Bushmen of the Kalahari
A TravelIntelligence.com story by Rupert Isaacson

Tribal tourism is nothing new: from the Masai in Kenya to Thailand’s hill tribes, tourism is becoming increasingly central to indigenous economies. The bushmen of the Kalahari are offering something different

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Get down! motioned the three hunters, small lithe men in ragged clothes with bows and quiver slung at their shoulders. Tom and I lay prone in the sharp Kalahari grasses. Just ahead grazed a pair of spiral-horned kudu. Bo - the oldest hunter - crept closer, rose slowly to his feet, leaned forward from the hips, holding the small bow out almost at arm's length and shot. The arrow - a small, poisoned dart with a slow-acting but lethal mix of acacia root and crushed beetle larva - arced up and forward, but missed. The horse-sized animals bounded off into the bush unharmed, and Bo shook his head, the others laughing at him.

Later, much later, we picked up the trail of a wildebeest that Bo had shot the day before. The beast lay dead in a meadow of dry yellow grasses. Taking out their knives, the hunters went quickly and efficiently to work, attracting clouds of blue and white butterflies who had floated down to drink the blood which lay in pools on the newly-flayed hide. The meat, cut into strips, the hunters packed into knapsacks made on the spot from the wildebeest's own hide, sewn together with dry reeds that grew at the edge of the clearing. Tom and I - mere tourists that we were - followed as the Bushmen shouldered their meat and began the 10 mile walk home.

Tribal tourism is nothing new: from the Masai in Kenya to Thailand's hill tribes, tourism is becoming increasingly central to indigenous economies. But most of these are, typically, fairly contrived affairs - a bit of bush walking, a bit of dancing, with a clear division between client (the tourist) and provider (the tribe). The Bushmen of the Kalahari are offering something different - the chance to participate directly in their hunter-gatherer life - stalking game with the men or helping the women dig up roots and tubers or climb into trees for wild fruit. Little is hidden from the visitor; with the Nharo Bushmen of Botswana I joined the chorus of a clapping, singing full moon dance, watching as a woman with terrible swellings in her leg was attended by a healer in deep trance, who screamed as if in pain, frothed at the mouth and shouted at unseen spirits. To bring him out of the trance, burning coals were rubbed on the healer's back, but neither man was burned and next morning, the woman's swellings were gone.

As Andrea Hardbattle, a half-English, half Nharo woman who organises the Botswana visits says:

"Most Westerners just don't get these kinds of experiences, not unless they spend years in the bush."

But it is necessity that has sparked the Bushmens' new-found interest in tourism. Confined to ever-decreasing 'islands' of wild land by more aggressive cattle-owning tribes, the Bushmen have, over the past 20 years, seen thousands of kilometres of wire fences erected across their old hunting grounds, the game killed or driven off, and the wild foods grazed and trampled out. The arrival of tourists (mostly Europeans, though lately an increasing trickle of Americans) has provided a way to break that cycle. As Benjamin Xishe, an English-speaking Ju'/Hoansi puts it:

"Tourists bring money. Without money we cannot keep the land, without land we cannot exist. For us it is a last stand."