Bushmen - Representation in Mass Media

Representation in Mass Media

The Bushmen of the Kalahari were first brought to the Western world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post. In 1955, Van der Post was commissioned by the BBC to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the Bushmen. The filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television documentary a year later. Driven by a lifelong fascination with this "vanished tribe", Van der Post published a 1958 book about the same expedition, entitled The Lost World of the Kalahari. It was to be his most famous book. In 1961 he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative derived from 19th-century Bushmen stories by Wilhelm Bleek. Van der Post's work is largely discredited, as it is the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 60s. His opinions branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even "mystical ecologists".

John Marshall, the son of Harvard anthropologist Lorna Marshall, documented the lives of Bushmen in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over a more than fifty year period. His early film The Hunters, released in 1957, shows a giraffe hunt during the 1950s. N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980) is the account of a woman who grew up while the Bushmen were living as autonomous hunter-gatherers, but who was later forced into a dependent life in the government-created community at Tsumkwe. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting fifty years in the lives of the JuǀʼHoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a vocal proponent of the Bushman cause throughout his life.

The BBC series How Art Made the World compares San cave paintings from 200 years ago to Paleolithic European paintings which are 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities, the San works may illustrate the reasons for ancient cave paintings. In this programme, Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams. Drawing parallels between modern hunter-gatherers in southern Africa (Bushmen) and the Americas, Lewis-Williams shows that healers, or ritual specialists, deliberately force themselves into a trance in which they travel to the spirit world. The visions they experience on these journeys of the mind are terrifying and complex, and the activity itself is undertaken for the good of the community. The Kalahari Bushmen go to the spirit world to entreat with their god for the lives of the sick, to make rain, and to control the movements of the game animals.

In the lightest stages of trance states, all humans have the capacity to see geometric shapes known as form constants. They are hard-wired in the brain. As the trance deepens, and the subject tries to make sense of the shapes, so they change into things which are governed by that person's particular culture. The geometries are found all over the world and throughout history. Coupled to this are experiences such as changing into animals: the rock art traditions of hunter-gatherers the world over – including Ice Age Europe – contain images of figures which are half human and half animal . Going into deep caves is likened to going into a deep trance. Some images in France and Spain are over 1 km into the caves. Native Americans would call this 'Vision Questing' — going to barely accessible places such as mountain tops to perform rock art making, the images likely derived from visions they had experienced at special ceremonies.

Spencer Wells' 2003 book The Journey of Man — in connection with National Geographic's Genographic Project — discusses a genetic analysis of the San and asserts their blood contains some of the oldest genetic markers found on Earth. The Bushmen's Y-chromosomal DNA haplogroup (type A) is one of the oldest, splitting off around 70,000 years ago from those found in the rest of humanity (type BT). Therefore, the Bushmen likely represent one of the oldest existing populations. Genetic markers present on the y chromosome are passed down through thousands of generations in a relatively pure form. The PBS documentary based on the book follows these markers throughout the world, demonstrating that all of humankind can be traced back to the African continent and that the San are one of the oldest, most genetically unadulterated, remnants of humankind's ancient ancestors. More recent analysis suggests that the San may have been isolated from other original ancestral groups for as much as 100,000 years and then rejoined at a later date, re-integrating the human gene pool.