The Bushmen

       Early in the morning the Bushman camp is astir. The women get up first and start the fire and prepare breakfast, usually leftovers from the night before. After breakfast everyone leaves for work. In the old days in the Kalahari Desert game was more plentiful than it is today, and the men furnished most of the food by hunting. Today game is scarce, and many of the larger animals have been killed. There is too little water for farming, and the wild plants and vegetables that the women gather are the main food of the Bushmen. Often they must go hungry.
       In the morning the men leave first for the hunt, and the women soon set off in another direction to gather wild vegetables. The little children follow their mothers in single file. As soon as they can, the women tum homeward, but sometimes they must go long distances in the search for food; so it may be late afternoon before they get back to camp. Quickly on the way back the women gather firewood to cook the evening meal. The children help so that the food will be ready when the men come home.
       Each family eats by itself in its hut, but after dinner is the time they enjoy when everyone goes visiting. The women go to one hut and the men gather in another to talk. Perhaps they will speak of the day’s hunt, and one man may tell how he tracked an antelope for many miles after he had hit it with a poisoned arrow. The force of the arrow could not kill it, but the poison took slow effect while the hunter followed until at last the animal dropped.
       In the meantime, the women chat and the children play. No one sends them to bed; they go when they are tired. But bedtime is usually early for everyone. Sometimes, if it is an especially fine moonlight night and there has been enough to eat for dinner, the girls will begin to clap their hands in rhythm. This is a signal for a dance, and soon everyone is dancing except a few old grandfathers. The boys tie dried cocoons to their legs to make a rattling noise, and then they may do a dance to imitate the wild animals they hunt. They may dance almost all night.
       The Bushman's home in the dry season is only a windscreen made perhaps by sticking bunches of grass onto a bush. But in the rainy season the hut is a semicircle with the open side away from the wind and rain and shifted according to the direction of the storm. Inside the hut the dirt floor has been scooped out a little and filled with grasses to make a cozy nest. The family curls up, each one wrapped in an animal-skin blanket, which is a cape to be worn in the daytime.
       Water is the great problem in this dry country, and the water supply determines the number of people who can live in any area. Animals as well as men must move in search of water, for they depend upon the grasses that grow beside the water-holes. It is the duty of the older children to go to the water-hole each day to get the supply of water. Instead of pails, they carry ostrich-egg shells that they fill with water. Then they fit in a grass plug, so that none of the precious water can spill. Putting the shells in net bags, they sling them over their shoulders and go back to camp. Their duty is very important.
       We have no history of the Bushmen because they cannot read or write, but we know something of how they lived long ago. Their ancestors painted and carved pictures on the rocks showing the animals they hunted and the wars they fought. Their traditions tell that they once lived in a more favorable country, but they were pushed back into the dry Kalahari Desert where life is difficult, and only their hard work and knowledge of the country make it possible for them to survive. Edith Fleming

Bushman - "Once we were Hunters" by Chis Oberholster