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."
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS