Words: Khumoetsile Seamogano
Images: Girl Gome Authentic Archives. Bannister, A.
and Lewis-Williams, D., 1991. Bushmen: A Changing Way of Life.
Cape Town: Struik.
Childhood among the San, the landscape, and a way of knowing.
The San peoples of Southern Africa comprise many distinct communities, languages, and traditions. They are often associated with hunting and gathering, but this description alone does little justice to the depth of knowledge involved. It is environmental knowledge, material knowledge, ecological knowledge, and cultural memory woven together.
As children, we played with wild herbs gathered from the landscape, picking them, crushing them between our fingers, smelling them, and making games from whatever we found. We knew their names. We knew that some could be eaten, some used for healing, some carried particular scents, and others simply belonged to the land around us.
The bush was not an empty space between places.
It was alive with knowledge.
Living among San people in the Kalahari as a child meant growing up close to a way of knowing the world that was at once practical, spiritual, material, and deeply attentive to place. At the time, I did not have the language for any of this. I was simply a child moving through it.
Years later, the details have begun to arrange themselves differently.
At Home
My great-grandmother had San people help her look after her cattle, and at one point we lived alongside another San community.
Home was closely tied to the landscape.
The temporary dwelling, or mogoafatshe, was constructed from materials gathered from the surrounding environment. Men built the framework while women gathered long grasses for thatching. Nothing was particularly abstract about the process. The materials were known, their properties understood, their uses passed down through practice.
The Kalahari could be intensely hot during the day and dramatically cold at night.
Fire was therefore necessary.
But it was also social.
Evenings gathered people around the same centre. Food was shared. Stories were told. There was song, dance, conversation and laughter. The fire marked a transition from the day’s activity into something slower and more communal.
It was difficult to separate everyday life from culture because culture was simply what everyone was doing.
The Bush as a Classroom
Children were free to explore.
The bush offered herbs, flowers, insects, small animals, branches and stones, all of which could become material for play. Adults worked around us, and their knowledge entered childhood almost incidentally.
A plant was not merely a plant. It had a name and a use.
Should you encounter a fox, find a way to make yourself taller to intimidate it. A duiker has delicate hooves, while a springbok barely touches the earth. Know what you are following.
Knowledge of what was poison and what was medicine was taught early, though not always as a formal lesson. Sometimes it was simply absorbed through proximity: watching, listening, asking, following.
This is perhaps one of the things I understand most differently now.
What felt like freedom was also education, so intricately tied to who we were and where we were.
The landscape was not simply around us.
It was teaching us how to live with it.
Food and Water and Knowledge of the Land
The ostrich egg was among the most prized delicacies. Its contents could become a large omelette, while the shell could later be prepared as a vessel for storing water. Food and material were never entirely separate; what nourished the body could also become something useful afterwards.
During dry periods, knowledge of particular roots and plants provided nourishment. The women knew where to find the nourishing water root, kgengwe, and which wild melons could be eaten. This was not knowledge that could easily be written down on a map and stored in a library. It belonged to the landscape and to those who knew how to read it.
Men would store water in ostrich eggs and bury them in different locations, remembering where each had been placed. They could also sense, go dupa, underground water and dig small wells where it could be found. These wells were often shared.
Water, in this sense, was not simply a resource, but something remembered through generations of knowledge.
Wild fruits were gathered according to season and carried home in large leather bags to be shared.
When the land was especially generous, it would send the honeyguide bird.
The greater honeyguide is known for its remarkable interaction with honey-hunting people in parts of Africa. The bird can lead people towards a bees’ nest, where the honey can be harvested, after which it feeds on what remains.
It is fascinating that the bird knows where the honey is, and the human knows how to reach it.
Nothing about it was merely coincidence.
The Sky, Healing, and the Unseen
And then there was the sky.
The stories I encountered connected dance, the sky, the stars, healing, and the spiritual world in ways that were difficult to separate from one another.
Among several San communities, healing traditions have involved song, dance, trance, and relationships with the spiritual world. These practices vary considerably between communities, but the understanding that healing could involve more than the physical body has stayed with me.
Healing was not always something that happened apart from everyday life.
It could happen through movement, song, and rhythm.
The collective energy of people gathered beneath the sky, around a fire, became part of the healing.
The stars, the eyes of those who came before us, were always watching and listening. And if we listened closely enough, we could enter that world: the lake at the heart of the universe, where healing could be sought and received.
The boundaries between body and spirit, earth and sky, the living and the unseen were less certain.
Healing was not simply the treatment of an individual.
It was a way of restoring balance to the community.
My great-grandmother was convinced that the San people looking after her cattle could shape-shift.
Into lions, she believed. The conviction was entirely serious. I have yet to see it happen.
But the story has remained with me because it reveals something about the world in which I grew up: the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary were not always as firmly drawn as they are in modern life.
In many rural communities, beliefs about transformation, spiritual power, ancestors, animals, and the unseen world continue to form part of living traditions, although these beliefs are neither universal nor identical across San communities.
For a child, however, there was no need to resolve the question.
The possibility was simply there.
The Kalahari contained more than what could be immediately seen.
