Among the keepers of the oldest memory of the human species
There are seven 'living museums' in Namibia, located in remote areas and run by San hunters and gatherers and other local people. They offer visitors the opportunity to learn about their culture: from hunting and gathering to their dances and legends
7' min read
7' min read
Crouched in the red sand of the camp, he had just finished lighting a fire with two sticks. 'The male', 'the female', he said, showing them off, curious perhaps to see if the allusion was intended, but not malicious. They were light sticks of marula, baobab, or Senegalese maytenus. He rubbed them one into the hollow of the other, with a few tiny pebbles deposited in between, in the 'female' cavity, swiftly rotating the male in his tapered hands. A few cries of incitement, and a wisp of smoke rose into the air. He drew a fine straw closer and when the smoke began to spread, he gently gathered it in his palms and blew until the flame emerged. Then he laid it in a nest of twigs that immediately ignited.
Now, however, it is the bow that is showing, the arrows. They are disassembled: the tip is tied tightly with an antelope tee to a short, hard stick, which is threaded through a long, thin cannula. When the animal is shot, only the cannula pulls out, leaving a bloody clue for the hunter, while the tip remains embedded in the flesh, more difficult to detach for those without hands, and thus releases all its lethal venom. The points,' he explains, 'were made from the giraffes' leg bones. They were left to soak for four days. Once they became more malleable, they sharpened them.
Then he looks at me. His gaze is clear, penetrating, ironic perhaps. He seems to really see me. I feel seen. I wonder what he sees. I remember that I have come all this way to ask them who we are, who I am. They, the San, here the Ju/'Hoansi San, who hold the oldest memory of the human species. Who still live as we all lived, before the adoption of agriculture and farming took us so far from what our genes evolved to do, from our genetic self. Too fast the cultural evolution: biologically we are still the same nomadic humans who lived by hunting and gathering.
"When the Europeans arrived and started to fence everything in,' he says without emphasis, peering at me from the corner of his sharp, laughing eyes, 'that's when we started to peel off the metal of the fences to make triangular arrowheads that stayed firmly fixed in the flesh and therefore were not lost and could be reused. His tone is pragmatic, not vindictive. I look at him, wanting to understand if he is telling me something else, but he does not reveal himself. He shows me those efficient points 'stolen' from the fences that kept them out of their lands, that still confine them to the margins of a territory, that of southern Africa, of which they are the oldest inhabitants. They were the first, they have become the last. Their presence, witnessed also by splendid rock depictions in what are now Namibia and Botswana - which even asks them to buy a periodical permit to allow them to hunt - is tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years before the invasions of populations of Bantu shepherds, whom they call 'the blacks', because they instead have amber skin, and the more recent and more terrible usurpations of the whites. Traces of both remain in the stories handed down by the elders: when one evening around the fire I ask them if they have any memory of them, the tale of the violence and kidnappings for the slave trade is still vivid and full of strong emotions.
The tips are thin metal blades, they look almost harmless. To give them their shape, they beat them on the fire, he explains, showing a prodigious tool made from a very hard twisted root, which, depending on how a blade is inserted into it, turns into an axe or a scraping tool, or beating. It is not the weight of the arrows, the propulsive force of the bow, that allows it to kill even very large animals, such as kudu, giraffe, buffalo, once elephants, but the poison. A very powerful poison, which they only give to a boy when his behaviour allows him to be considered an adult. Not everyone can use it, it is too dangerous. But it is not exclusive to men, women also hunt if they want to: they are egalitarian cultures those of the San, and almost devoid of ceremonies and cults.
