They roamed the savannahs and open plains for thousands of years, but the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of southern Africa's San tribes is slowly being squeezed towards extinction.
After clashing at the start of the last century with German settlers in modern-day Namibia and then being exploited by South Africa's apartheid regime in the 1980s, the San, also known as Bushmen, are now threatened by the 21st century curses of unemployment, poverty, alcohol abuse and HIV-AIDS.
While the plight of the San in Botswana made headlines in recent months when authorities illegally evicted tribes from the Kalahari, their kinsmen in Namibia and South Africa have fared little better in protecting their traditional habitat.
A glimmer of hope lies in tourism as operators discover this remote part of Namibia where the likes of Gcao Nari, a grandmother of the Juhoansi San tribe, showcase the ancient art of threading ostrich shell beads.
But in a sign of the times, the beads that Nari painstakingly needles under the fierce sun are imported from neighboring South Africa since there are no ostriches left in the area of the remote northeastern Otjozondjupa region.
Nari speaks softly to her granddaughter in the ancient San tongue, with complicated clicks rolling from her lips as she enthuses about tentative plans to re-introduce game to the area as a source of food and income for a people with unparalleled hunting abilities.
"Then my grandchildren can be taught to hunt again," she says.
About 30,000 San remain in Namibia, with the Haikom and Juhoansi the largest groups.
Their numbers dived from the start of the last century when then colonial ruler Germany allowed growing numbers of white settlers to shoot Bushmen and encroach on their traditional hunting grounds.
South Africa took over the territory's administration during the World War I until Namibia's independence in 1990, which followed a protracted liberation war.
Nari remembers the 1970s when the South African military came to enlist the help of the San in return for certain favors.
"They used my husband and other men of our village as trackers along the border with Angola to fight freedom fighters," she says through an interpreter. "The military drilled boreholes for us and taught our children, their doctors in uniform gave us medical treatment and my husband earned a salary."
Other San like the Khwe and Vasekele originated in Angola, were employed by Portuguese colonial military forces during that country's liberation struggle, but fled to Namibia after Angolan independence in 1975.
They were wedged between two warring factions.
The South African military gave them shelter in then South West Africa; the men became trackers and soldiers in a special "Bushman Battalion" against the Peoples' Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN).
In 1990, some 1,000 San soldiers and their families took up an offer from the Pretoria government to settle at Schmidtsdrift, near Kimberley in South Africa's arid Northern Cape Province, fearing reprisals from the new Namibian government if they stayed.
The 5,000-strong !Xu -- an exclamation point precedes the word to represent the distinctive click sounds in their language -- and Khwe communities left in the Northern Cape today have been reduced to relying on government pensions and food handouts.
"I feel caged," says 84-year-old Monto Masako in his sparsely furnished three-room home at Platfontein, as he dreamily recalls his childhood. "My father taught me to hunt with a bow and arrow. We slept in the veld -- it was so free. But that has all been taken away, we can never go back."
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in