Bushmen: Lessons from the kalahari desert

Codger_64

Codger_64

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I found an old and now rather obscure movie about the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in South Africa. It does show their methods of collecting food and water in a hostile environment and has a mildly entertaining story line too.

[youtube]V2IxsfUpBck[/youtube]

It is posted to youtube in quite a few parts. I couldn't find it as a single streaming movie, but I found it interesting enough to watch it again in parts.
 
I saw the entire movie a couple of times. I should probably hunt up the DVD, it was really a lot fun.
 
One of my all time favorite movies. The only movie's I've laughed as hard from are "There's something about Mary" and "Money Pit".
 
Very entertaining movies, there was 2. Whole family would laugh and laugh.

Would still hold up today for kids.

the whole tribe fighting over a cola bottle then him throwing it back up to the gods and smacking him in the head was priceless. (I am going from memory 20 years back)

also when the little kid was being stalked by the hyena and would run a bit then face the hyena and put a big stick vertically on his head because it was fearful of things taller....
 
I decided to find and watch it this time in regards to what it might show us here on this forum, particularly how these primitive desert dwellers procure food and water. In the first segment (1 of 11) we see the following:

1. Morning dew collected from leaves placed the night before.
2. Licking dew from certain grassy plants.
3. Digging with a stick in places that held water during the rainy season.
4. Squeezing plant root pulp in the fist and using the thumb to guide juice into the mouth.

I know I missed some, besides the food gathering methods I didn't mention.
 
A good friend of mine supplied and trained all of the animals for that movie. Mugabe eventually stole everything he owned from him.
 
I remember seeing that movie as a kid in the theater - it was really great

I just finished reading the book Heart of Dryness - it's a pretty interesting look at how people adapt to limited physical resources.

http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Dryness...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263579300&sr=8-1

This an amazing video of the Kalahari Bushmen in a persistence hunt. I found one shot kinda suspect - where he's pouring water over his body to cool himself off - just not something I think a Bushman would do. Water is just too precious for that sort of thing. They hunt kudu not just for the sustenance of the meat but also for the water the animal carries in its body - as a desert-adapted animal it carries an incredible amount of water and they wring it out of the animal's body very carefully. Male Bushmen take hunting kudu very seriously - if they don't kill one as young man, no one will mate with them. They get beat up by Botswana's game authorities for "poaching" - Botswana has been trying to push them off their land for a long time now which is mostly what the book Heart of Dryness is about, their struggle to remain in the face of increasing drought and the gov't destroying their (government-supplied) water wells. I guess there's a lot of diamonds underneath their land.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo

And an interesting study of persistence hunting in the Kalahari:

www.mattmetzgar.com/matt_metzgar/files/persistence_hunting.pdf

The book Heart of Dryness seemed to imply they use horses and dogs now to hunt kudu - I don't think there are many, if any, Bushmen who still do persistence hunting.
 
Incidentally, although I don't have any links on hand, not only do these people live in the heartland of earliest humanity, their genetics are said to indicate they themselves are the oldest human type. This is a relative concept, of course, since no extant type is "pure".
 
The movie in my first post was filmed circa 1979 and I understand that it wasn't really a documentary, though the first portion was presented in that fashion. In fact, the star was played by a San farmer from Namibia. Having finished rewatching it in it's entirety, that was the best part of the movie from a survival standpoint. Most of the rest was slapstick humor.
 
The movie was never intended as any kind of documentary and any 'survival' info is suspect. The Kalahari is not that bad of an environment and finding water there isn't that difficult, only a matter of knowledge. There are pans everywhere with underground water.
akennedy73, kudu are not specifically adapted to the Kalahari. They can be found all over the southern African sub region from Kenya to South Africa.
I think that the info you might have read would have been specific to a certain tribe of the San. Each tribe will have totem animals that they hunt as an intro to manhood or stay away from for taboo reasons.
Van Der Post has written some excellent books detailing the last 200 years or so of the Sans dealings with whitemen and Buntu tribes.
 
I have this movie on vhs somewhere and will look for it. I wonder if that can be transferred to dvd. Any ideas?
 
Wild is right! Hallet had only one arm and one functional eye/ear. Fishing with dynamite is not a good idea when you aren't absolutely certain of the fuse quality! An unexpected fast burner can be a real problem.

DancesWithKnives
 
762 shooter said:
akennedy73, kudu are not specifically adapted to the Kalahari. They can be found all over the southern African sub region from Kenya to South Africa.
I think that the info you might have read would have been specific to a certain tribe of the San. Each tribe will have totem animals that they hunt as an intro to manhood or stay away from for taboo reasons.
Click to expand...

the info is from the book The Heart of Dryness - I can't vouch for its veracity. The author is a journalist - not an anthropologist or biologist. But that's what he claimed - among Bushmen you either kill a kudu or no one is going to marry you. Like all characterizations of entire societies or cultures, there's probably some truth to it.

As far as the Kalahari being difficult, I think it's something that comes and goes with the climate. In the recent past I guess there's been a lot of drought in that area. There are aspects to desert life that make living easy - most notably the relative absence of infectious organisms. But surviving in an area like that is way beyond my skillset - and I think even the Bushmen find it very challenging at times.
 
akennedy73 said:
As far as the Kalahari being difficult, I think it's something that comes and goes with the climate. In the recent past I guess there's been a lot of drought in that area. There are aspects to desert life that make living easy - most notably the relative absence of infectious organisms. But surviving in an area like that is way beyond my skillset - and I think even the Bushmen find it very challenging at times.
Click to expand...

This has the ring of authenticity to it. Organisms adjust to the harshest likely conditions of their environment. It does no good to be adapted to life in the wet season when the dry season lasts for years.
 
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