excellent its nice to see them living free as yhey have suffered a lot recently in Botswana.
Unfortunately not, nothing has really changed in Botswana, except perhaps the bushmen
the people in those photographs live temporarily on farm land owned by the chairman of the charity I was involved with, they are paid a wage to maintain their traditional lifestyle and skills whilst they are there and the place acts as a sort of 'living history museum'.
I was a little wary of this at first, but it turned out to be a very good thing. Of all the communities of bushmen we had contact with in Botswana with this was the only group that still had a fully intact repertoire of traditional bushlore. Undoubtedly because their income gave them a strong incentive to maintain the skills.
Because of their level of traditional knowledge, this is the group I chose to spend my free time with. However in spite of the image portrayed by the popular media, this is not what modern Bushmen look like, other than in our romantic western imagination. Since hunting is illegal in Botswana without a game licence, which is beyond the reach of the Bushmen and they don’t 'own' land, political and financial pressure pushes them to move to the 'Big cities'. (which from our perspectives are tiny isolated villages) Where the wages offered are to low to live in anything but abject poverty and prostitution, AIDS and alcohol abuse are part of day to day life.
It is only recently that the Botswanan government changed the term they used for bushmen, so that linguistically a least they would classify them as humans. Its worth noting as an example of the government approach to the bushmen, that you will be imprisoned for longer if caught stealing a goat in Botswana than if you convicted of raping a bushman woman.
This is a group of modern bushmen (or in this case women, in their Sunday best) teaching me how to build a wikiup:
Pick a spot and have a long debate about the suitability of the location:
Start digging:
Stop for a smoke:
Thatch:
Then relax in your new home, this young lady seems to have taking quite a liking to me
But the image of modern bushmen I remember most. Checking to see if you new home gets a good signal on your mobile! (There is a small town not too far away)
Some other interesting things:
The biggest tree I have ever seen:
And the largest animal I have come face to face with in the wild (I apologise for the poor image, I was preoccupied with fleeing!)
