photo: Phillipe Laport

"What if the point is to stop and listen to the birdsong, to watch the dragonflies hover, then look up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family... to relate, to experience things on their own terms? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?”

derrick jensen - a language older than words

bushmen way

namibia

journey available on request only

There are still people in this world who remember what it was like to move with the seasons, to follow animals, how to track, where to dig for food, make medicine from plants, who spend warm nights with the certainty of a fireside making music and dancing in soft sand, barefoot, falling asleep to uncountable stars.

These people have now been forced to settle, their nomadic way of life no longer possible in the fast moving commercial world of business, farming, land ownership and national parks that only allow certain people through their gates. But although they cannot live as they used to, now wear faded, torn, 5th-hand-me-down jeans and shoes sewn together with sinew, they still remember.

As they walk their hands gesture the movements of steenbok, leopard and spring hare from the night before; in sand that looks dry and lifeless they know where to dig for tubers that are the last vestiges of water in the dry season at its zenith; all around them are plants used for any sort of ailment; they remember how to make fire with sticks.

This project is a request from one Bushmen community in northern Namibia for an exchange. An invitation to come and spend some time with them learning to track, set traps, forage for edible and medicinal plants, make music with mouth bows and thumb piano (mbira) and jewellery from ostrich egg shell, hear the complex beauty of the remaining click languages, and leave with an altered sense of time, a new understanding of what it takes to live off the land and an un-namable sense of the mysterious passed across by these remarkable people of the bush.

It must be noted that the Bushmen are also people of the modern world. The scenes of traditional people in skins and loincloths exist now only as photographs of the past.

The myth of Pisaboro, about how fire came to the humans, told by !Nqate while using a hand-drill to make fire.

Today they wear jeans, t-shirts, smoke harsh leaf tobacco rolled in crumpled newspaper, and trade with the pastoralist peoples whose cattle have all but decimated the landscape on which they are given minimal quotas to hunt small game. Yet there are many who remain masters in tracking, firekeeping, plant knowledge, animal behaviour, craft, music, rhythmn. While these skills do provide them with some food, they otherwise hold very little use for them in these modern days where their hunting rights are continuously overshadowed by trophy hunters and other ethnic groups wanting access to their land for grazing livestock.

Through this exchange they are able to buy food and needed items and we can learn to remember.