San

This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining the nexus between land, economic choices, power, and identity, I analyze the construction of the "Bushman myth "in South Africa as it relates to the ‡Khomani San of the Northern Cape. The myth refers to stereotypical depictions of “Bushmen” based on invented traditions. These traditions are depicted as atavistic manifestations of a historically immutable Bushman ethnicity. Stressing their timelessness and isolation, the Bushman myth thus disregards the San’s internal dialectics and fluid social worlds as well as their historical and local relationships to non-San; nevertheless it has come to define the life of the so-called Bain’s Bushmen and their descendants during the last 80 years. By tracing the development, application, and appropriation of the Bushman myth and its power to define traditions, I hope to contribute towards a much-needed discussion in the present about multiple identities and ‡Khomani ethnicity.



Motivated by a desire to understand the difficulties the ‡Khomani community is facing today, I set out to trace the development of San identity and its relationship to land and the political economy through the past 150 years. My thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Northern Cape in South Africa from Cape Town to Upington and on the ‡Khomani land in January and summer 2008. I conducted 42 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with community members and others ranging from lawyers, government officials, to NGO consultants, and engaged in participant observation. The archival work is based on government records, newspaper articles, correspondence, and ethnographic studies collected in six South African archives.

BA thesis, summa cum laude in history

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek first came to Natal in 1854 with Bishop J. W. Colenso's party to assist with translation of the English bible into Zulu.  A young Prussian linguist, he was the founder of southern African linguistics.  Bleek's doctoral dissertation at the University Bonn, submitted in 1851 as De Nominum Generibus Linguarum Africae Australis, Copticae, Semiticarum Aliarumque Sexualium was written in Latin, and based on a few texts that he had been able to obtain from missionaries in the Cape and from European libraries. This dissertation dealt with the problem of how the more abstract grammatical 'gender' classes of the African languages might be related to ‘sexual’ gender categories (masculine and feminine) in European languages.  Although broadly comparative, it also attempted to provide the first grammars of Nama and Xhosa.  Bleek’s earliest work was the first philosophical and comparative approach to African languages in relation to cultural categories: what we would today call a socio-linguistics.  Indeed, his work on gender as both a grammatical and cultural category anticipated by at least a century similar work by linguists and feminists.  This work formed the basis for his later Grammar of South African Languages published in 1863, a work which formed the basis for all subsequent grammars of Bantu languages and still forms the basis on which all of these languages are described and taught today.  By coining the term ‘Bantu’ as the universal label for a large family related languages and cultures, he paved the way for ideas of pan-African identities and histories, comparative studies in ethnology and linguistics, and helped to make later ethnographic studies possible

The hunter-gatherer rock-arts of northern Australia and southern Africa have much in common. Both places have an abundance of engraved and painted rock-art that occurs at topographically comparable locales. Though northern Australian and southern African hunter-gatherers had no contact with each other, their world-understandings have tended to find expression in similar ways and often involve rock-art imagery. In the case of northern Australia and southern Africa, rock-art points the way, often literally, to multiple landscapes that co-exist but that do not seem to have been equally accessible to all hunter-gatherers. In particular, the notion of inner worlds of extra-ordinary experience simultaneously and immanently existing with the outer world of ordinary existence is pervasive. Rock-art sites represent places where these worlds connected. As important as the rock-art imagery in this respect is the rock itself, which is by no means a neutral support for imagery, but was and is an active, living and sometimes dangerous entity. By using ethnography, rock-art imagery and a consideration of rock and place, we explore the nature of landscape perception and usage among northern Australian and southern African hunter-gatherers and see if these perceptions and practices have an ancient origin or not.

As former mobile foraging peoples, the indigenous Hai//om San of Namibia lost most of their land-including Etosha National Park and Mangetti West-to other groups and the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After independence (1990), the government redistributed some of this land to various expropriated groups. In the following overview , we delve into this complex history to argue that the recent decision by the Hai//om (2015) to file a collective action lawsuit against the government of Namibia over Etosha and Mangetti West must be seen in a context of ongoing, often subtle, processes of land dispossession simultaneously taking place as a result of marginalisation and structural disempowerment.

Rock-art is a powerful and theoretically informed artefact that allows non-rock-art producing people an understanding of the worldview of the rock-artists. But the flow of information in such rock-art researches – ‘us’ observing ‘them’ via `their’ artefacts is often asymmetrical and can be disempowering to the rock-art-producing individuals and communities past and present. Fortunately, rock-art is also able to balance and even reverse this asymmetry. For example, there are certain ‘contact’ period rock engravings and rock paintings in southern Africa that were produced at and after the time of the colonisation of southern Africa by non-Bushmen beginning about 2 000 years ago. Some of the power relations between indigenes and colonists are made explicit in the form of rock paintings and rock engravings. Specifically, much of this rock-art shows how the Bushmen imagined and imaged the colonists.

Evidence from Thaba Sione, a town and rock engraving site in the Bophutatswana District of the North West Province, South Africa, indicates that both the site and its imagery were and are involved in the spiritual and political lives of foragers and farmers. Thaba Sione constituted a hierophany where elements of forager and farmer belief and practice, particularly rain-making, appear to have been modified as a result of contiguity initiated with the movement of Bantu-speaking farmers into the area from at least 1 500 years ago. Today, local Tswana-speakers believe Thaba Sione to be a place of the ancestors and the town Chief and Zionist Christian Church members use the site and its imagery to posit and perpetuate a definite political identity.

South African commercial and production pottery is a
highly neglected field of research. In this article I focus on
reproductions of San rock paintings on domestic crockery
produced by Grahamstown Pottery’s Drostdy Ware
in the 1950s. At first glance, Drostdy’s Bushman wares
appear to resemble clichéd copies of Helen Tongue’s
(1909) reproductions. It is argued that Drostdy’s Bushman
wares offer a partial reflection into the complex,
evolving and frequently contradictory public sentiment
of the 1950s regarding the provenance of San rock art;
its raison d’etre; its public profile in the media, literature,
popular fiction, scientific literature, the arts, festivals
and exhibitions. This article contends that Drostdy’s
Bushman wares both espoused and contested contemporary
realities. The interstitial agency of Drostdy’s
Bushman wares was asserted via the triangulation of
textual markings on their bases; iconography and design;
and compounded by their relative quantitative “weight”.
These wares challenge the political neutrality or complicity
of much contemporary South African art and craft
production.

Using words to capture and convey our beliefs and experiences may seem precise and comprehensive, but such omniscience is illusory (Mitchell 1994). It may, however, be possible to fragment the totalising influence of words and concepts like ‘cosmology’ – knowledge of the world – by using historically specific texts, images, sounds and sensoria to promote epistemological diversity. This approach works well within a ‘culture’. I can, for example, distinguish between Southern Baptist and Greek Orthodox as two heterodox forms of Christianity. But what about other people, in other places, at other times? The people on whose behalf we interlocute - in this case the San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa (Sidebar 1) - have histories marked by imperialism, colonialism, missionisation and Apartheid (Figure 1; Emeagwali 1997). How then do we know when our information about these people draws on their remembrances of original traditions or when it embodies recent histories of violence? Despite ethnography’s ethical problems (Clifford & Marcus 1986), we can use multiple strands of evidence to produce working knowledge that tacks between absolutism and hyper-relativism (Benhabib & Fraser 2004).

The visual primacy of rock-art imagery can sometimes blind researchers to equally important but less obvious, non-visual aspects of rock-art. Recent work from southern Africa indicates that certain San rock-engravings were hammered, rubbed, cut and flaked in order to produce sound; to touch certain numinous images and rocks; and to possess pieces of potent places. By combining rock-art’s non-visual with the concepts of questing and desire we may understand how body, landscape and mindscape combined in an aesthetic and sensory articulation.

The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period 1850-1900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate domain of the new academic discipline of anthropology. Academic anthropology could not claim small-scale societies, but could claim the ethnographic description of small-scale societies, as its professional domain.

The aim of this article is to propose some principles and practices for truth-seeking during research into violent conflict. To achieve this aim, an argument is deployed by analysing the theoretical concepts “truth”, “myth” and “oral culture” as sources of knowledge. This conceptual analysis precedes a discussion on community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a research methodology to access the knowledge of
lived experiences embedded in the oral culture of the San community of Platfontein, near Kimberley, South Africa. It was found that CBPR contains good practices to use in
research to judge the probable truth about disputes. The CBPR process is ideal for determining the accuracy of data in the context of a specific culture, considering the norms, spiritual influences and personal considerations of knowledge-holders that accompany a unique cosmology. A variety and equity of worldviews and perspectives of
what happened during violent conflict successfully challenges hegemonic power relationships, paradigms and narratives, ultimately leading to informed judgements of
what is probably true about a conflict. CBPR with the San of Platfontein revealed principles that can be used as guidelines for researching disputes where oral culture is involved.

A program to develop planetary rover technology is underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under sponsorship of NASA. Developmental systems with the necessary sensing, computing, power, and mobility resources to demonstrate realistic forms of control for various missions have been developed, and initial testing has been completed. These testbed systems and the associated navigation techniques used are described. Particular emphasis is placed on three technologies: Computer-Aided Remote Driving (CARD), Semiautonomous Navigation (SAN), and behavior control. It is concluded that, through the development and evaluation of such technologies, research at JPL has expanded the set of viable planetary rover mission possibilities beyond the limits of remotely teleoperated systems such as Lunakhod. These are potentially applicable to exploration of all the solid planetary surfaces in the solar system, including Mars, Venus, and the moons of the gas giant planets

"An eye witness account of coastal people along the northern Namibian coast was recently found in the State Archives, Windhoek (Elers 1907). In view of current interest in coastal settlement and subsistence, it was thought worthwhile to reproduce relevant parts of the document. It shows that small groups of people were living on the coast searching for beached whales."

The Namibian government promotes community-based tourism (CBT) as market-based development. At Treesleeper Eco-camp, a CBT-project among marginalised Hai//om and !Xun Bushmen (San), we investigate how Bushmen's historically developed paternalist relations shape contemporary local institutional processes. Institutional design principles, seen as prerequisites for stable and robust institutions (norms, rules and regulations), and thus successful CBT, are used to analyse local changes of the project in relation to a government grant. Ironically, after the grant, Treesleeper generated less income and the consequent 'upgrade' intensified conflicts. This study shows that community control, ownership and participation are key factors for successful CBT-projects, but currently the state has obstructed these, just as various other 'superior' actors have also done (throughout history) in relation to 'inferior' Bushmen. We argue that paternalist ideologies perpetuate today in the Bushmen's relation with the state, leading to weaker institutions locally through dispossession of their sovereignty.