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The San Tribe

The Botswanan government, dominated by Bantu tribes and Europeans, look upon the San as primitive, embarrassed by the San’s Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture. Only a few thousand San actually manage to live in this manner. Most work on European-owned farms for wages or for other Africans as hunters, herdsmen, and laborers, often toiling for provisions. It could be that more settled farmers and townspeople find the San’s simply style of life unsettling. Hunter-gatherers typically enjoy a steady, highly nutritious food supply. Even when neighboring agricultural peoples are facing hardships from drought, the hunter-gatherers rarely goes hungry. Averaging fifteen hours of week of word, hunter-gatherers do not have to work hard to survive, though no one from the outside would like to experience the privations they must routinely endure on the hunt. Spared a life of agricultural drudgery, the San face a different set of problems.

The San are perhaps the finest trackers in the world. A returning party, especially a successful hunter, is received with great acclaim, but the game actually belongs to the owner of the arrow that killed it. As hungers often exchange arrows and other equipment, it is very likely that the owner could be different from the person who shot the animal. But in the scheme of things ownership matters little. The meat is distributed evenly among the camp so everyone benefits—to eat in front of the person without food is an immoral act. Sharing is the heart of the San way of life and a cornerstone of their morality. Indeed, all tools essential to hunting and gathering are circulated on a borrow-lend basis, as many people do not own the necessary implements. Despite popular notions, hunters provide only the garnish of the San diet. Between 60 and 80 percent of what they eat is gathered by the women, not hunted. As opposed to the female domain of gathering, hunting is given such importance because it is a male activity, and it carries with it an exciting element of danger beloved of early travelers and investigators. In making the first documentations, these explorers tended to talk mostly with the men of the tribe, who reported primarily on their own interests.

It is common with hunting people s to believe they have a compact with the animals that sustain them. The San never kill an animal without saying “thank you” to it and offering a dance to it for allowing itself to be killed so they could live. When a large kill has been made, dancing may go on until dawn. Dancing and singing are the mainstay of San ritual and expression. They also drive away evil spirits; when someone is sick, he or she is made to crouch within a circle of dancers. The dancers will absorb the spirits through a laying on of hands. But the San will dance for much less. Sometimes after dinner the women will being singing, inciting the men to dance around them.