The hunter-gatherers and beachcombers of the early Cape
Of all the African people living in South Africa one
can probably say that the only truly original indigenous people remaining are
the Nama and the San – small-framed, apricot-skinned beachcombers and hunter
gatherers who walked the land for food and fished along the rocky shores in
turbulent waters more than three hundred and fifty years ago.
With a tiny
physique, an earthy complexion and wrinkled appearance, the San have good eyesight,
can see great distances and were skilled trackers who could study a pile of
manure or animal dung and tell you which animal had made the deposit, the age
of the animal, and the direction it had gone. The San had rock paintings all
along the coast as if to dress up the places where they had been and left their
signature; they were hunter-gatherers with a wonderful sense of poetry, music,
and art.
Remnants of the
San remain, and have been made famous in the well-known film by Jamie Uys known
as The Gods Must be Crazy – where a Coke bottle falls from the sky and causes a
tribe member to start walking to the end of the earth to return it to the gods.
The act of trying to give back a Coke bottle to the gods is evidence of their
delightful nature. The San speak both Khoisan and Afrikaans and make a click
sound when they speak. Hunted by the early settlers in the 17th and
18th centuries, they fled north and disappeared.
The
second group, the Nama, close in colour and stature to the San, who also had Mongolian
features, originally lived around the Orange River in southern Namibia and northern South Africa in the mid nineteenth
century. Before this, they lived in Namaqualand
and were called Hottentots.
Today, about 60,000 Nama live in Namibia,
and an entire community reside in the four districts in the
Richtersveld, a mountainous and stony landscape, in Eksteenfontein, Kubus, Sanddrift
and Port Nolloth where they have houses along sandy streets with some trees, a
café, a school, a church with a piano. The Nama, however, have their problems;
alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, and fear that their culture and language will
soon disappear. The children are uninterested in learning the language of their
elders and many of them now speak only Afrikaans.
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