The “bushmen,” also called the “Khwe,” “Sho,” “San,” or “Basarwa,” are a tribe of people who have lived in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa for thousands of years. Many experts say that this tribe is the oldest one on earth and that all other people originated from the ancestors of the Bushmen.
Although they had been hunter-gatherers for millennia, from the 1950’s to 1990’s they were forced to become small-scale farmers. Owing to the central government to Botswana’s relocation policy, the Bushmen were forced to move out of their original desert homeland and into newly created settlements. The Bushmen started their long-running court case against the government, saying that the government had forced them out of their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and intended to clear the area to attract the lucrative tourist trade and create diamond mines. The government denied this charge and declared that many of Bushmen were willing to give up their traditional way of life─hunting-gathering─and that much of their indigenous homeland was preserved as a nature reserve. In 2006 the Bushmen won a historic ruling. However, only a small number of Bushmen have been allowed to return to their homeland. There are only about 250 Bushmen living in the desert today as their ancestors had once lived, and they are still harassed by the authorities.
In the desert, they live in small family groups, moving from place to place according to the seasons. They hunt gazelle and dig up roots and bulbs to survive. They are a remarkable people and know how to live off the land in a hot and inhospitable place. They lived with nature instead of trying to change it. So, when bushmen hunter shoots a gazelle with a period with a poisoned arrow, he will apologize to the animal that they killed and explain why he did so. They are also very good at tracking animals and can run for days on end with very little water.
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