaa, Kua and !Xo. The !Kung and /Kwe located just
below the name "Lesotho", is at Schmidtsdrift just outside Kimberley, where they
were translocated after the ending of South Africas military campaigns against
Swapo and Angola, many years ago. They were given the choice of remaining in
Angola or Northern Namibia where thet were employed by the South African Army as
trackewrs and interpreters, or to be translocated to an area within South
Africa. Those located at Schmidtsdrift today, chose to be relocated.
The Bushmen are a people with very little in the line of personal belongings.
Just the few skins that they carry on their backs, sticks, a minimum of iron
utensils and tools that they now use, which they have picked up from their
modern neighbours, is all that they have. When you have to carry everything you
own on your back, one learns to travel light! Food, clothing, weapons,
everything he needs the bushman gets from nature.
The Bushmen or San does not have a government, a King or a National leader. Not
even a "Chief", "Chieftain" or "Captain" in the sense understood in Africa. They
lead what many believe to be an ideal and simple social life, where at the most
one or two related families or family groups or clans live together in a loose
knit community or group. Each individual do largely as he pleases, within the
constraints of their customs, and if there is a disagreement about something,
the group simply splits up and the families go their separate ways, with little
or no coercion. They have no taxes, no Government, except that imposed upon them
by outsiders.
The San or Bushmen do, however, have a culture and a religion, and we would do
well to copy many of their cultural practices. They have a life-style that is
most highly attuned with nature, and the ultimate in eco-friendly and sustained
life-style, that they have maintained fore aeons and perhaps millenia. So-called
"Modern man" has only lately started to realise the importance of this.
The Bushmen of the Kalahari is known for their legendary ability to track or "sny
spoor" from "spoorsny" (= cut track) as it is known in Afrikaans. They are
equally well known for their superb hunting ability and endurance. If you had to
catch your meat on the hoof after killing it from a short distance with a
poisoned arrow, you would also develop marvelous endurance, or become mighty
thin in a short time.
The Bushmen are equally well known for their dancing and music, the mimicing of
birds and animals, their knowledge of plants as medicine, poison, and food. They
are perhaps the people on earth that lives the closest to nature, and scientists
are often amazed at the acurate knowledge and fine observational skills of the
San Bushmen of the Kalahari.
Source: www.abbott-infotech.co.za
Queenstown, Eastern Cape (It is proposed that the name Queenstown become Khomani. The Khomani are a subset of the Bushman San)
Queenstown is a town in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is the
commercial, administrative, and educational centre of a prosperous farming
district.
The layout of Queenstown reflects its original objective as a defensive
stronghold for the frontier area and has a most unusual design. There is a
central hexagonal area where canon or rifle fire could be directed down 6
thoroughfares radiating from the centre. The canon sites have now been replaced
with gardens and a central fountain was the dominant feature. A striking
abstract sculpture replaced the fountain as part of the town's 150th
anniversary.
Queenstown lies on the Komani River which forms part of the Great Kei system of
rivers and has a refreshing climate and plentiful water supply from the
surrounding rugged mountains. The water is collected in Bongolo Dam, set in the
hills, used extensively for recreation and watersports. Each year, around the
beginning of June, the town holds an art exhibition with the emphasis on
paintings and sculpture. Perhaps inspired by some of the most interesting
Bushman paintings in nearby caves, which are accessible to the visitor.
Close to Queenstown is a nature reserve with numerous antelope, white
rhinocerous and spectacular flowering plants together with panoramic views from
the mountain summit.
Queen's College and Queenstown Girls' High School are secondary schools located
in Queenstown.
Geology
The Queenstown area is located in the burgesdorp formation of the takastard sub
group, in the upper beaufort group traisic in age in the karoo super group.The
lithology is red mudstone 1-10m rich layers and surb ordinate 1m-2m rich sand
stone layers deposited by meandering rivers in the flood plain in an oxidising
environment.
Queenstown is located within the Chris Hani Municipal district of the Eastern Cape.
The Chris Hani District
PROFILE
The Chris Hani District ranges across the centre of the province, covering a
range of terrain from semi-arid Karoo in the west to the hills of the Transkei
in the east. It is the second largest of the six districts with an area of
37,111 square kilometres. The district encompasses both large commercial
livestock farms and ex-Ciskei and Transkei areas. Queenstown lies at the centre
of the district and is the main town. Cradock, Middelburg, Elliot and Engcobo
are other major towns in the district.
POPULATION
Chris Hani had an estimated population of 822,891 in 1999, giving it a low
population density of 22km². The majority of the population (93%) lives in the
former Transkei and Ciskei areas. Coloureds make up 4% and the proportion of
whites is 2%. Xhosa is the majority language.
CHALLENGES
The Chris Hani District has a base in agriculture with limited agro-processing
industries. The challenge is both to reverse the relative decline in
agricultural production, primarily through increased livestock production in the
ex-homeland districts and to source investment in agro-processing industries.
The unemployment rate of 55% is close to the provincial average, but hides high
unemployment in the ex-Transkei and Ciskei and in the more remote areas of the
Karoo. Social services and infrastructure require improvement, primarily due to
poor services in the former homelands. Some 73% of houses are informal,
reflecting traditional unserviced sites. Only 28% of households have potable
water on site and 50% have a flush toilet or pit latrine.
Source: www.ecprov.gov.za
Bushmen
The Bushmen, San, Basarwa, !Kung or Khwe are indigenous people of the Kalahari
Desert, which spans areas of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. They
were traditionally hunter-gatherers, part of the Khoisan group, and are related
to the traditionally pastoral Khoikhoi. Starting in the 1950s through the 1990s
they switched to farming, with only minor hunting and gathering activities.
Archaeological evidence suggests that they have lived in southern Africa (and
probably other areas of Africa) for at least 22,000 years but probably much
longer. Genetic evidence suggests they are one of the oldest, if not the oldest,
peoples in the world — a "genetic Adam" according to Spencer Wells, from which
all humans can ultimately trace their genetic heritage.
Naming
The terms San, Khwe, Bushmen, and Basarwa have all been used to refer to
hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa. Each of these terms has a
problematic history, as they have been used by outsiders to refer to them, often
with pejorative connotations. The individual groups identify by names such as
Ju!!hoansi and !Kung (the punctuation characters representing different clicks),
and most call themselves "Bushmen" when referring to themselves collectively.
The term "San" was historically applied by their ethnic relatives and historic
rivals, the Khoikhoi. This term means "outsider" in the Nama language and was
derogatory because it distinguished the Bushmen from what the Khoikhoi called
themselves, namely the First People. Western anthropologists adopted "San"
extensively in the 1970s, where it remains preferred in academic circles. The
term "Bushmen" is widely used, but opinions vary on whether it is appropriate –
given that the term is sometimes viewed as pejorative.
In South Africa, the term "San" has become favored in official contexts, being
included in the blazon of the new national coat-of-arms. In South Africa
"Bushman" is considered derogatory by some groups. Angola does not have an
official term for Bushmen, but they are sometimes referred to as Bushmen,
Kwankhala, or Bosquímanos (the Portuguese term for Bushmen). Neither Zambia nor
Zimbabwe have official terms, although in the latter case the terms Amasili and
Batwa are sometimes used. In Botswana, the officially used term is Basarwa,
where it is partially acceptable to some Bushmen groups, although Basarwa, a
Tswana language label, also has negative connotations. The term is a class 2
noun (as indicated by the "ba-" class marker), while an older class 6 variant, "Masarwa,"
is now almost universally considered offensive. (using class 5 labels with class
6 plurals is a common strategy used by speakers of southern Bantu languages to
show contempt for ethnic groups, though there are many societies whose own
endonyms are class 1 nouns with irregular class 6 plurals)
Relocation and government persecution
Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move
Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve even though the national
constitution guarantees the Bushmen the right to live there in perpetuity. The
Game Reserve was originally created in 1961 to protect the 5,000 Bushmen living
there who were being persecuted by farmers and cattle-rearing tribes. The
government's position is that it is too costly to provide even such basic
services as medical care and schooling, despite the reserve's tourism revenues.
It has banned hunting with guns in the reserve and has said that the Bushmen
threaten the reserves ecology. Others, however, claim that the government's
intent is to clear the area – an area the size of Denmark – for the lucrative
tourist trade and for diamond mining. As of October 2005, the government has
resumed its policy of forcing all Bushmen off their lands in the Game Reserve,
using armed police and threats of violence or death. Many of the involuntarily
displaced Bushmen live in squalid resettlement camps and some have resorted to
prostitution, while about 250 others remain or have surreptitiously returned to
the Kalahari to resume their independent lifestyle.
The group as a whole has little voice in the national political process and is
not one of the tribal groups recognized in the constitution of Botswana. Over
the generations, the Bushmen of South Africa have continued to be absorbed into
the African population, particularly the Griqua sub-group, which is an
Afrikaans-speaking people of predominantly Khoisan that has certain unique
cultural markers that set them apart from the rest of the Africans.
On December 13, 2006, the Bushmen won an historic ruling in their long-running
court case against the government. By a 2-1 majority, the court said the refusal
to allow the Basarwa into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) without a
permit was "unlawful and unconstitutional." It also said the state's refusal to
issue special game licenses to allow the Bushmen to hunt was "unlawful" and
"unconstitutional" and found that the Bushmen were "forcibly and wrongly
deprived of their possessions" by the government. However, the court did not
compel the government to provide services such as water to any Bushmen who
returned to the reserve. More than one thousand Bushmen intend to return to the
Central Kalahari Game Reserve, one of Africa's largest protected nature
reserves.
Bushmen from the Kalahari desert have won a court case in which they accused
Botswana's government of illegally moving them from their land. The court said
the bushmen – or San people – were wrongly evicted from their ancestral homeland
in 2002. A panel of three judges ruled by two-to-one in their favour in the
major issues in the case. It is seen as a wider test of whether governments can
legally move people from their tribal and ancestral lands. The leader of the
bushmen, Roy Sesana, emerged from court wearing traditional headdress and
smiling broadly. He told the BBC's Orla Guerin that he would return to the
Kalahari to greet his ancestors within the next few weeks. It is unclear how
many of the San people will want to return. More than 1,000 were evicted four
years ago.
Society
The Bushman kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally
small, mobile foraging bands. Also, the kinship system is comparable to the
Eskimo Kinship system, with the same set of terms as in Western countries, and
also employ a name rule and an age rule. The age rule resolves any confusion
arising around kinship terms, because the older of two people always decides
what to call the younger. According to the name rule, if any two people have the
same name, for example an old man and a young man both named !Twi, each family
uses the same kin term to refer to them: Young !Twi's mother could call Old !Twi
"son", Old !Twi would address young !Twi's sister as his own, Young !Twi would
call Old !Twi's wife "wife", and Old !Twi's daughter would be strictly forbidden
to Young !Twi as a potential bride. Since relatively few names circulate, and
each child is named for a grandparent or other relative, Bushmen are guaranteed
an enormous family group with whom they are welcome to travel.
Traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: a hide sling, blanket, and
cloak called a kaross to carry foodstuffs, firewood, or young children, smaller
bags, a digging stick, and perhaps a smaller version of the kaross to carry a
baby. Women and men would gather, and men hunted using poison arrows and spears
in laborious days-long excursions.
Villages ranged in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring,
when people moved constantly in search of budding greens, to formalized rings
when they congregated in the dry season around the only permanent waterholes.
Early spring, a hot dry period following a cool dry winter, was the hardest
season, after autumn nuts were exhausted, villages concentrated around
waterholes, and most plants were dead or dormant. Meat was most important in the
dry months, when wildlife could never range far from receding waters.
Traditionally the San possessed no status hierarchies. They had no "chief" but
instead made decisions among themselves, on a consensus basis. Women's status
was relatively equal. Women did not begin bearing children until about 18 or 19
years of age due to late first menstruation due to the low calorie and low fat
diet and had them spaced four years apart, due to lack of enough breast milk to
feed more than one child at a time, and the requirements of mobility leading to
the difficulty of carrying more than one child at a time.
Children were very well behaved and treated kindly by the their parents and
group. Children spent much of the day playing with each other and are not
segregated by sex, neither sex is trained to be submissive or fierce, and
neither sex is restrained from expressing the full breadth of emotion that seems
inherent in the human spirit".
The San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts on a
regular basis rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services.
Early history
Bushmen had an advanced early culture evidenced by archaeological data. For
example, Bushmen from the Botswana region migrated south to the Waterberg Massif
in the era 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. They left rock paintings at the Lapala
Wilderness area and Goudriver recording their life and times, including
characterizations of rhinoceros, elephant and a variety of antelope species
(resembling impala, kudu and eland, all present day inhabitants).
In the media
The Bushmen of the Kalahari were first brought to the Western world's attention
in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post with the famous book
The Lost World of the Kalahari, which was also a BBC TV series.
The 1980 comedy movie The Gods Must Be Crazy portrays a Kalahari Bushman tribe's
first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coke bottle).
John Marshall documented the lives of Bushmen in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia
over more than a 50-year period. His early film
The Hunters, released in 1957,
shows a giraffe hunt during the 1950s. N!Ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman (1980)
is the account of a woman who grew up while the Bushmen were living as
autonomous hunter-gatherers and was later forced into a dependent life in the
government created community at Tsumkwe. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a
five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju!!hoansi
of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a fierce and vocal proponent
of the Bushman cause throughout his life, which was, in part, due to strong
kinship ties, and had a Bushman wife in his early 20s.
In Wilbur Smith's The Burning Shore, the San people are portrayed through two
major characters, O'wa and H'ani, and the Bushmen's struggles, history and
beliefs are touched upon in great detail. The Burning Shore is a volume in the
Courtney's of Africa series.
PBS's series How Art Made the World compares San cave painting 200 years ago to
Paleolithic European painting 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities,
the San can help us understand the reasons for ancient cave paintings. Lewis
Williams believes that their trance states (traveling to the spirit world) are
directly related to the reasons people went deep into caves, experienced sensory
deprivation, and painted their visions onto the cave walls.
Spencer Wells' 2003 book The Journey of Man—in connection with National
Geographic's Genographic Project—discusses a genetic analysis of the San and
asserts their blood contains the oldest genetic markers found on earth, making
the Bushmen humankind's "genetic Adam". These genetic markers are present on the
y chromosome and are therefore passed down through thousands of generations in a
relatively pure form. The documentary continues to trace these markers
throughout the world, demonstrating that all of humankind can be traced back to
the African continent and that the San are the last, most genetically
unadulterated, remnant of humankind's ancient ancestors.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post (aka
Laurens van der Post) December 13, 1906 – December 16, 1996. Famous 20th century
Afrikaner author of many books, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British
heads of government, godparent of Prince William, educator, journalist,
humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and conservationist.
Contents
Early years
Laurens was born in the small town of Philippolis in the Orange River Colony, a
British colony in what is today South Africa. His father, Christiaan Willem
Hendrik van der Post (1856–1914), of Dutch origin, had arrived in South Africa
at the age of three and later married Laurens's mother in 1889. Her name was
Lammie and she was of German origin. The family had a total of fifteen children,
with Laurens being the thirteenth, the fifth son. Christiaan was a lawyer and
politician, and fought in the Second Boer War against the British. After the
Second Boer War he was exiled with his family to Stellenbosch, where Laurens was
conceived. They returned to Philippolis in the Orange River Colony in 1906,
where Laurens was born.
Laurens spent his early childhood years on the family farm, remembering how he
became a fan of reading books from his father's extensive library which included
Homer and Shakespeare. In August 1914 his father died and then in 1918 Laurens
went to school at Grey College in Bloemfontein. There it was a great shock to
him that he was "being educated into something which destroyed the sense of
common humanity I shared with the black people". In 1925 he took his first job
as a reporter in training at The Natal Advertiser in Durban, where his reporting
included his own accomplishments playing on the Durban and Natal field hockey
teams. In 1926 he and two other rebellious writers, Roy Campbell and William
Plomer, published a satirical magazine called Voorslag (English: whip lash)
which promoted a more racially integrated South Africa; it lasted for three
issues before being forced to shut down because of its radical views. Later that
year he took off for three months with Plomer and sailed to Tokyo and back on a
Japanese freighter, the Canada Maru, an experience which produced books by both
authors later in life.
In 1927 Lauren met Marjorie Edith Wendt (d. 1995), daughter of the founder and
conductor of the Cape Town Orchestra. They traveled to England and on March 8,
1928 married at Bridport, Dorset. A son was born soon after on December 26,
named Jan Laurens (later known as John). In 1929 Laurens returned to South
Africa to work for the Cape Times, a newspaper in Cape Town, where "For the time
being Marjorie and I are living in the most dire poverty that exists," he wrote
in his journal. He began to associate with bohemians and intellectuals who were
opposed to James Hertzog (Prime Minister) and the white South African policy. He
wrote an article entitled 'South Africa in the Melting Pot' which clarified his
views of the South Africa racial problem, he said "The white South African has
never consciously believed that the native should ever become his equal." But he
predicted that "the process of leveling up and inter-mixture must accelerate
continually ... the future civilization of South Africa is, I believe, neither
black or white but brown."
In 1931 he returned to England and formed friendships with members of the
Bloomsbury group including Arthur Waley, J. M. Keynes, E. M. Forster and
Virginia Woolf. Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf were publishers, and had
previously published William Plomer's works, and it was through Plomer's
connections that Laurens gained introduction to the Woolfs and the somewhat
exclusive and scandalous "Bloomsberries".
In 1934 the Woolfs published Laurens's first novel under the Hogarth Press
label. Called In a Province, it portrayed the tragic consequences of a racially
divided South Africa. Later that year he decided to become a dairy farmer and,
possibly with the help of Lilian Bowes Lyon, bought a farm called Colley Farm,
near Tetbury, Gloucestershire, with Lilian as his neighbor. There he divided his
time between the needs of the cows and occasional visits to London where he was
a correspondent to South African newspapers. He considered this a directionless
phase in his life which mirrored Europe's slow drift to war. In 1936 he made
five trips to South Africa and during one trip he met and fell in love with
Ingaret Giffard (d. 1997), an English actress and author five years his senior.
Later that year his wife Marjorie gave birth to a second child, a daughter named
Lucia, and in 1938 he sent his family back to South Africa. When the Second
World War started in 1939 he found himself torn between England and South
Africa, his new love and his family; his career was at a dead end, and he was in
depressed spirits, often drinking heavily.
War years
In May 1940 Laurens volunteered for the British Army and upon completion of
officer training in January 1941 he was sent to east Africa in the Intelligence
Corps as a Captain. There he took up with General Wingate's Gideon Force which
was tasked with restoring the Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne in Abyssinia.
His unit led 11,000 camels through difficult mountain terrain and he was
remembered for being an excellent caretaker of the animals. In March he came
down with malaria and was sent to Palestine to recover. In early 1942 he was
transferred to the Dutch East Indies because of his Dutch language skills. He
was placed in command of "special mission 43", whose purpose was to organize an
allied retreat after the Japanese invasion of Java.
On April 20, 1942 he was captured by the Japanese. He was first taken to
Soekaboemi (Sukabumi) camp and then to Bandoeng. He played a legendary role in
keeping up the morale of troops from many different nationalities. Along with
other compatriots he organized a "camp university" with courses from basic
literacy to degree-standard ancient history, and he also organized a camp farm
to supplement nutritional needs. He could also speak some basic Japanese, which
helped him greatly. Once, depressed, he wrote in his diary: "it is one of the
hardest things in this prison life: the strain caused by being continually in
the power of people who are only half-sane and live in a twilight of reason and
humanity." He wrote about his experiences in A Bar of Shadow (1954) and The Seed
and the Sower (1963). Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima based his film Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1982) on these books.
While his fellow POWs left for home, Laurens remained in Java, and on September
15th, 1945 he joined Admiral William Patterson on the HMS Cumberland for the
official surrender of the Japanese to the British.
He then spent two years helping to mediate between Indonesian nationalists and
members of the discredited Dutch colonial regime. He had gained trust with the
nationalist leaders such as Mohammad Hatta and Ahmed Sukarno and warned both
Mountbatten and prime minister Clement Attlee, whom he met in London in October
1945, that the country was on the verge of blowing up. He went to The Hague to
repeat his warning directly to the Dutch cabinet. In November, 1946 British
forces withdrew and he became military attaché to the British consulate in
Batavia, but by 1947, after he had returned to England, his worst fears came to
pass: Indonesia collapsed into the civil war which led to independence. Soon
after in the same year, he retired from the army and was made a CBE.
Rise to fame
With the war over and his business with the army concluded, Laurens returned to
South Africa in late 1947 to work at the Natal Daily News, but with the election
victory of the National Party bringing in apartheid he came back to London. In
May 1949 he was commissioned by the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) to
"assess the livestock capacities of the uninhabited Nyika and Mlanje plateaux of
Nyasaland".
Around this time he divorced Marjorie, and on October 13, 1949 married Ingaret
Giffard. Before he married Ingaret, he had become engaged to Fleur Kohler-Baker,
the daughter of a prominent farmer and businessman, who was seventeen years old;
they had met on a ship with an intense but brief affair of love letters, and so
she was shocked when he broke off the relationship. He went on a honeymoon with
Ingaret to Switzerland where his new wife introduced him to Carl Jung. Jung was
to have probably a greater influence upon him than anybody else, and he later
said that he had never met anyone of Jung's stature. He continued to work on a
travel book about his Nyasaland adventures called Venture to the Interior, which
borrowed on the structure of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
In 1950 Lord Reith (head of the CDC) asked Laurens to head an expedition to
Bechuanaland, to see the potential of the remote Kalahari Desert for cattle
ranching. There Laurens for the first time met the Kalahari natives, a
hunter-gatherer bush people known as San. He repeated the journey to the
Kalahari in 1952, the same year Venture to the Interior was published, and it
became an immediate best-seller in the US and Europe. In 1954 he published his
third book Flamingo Feather, an anti-communist novel about a Soviet plot to take
over South Africa, which sold very well. Alfred Hitchcock planned to film the
book, but lost support from South African authorities and gave up the idea.
Penguin Books kept Flamingo Feather in print until the collapse of the U.S.S.R..
In 1955 the BBC commissioned Laurens to return to the Kalahari in search of the
bushmen, a trip that turned into a very popular six-part television documentary
series in 1956. In 1958 his most famous book was released under the same title
as the BBC series: The Lost World of the Kalahari, followed in 1961 by The Heart
of the Hunter, derived from 19th-century Bushmen stories by Wilhelm Bleek.
Laurens described the bushmen as the original natives of southern Africa,
outcast and persecuted by all other races and nationalities. He said they
represented the "lost soul" of all mankind, a type of noble savage myth. This
mythos of the Bushmen inspired the colonial government to create the Central
Kalahari Game Reserve in 1961 to guarantee their survival, and the reserve
became a part of settled law when Botswana was created in 1966.
Later years
Laurens's fame and success was now assured. He had become a popular television
personality, had introduced the world to the Kalahari bushmen, and was
considered an authority on Bushmen folklore and culture. "I was compelled
towards the Bushmen," he said, "like someone who walks in his sleep, obedient to
a dream of finding in the dark what the day has denied him." Over the next
decade he had a steady stream of book releases, including novels drawn from his
war experiences, The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon
(1970). A travel book called A Journey into Russia (1964) described a long trip
through the Soviet Union. In 1972 there was another BBC television series of his
16-year friendship with Jung, who died in 1961, which was followed by the book
Jung and the Story of our Time (1976).
Ingaret and he moved to Aldeburgh, Suffolk where they became involved with a
circle of friends that included an introduction to Prince Charles, whom he then
took on a safari to Kenya in 1977 and with whom he had a close and influential
friendship for the rest of his life. Also in 1977, together with Ian Player,a
South African conservationist, he created the first World Wilderness Congress in
Johannesburg. In 1979 his Chelsea neighbor Margaret Thatcher became Prime
Minister and she called on his advice with matters dealing with southern Africa,
notably the Rhodesia settlement of 1979–80. In 1981 he was given a Knighthood.
In 1982 he fell and injured his back and used the downtime from tennis and
skiing to write an autobiography called Yet Being Someone Other (1982), which
discussed his love of the sea and his journey to Japan with Plomer in 1926. By
now Ingaret was slipping into senility, and he spent much time with an old
friend Frances Baruch. In 1984 his son John (who had gone on to be an engineer
in London) died, and Laurens spent time with his youngest daughter Lucia and her
family.
Even in old age Laurens was involved with many projects, from the worldwide
conservationist movement, to setting up a centre of Jungian studies in Cape
Town. He remained a captivating speaker and storyteller both in public and in
private. In 1996 he tried to prevent the eviction of the Bushmen from their
homeland in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which had been set up for that
purpose, but ironically it was his work in the 1950s to promote the land for
cattle ranching that lead to their eventual downfall and removal. In October
1996 he published The Admiral's Baby describing the events in Java at the end of
the war. For his 90th birthday party he had a five-day celebration in Colorado,
with a "this is your life" type event with friends from every period of his
life. A few days later, on December 16th, 1996, after whispering in Afrikaans
"die sterre" (the stars), he died. The funeral took place December 20th in
London, attended by Prince Charles (who was photographed in tears) Lady
Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and many friends and family. His ashes were buried in a
special memorial garden at Philipolis on April 4th, 1998. Ingaret died five
months after him on May 5th, 1997.
Controversy
After his death a number of writers discredited Laurens. It was revealed that in
1952 he had fathered a child with a fourteen-year-old girl who had been under
his care during a sea voyage to England from South Africa. His reputation as a
'modern sage' and 'guru to Prince Charles' was questioned and journalists opened
a floodgate of examples of how Laurens had not always told the truth in his
books. These facts came together in the 2001 book by J.D.F. Jones Teller of Many
Tales: The Lives of Laurens van der Post, an authorised yet hostile biography
which damaged Laurens' reputation.[3] A rebuttal was offered by Christopher
Booker, a friend of Laurens. While Jones' book did interpret a darker side to
Laurens' life, it did not diminish his popularity and he continued to strike a
chord with many people. Nor could many of his wartime accomplishments and his
conservation efforts be easily dismissed.
Selected works
Works mentioned in the article. For an extensive complete list see External
links.
* In a Province, 1934
* Venture to the Interior, 1952
* Flamingo Feather, 1955
* The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958 (BBC 6-part TV series, 1956)
* The Heart of the Hunter, 1961
* The Seed and the Sower, 1963
* A Journey into Russia, 1964 (US title: A View of All the Russias)
* The Night of the New Moon, August 6, 1945... Hiroshima, 1970 (US title: The
Prisoner and the Bomb)
* Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1975
* Yet Being Someone Other, 1982
* The Admiral's Baby, 1996
Movies
Movie adaptations of his books; otherwise he is not in or involved directly with
these movies.
* Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) —- Based on The Seed and the Sower (1963)
and The Night of the New Moon (1970), about his experience as a prisoner of war.
Starring David Bowie.
* A Far Off Place (1993) —- Based on A Far-Off Place (1974) and A Story Like the
Wind (1972).
Source: www.wikipedia.org
The Gods Must Be Crazy is a film released
in 1980, written and directed by Jamie Uys. Set in Botswana and South Africa, it
tells the story of Xi (IPA: [gi]), a Bushman of the Kalahari Desert (played by
Namibian bush farmer N!xau) whose band has no knowledge of the world beyond. The
film is followed by four sequels, the final three of which were made in Hong
Kong.
The Gods Must Be Crazy I & II
The first two films both present the Bushmen as noble savages leading a simple,
fairly utopian life in contrast with western culture. There are several
slapstick situations, accentuated by the use of fast motion.
These films, and the songs of Miriam Makeba, are probably the only exposure to a
click consonant language for most people living outside of southwest Africa.
Conversely, the arrival of a Coca-Cola bottle thrown from a passing light
aircraft represents the only exposure that the bushmen have with western
culture, reminiscent of so-called New Guinean 'Cargo Cults'.
While a large Western white audience found the films funny, there was
considerable debate about its racial politics. The portrayal of Xi (particularly
in the first film) as the naive innocent incapable of understanding the ways of
the "gods" was viewed by some as patronising and insulting. The film was banned
in Trinidad and Tobago for this reason. However, its many fans believe that it
is exactly the opposite, a send-up of so-called civilization and condemnation of
racism with Xi as the hero.
Some of the debate centered on Xi's reaction to the first white people he met,
assuming they were gods since they were strange (he had only known Bushmen
before), rode vehicles (which he also had never seen before), and were
comparatively huge. However, within minutes he began doubting they were gods.
The second film clearly shows Xi's greater understanding as he tells the
children about the people he had met: "heavy people ... who seem to know some
magic that can make things move," but are "not very bright, because they can't
survive without their magic contrivances."
It should also be noted that the films' depictions of the Bushmen, even if they
were accurate in the 1980s (also a source of debate), are clearly no longer
accurate. The DVD's special feature "Journey to Nyae Nyae" (N!xau's homeland in
northeastern Namibia), filmed in 2003, demonstrates this.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
The first film is a collision of three separate stories — Xi's, the romance
between a klutzy scientist and a schoolteacher, and a band of terrorists on the
run.
The bushmen of Xi's group are living well off the land. They are happy because
the "gods" have provided plenty of everything, so no one in the tribe has
unfilled wants. One day, the pilot of a passing airplane drops a glass Coke
bottle. Initially, this strange artifact seems to be a boon from the gods — Xi's
people find many uses for it. But unlike anything that they have had before,
there is only one bottle to share among all members of the group. They soon find
themselves experiencing things they never had before: envy, hatred, even
violence.
It is decided that the bottle, renamed "the evil thing", must be thrown off of
the edge of the world. Xi volunteers for the task. As he travels on his quest,
he encounters western civilization for the first time. The film presents an
interesting interpretation of civilization as viewed through Xi's perceptions.
There are also plot lines about biologist Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers) who is
studying the local animals, and the newly-hired village school teacher Kate
Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo), and some guerrillas who are being pursued by
government troops after unsuccessfully attempting a coup. Xi encounters both
groups.
Xi eventually finds himself at the top of a cliff with a solid layer of
low-lying clouds obscuring the landscape below. This gives Xi the convincing
illusion that it is indeed the edge of the world, and he throws the bottle from
there. This was filmed at a place called God's Window in what was then called
the Eastern Transvaal, South Africa (now a separate province called Mpumalanga).
This is at the edge of the escarpment between the high and low-velds of South
Africa.
The biologist's mode of transportation is an early Series I Land Rover with no
brakes and tight piston rings, making it difficult to start. Dubbed "The
Anti-Christ" by his mechanic, Mpudi, the biologist's misadventures with the
cantankerous Land Rover make up some of the most hilarious scenes in the film.
The Gods Must Be Crazy II
Xi Changes his name to Xixo–A sequel, The Gods Must Be Crazy II, was filmed in
1985 but not released until 1989. In it, Xixo's two young children encounter
poachers in the Kalahari and explore the back of their truck, and become unable
to jump off once it starts moving. Xixo must once again travel great distances
to retrieve them, and once again encounters various other western characters who
are on quests of their own. The film is notable for the increased role of
animals throughout the story, and for its light-hearted treatment of the civil
war still raging in nearby Angola at the time.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
John Marshall (filmmaker)
John Kennedy Marshall (1932–April 22, 2005) was a filmmaker and anthropologist,
particularly known for his involvement with the field of visual anthropology.
He has been described as a "foul-tempered Hub brahmin who after spending 50
years filming the people of Namibia might be America’s greatest barely known
documentarian".
The
Hunters - a film by ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall.
The film is an early classic in anthropological film follows the hunt of a
giraffe by four men over a five-day period. The film was shot in 1952-53 on the
third joint Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored Marshall family expedition to
Africa to study Ju/'hoansi, one of the few surviving groups that lived by
hunting and gathering. John Marshall was a young man when he made this, his
first feature length film. He was a natural cameraman who found a subject that
would dominate the rest of his life. He has since shot over 600,000 feet of film
from which 24 films were edited. The value of the footage as an encyclopedia of
!Kung life is unequaled by any other body of ethnographic film.
Source: www.wikipedia.org