Marginal and poor, some San families find respite in the tourism industry. By Catherine Sasman GOBABIS Young and older eager faces peek out from two wooden hut structures in unison when cars approach on the two-track dirt road. The scantily-clad family emerge as they re-arrange their clothes and immediately form a semi-circle, with the two men in the group on one side stamping their feet in the Kalahari sand to the beat of the women’s and children’s rhythmic clapping and soft singing. “Welcome, welcome!” the family gathered under a big camelthorn tree to sing to the visitors. The show has begun. Over the last two years the San family, Xasa, has become a huge tourist attraction at the privately-owned SandÃÆ’Æ‘Æ‘ÃÆ”šÃ‚¼ne Lodge, formerly a cattle farm but turned into a game farm about 20 km in the eastern Kalahari forest region. Amid a compellingly beautiful environment with ancient plant and abundant wildlife, the family, like most San in the Omaheke region, is encapsulated within a commercial farming economy. Many farmers in the region have also started to adapt to changing economic conditions by diversifying into the tourism industry. A brochure for a safari group of Gobabis in the late 1990s described the Omaheke San for potential tourists as follows: “Amid these desolate expanses [the Kalahari dunes] the Bushman (sic) clans have wandered thousands of years …” Daan Roux, owner of the SandÃÆ’Æ‘Æ‘ÃÆ”šÃ‚¼ne Lodge and marketer of Namibia as a tourist destination, in tandem with the Xasa family, started the “Bushman Cultural Village” to provide a rare opportunity for foreign and local visitors to witness remnants of an ancient and near-extinct culture. The concept, says Roux, was to get travellers in the region to come “closest to the Kalahari and its people”. To the landless underclass caught in a poverty-trap of hunger and perpetual job-hunting, the touristy display of their culture is not just to rejuvenate some of their history and culture to others, but a necessity to survive amid grave economic hardship and political marginalization. “We suffer terribly at Post 13,” says the leader of the group, #Urib (meaning Short Man). Post 13 is about 200 km from Gobabis where the family normally live when not at the cultural village. “The government does very little to help us, so we are very happy when tourists come here. Then we can pay school fees and other things, like anybody else.” But they are happy to share song and dance with anyone interested enough to visit. And the visits usually start with titbits of oral history, of which the San has in abundance. So, tells the 62-year-old !Gorili (meaning Dry Wood), when a man wants a wife in San tradition, he has to prove his worth by hunting down and catching an anteater, apparently one of the most difficult small animals to hunt. A woman shows she will be a good wife by gathering as much veldkos [edible fruits and other plants found in the field] to give to her in-laws. “It is not the date of the wedding that counts,” says !Gorili. “It is whether or not you are ready with what you have to offer to your future in-laws. If a woman cannot not gather enough, she will be a bad wife.” Most unions are arranged marriages, and today, this is still widely practised. If the elders are happy with the find, the marriage is concluded with a feast of wild cucumber, berries, and beans burnt in the ashes of a hot fire. The woman gets an assortment of ostrich egg beads and other ornaments. When a woman falls pregnant with her first child, she goes to her mother’s place until she and the child are strong enough to move back to her husband. When someone dies, says #Urib, the body is wrapped in an oryx or kudu hide and buried. “Come, let me show you something,” says !Gorili. Nearby he has tied a leather strap onto a thin twig of a thorn bush and planted its end to the ground in a round circle. “What am I doing?” he asks in mock instruction. He has laid a trap for an ostrich. Should one come along, and pecks inside the circle, the strap will ensnare the animal around its long neck. “We do not kill just any ostrich,” explains #Urib. “We only kill the old and weak birds.” A romantic view on the San hunting is that the San is considered by many as “natural conservationists”, killing only what nature renders helpless and of lesser value – the old identified by their lang klou (drag-footed) footprints, and worn-out teeth, as well as the weak and dying. The men then proceed to target shoot, allowing the visitor to take up the arrow and bow for a try. The older woman in the group, !Khasa (which means come, let us relocate), and a young girl, Gobe (wild fruit basket), show off their various bush crafts, also on sale at the curio shop at the lodge – ostrich shells burnt to various colours and shapes, leather bags and an assortment of ornaments. Medicinal practices are also explained. For a headache, a small incision is made at the temples with a springbok horn, and blood is sucked out. For snakebite, an incision is made on the affected area and herbs are rubbed into wound. Devil’s claw and other plants are still, #Urib claims, being used to treat common illnesses. Some pundits are skeptical of this form of tourism, though. Such tours, they criticize, are often carefully constructed to perpetuate a mythical image of the former hunting and gathering ways of the San. In her thesis entitled ‘We work to have life: Ju/’hoan women, work and survival in the Omaheke Region’, RenÃÆ’Æ‘Æ‘ÃÆ”šÃ‚©e Sylvain writes that the cultural and scientific value of the San image “is becoming increasingly commoditized in late twentieth century capitalism, where the old-style pseudo-scientific, voyeuristic event of the exhibit is broadened and reformulated as a tourist attraction for post-colonial ‘amateur anthropologists’.” And the urge to find the “authentic” and “real” San is grossly exploited by the tourism big guns. Sylvain adds: “What is particularly alarming about this continuing trend of objectification from colonial to neo-colonial Bushmanology is that this use-value of the Bushmen is today being reformulated to serve a profit-driven tourism industry; this self-oriented objectification of the ‘Bushmen’ is now linked to an industry that profits from keeping the Ju/’hoansi silent when it comes to defining their own ethnic identity.” This highbrowed – though humanist – analysis does not , however, provide an alternative for a livelihood to the destitute San people of the Omaheke. “If all the fences could be taken off, we would not have to suffer hunger and sickness. Then we could have our own lives back,” says #Urib. “We want to go back to that way of life.”