Kalahari Ancients

No single name covers all of these peoples, and none of them uses one for the whole family. Each community names itself in its own language. The Ju/'hoansi (said roughly 'zhu-TWAH-see', with a soft dental click at the slash) call themselves the 'real' or 'ordinary people'. Others include the !Xun, Khwe, Naro, G/ui, G//ana, the Taa-speaking !Xóõ, the Hai//om, the ‡Khomani and N|uu people, and the nineteenth-century /Xam of the Cape interior.

The shared names all come from outside. San comes from Khoekhoe Sān, 'foragers', once a slighting word. Many San organisations accepted it in the 1990s as the most workable common term. Basarwa is the Setswana name used officially in Botswana. Bushmen is rejected by some communities and used with pride by others, among them some ‡Khomani. Khoisan is a scholars' compound coined in the 1920s. It joins San with Khoekhoe, the herding peoples (Nama, !Ora and others) who share click languages and much belief with them.

Click guide: / is dental (the 'tsk' of disapproval); // is lateral (the sound used to urge on a horse); ! is alveolar (a hollow cork-pop); ‡ is palatal (a sharper pop); ʘ is bilabial (a kiss). The word Kalahari itself comes from Setswana Kgalagadi.

Under the one name there are many peoples, and they speak languages from three unrelated families. The Kx'a (Ju) family includes Ju/'hoan, spoken in Nyae Nyae in Namibia's Otjozondjupa region and around Dobe in Botswana's Ngamiland, and !Xun, spoken in northern Namibia and southern Angola. The Tuu family includes Taa (!Xóõ) in southwestern Botswana, N|uu of the southern Kalahari in South Africa's Northern Cape, and /Xam, once spoken across the Northern Cape Karoo. The Khoe family includes Khwe in the Okavango and Bwabwata, Naro around Ghanzi and D'Kar, G/ui and G//ana in the Central Kalahari, and also Khoekhoe, the language of the Nama and Damara.

Genetic studies place San lineages among the most deeply divergent of all living humans. Archaeology shows a toolkit like the San one at Border Cave about 44,000 years ago. The brief's figure of 70,000+ years refers to that ancestral depth and to early symbolic finds in the region. Scholars debate how far a single continuous culture can be traced back that far, and that caution is part of the record.

The San were not migrants into the region. Farmers and herders came later and moved around and among them, so that by the colonial era San communities were living mostly in the drier interior.

The stories belong to small, mobile communities that live by sharing. They explain how the present order came to be: why people die, why animals are no longer people, why the stars sit where they do. They also carry practical knowledge of animals, plants, water and weather, and they keep alive the experience of n/om, the healing potency at the centre of religious life.

History pressed hard on the tradition. Herders and farmers took the better water and grazing, and colonial commandos in the Cape killed and captured San people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The richest record of /Xam lore was taken down in the 1870s from men who had been imprisoned at the Breakwater Convict Station in Cape Town. Many tales are told against that loss, and some later tellers speak of it directly.

Sacred and everyday are not cleanly divided. Ju/'hoansi tell the tales of ≠Gao N!a, the great god, at the fire, with bawdy humour and laughter. The same god is prayed to in sickness and is the source of the healing songs. The serious register belongs to the healing dance, to rain and to initiation. Anyone may tell tales in the evening. Initiatory knowledge belongs to its keepers.

The foundational record is the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Between 1870 and the 1880s Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam narrators in their own language, among them //Kabbo, /Han≠kass'o, Diä!kwain and !Kweiten-ta-//ken, and later !Xun boys from further north. The notebooks run to more than twelve thousand pages and are held at the University of Cape Town and other Cape Town institutions. UNESCO's Memory of the World register lists them.

For Ju/'hoan belief and storytelling, the main published sources are Lorna Marshall, Megan Biesele (who worked in Ju/'hoan with Ju/'hoan tellers), Richard Lee, Richard Katz on healing, and Polly Wiessner on hxaro exchange. On rock art the main names are David Lewis-Williams, Janette Deacon and Pippa Skotnes. Mathias Guenther has compared beliefs across groups, and Sigrid Schmidt has catalogued folktales.

San-led organisations include the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA, 1996), the South African San Institute, the South African San Council, the Kuru Family of Organisations at D'Kar, the Nyae Nyae Conservancy and !Khwa ttu in the Western Cape. In 2017 the San Code of Research Ethics set out terms for anyone working with San knowledge.

This holding draws on the published record. It has not yet been reviewed by San representatives, and the Code asks that such review be sought.

1. Sharing. Meat from a large kill is shared across the camp according to known rules. Gifts move between partners in the long-distance exchange called hxaro. Stinginess is the most talked-about fault.

2. Modesty. A successful hunter plays down his kill, and others make fun of the meat so that no one grows proud. Richard Lee described this practice of 'insulting the meat' in Ju/'hoan camps.

3. Healing together. Health belongs to the group. The whole camp gathers for the healing dance, and n/om is spent for everyone, not owned by one person.

4. Respect between people and animals. Animals were people in the first times, and they are still persons who must be hunted properly and spoken of carefully.

5. Humour and avoiding open conflict. People tease to correct each other, and they move away from a quarrel rather than fight it out.

The group comes before the individual. The dead are not ancestors to be worshipped. They are kept at a distance. Western readers looking for a lone hero's triumph will find that a triumph which isolates someone is often the problem the story has to solve.

Ju/'hoansi trace misfortune to several causes that can act together. ≠Gao N!a may decide that a person dies. The //gauwasi, the spirits of the dead, shoot small invisible arrows of sickness because they miss the living and want them. Tension in the camp makes people vulnerable. Lorna Marshall also recorded n!ao, a force that a person receives at birth and that links them to weather and to the animals they kill.

A person stands inside a web of namesakes, kin and exchange partners. A name links you to everyone else who carries it, and that link shapes whom you may joke with and whom you must avoid.

Time has two layers. In the First Order, the time of the Early Race, animals and people were not yet separate and things were unsettled. Then came the present order, with fixed forms and death. The first layer has not vanished. Healers reach it in trance, and the rock paintings show it.

Reality has layers too: this world, the sky where the gods live, and the realm of the dead. Healers in trance and the dead cross between them.

Stories are told to entertain, to teach, and to keep the world in order. Tales of the gods and the Early Race explain how present things came to be. Stories of hunts and journeys pass on knowledge of animals, tracks and country. Accounts of healing and of dreams tell people what the spirit world is like.

There is no class of professional storytellers. Older men and women are usually the most admired tellers, because they have heard the most and tell it best. Children listen, interrupt and learn. //Kabbo told Bleek that he wanted to go home and hear the stories that float from afar, like the wind, from other places. To him, stories were something that moved between people and camps.

Tales are mostly told in the evening around the fire. The healing dance may follow, or it may happen on another night. Stories also come up during the day, while people work, rest or wait for meat.

Telling a story does not give the teller authority. Listeners correct, laugh and add their own versions, so the teller stays one voice among equals.

The basic unit is the episode, and episodes gather into loose cycles around a central figure. For the /Xam that figure is Kaggen, the Mantis. For the Ju/'hoansi it is ≠Gao N!a, who is the great god in prayer and a trickster in the tales. Episodes have no fixed order. A teller links them as the evening goes, and the same motif can turn up attached to different characters.

The tradition does not fit a single imported template. It combines open-ended trickster cycles, stories that explain how things came to be, and accounts of journeys into trance. Many stories end by setting some part of the present world in place. Others simply stop and are picked up again another night.

Stories move through transformation rather than a rising line of action. A character changes shape, dies and comes back, crosses into the sky or a waterhole, and returns. Kaggen is killed and his bones gather themselves together again. What drives each episode on is an encounter, a breach of proper conduct, and a reversal.

Tension usually comes from breaking proper relations rather than from a struggle between good and evil. Someone keeps food to themselves, refuses advice, mocks a girl in seclusion or disrespects the rain. The order of things is upset and the world answers.

Kaggen causes much of the trouble in /Xam tales. He is greedy, curious and boastful, and he meddles with things he should leave alone. His sober family, especially his grandson the young Ichneumon (mongoose), keeps telling him off. The tension is family friction, not a war.

The second driver is discovery. In the first times things are not yet fixed, and the stories find out how they became fixed: how the moon came to die and return, how death became final for people, how the sun got into the sky.

A third driver is danger at a boundary. Contact with potency, with the dead or with !Khwa, the rain, is dangerous if handled badly. Healers face this danger in trance, and girls are protected from it at their first menstruation.

The central figure is a trickster who is also a creator. Kaggen makes the eland and helps the moon into being, yet he is also greedy, cowardly and ridiculous. ≠Gao N!a in Ju/'hoan tales is just as double-sided: in the stories he is a foolish, lustful husband, and in prayer he is the giver of life and death. Mathias Guenther argues that this ambiguity is central to San religion and not a contradiction.

Around the trickster stand the people of the Early Race. They are animal-persons such as the Hyena, the Lynx, the Hare, the Moon, the Porcupine and the Blue Crane, and each has its own temperament.

Women and girls lead many important stories. The girl of the Early Race who threw ashes into the sky to make the Milky Way acts on her own. Girls in seclusion are at the centre of the !Khwa stories.

Human hunters and healers are central to narratives of experience, such as accounts of trance journeys and stories of hunts, more than to myth. A protagonist matters through his or her relationships, not through solitary greatness.

Stories rarely end in victory. Their most typical ending sets the present world in place: the moon now dies and returns, death is final for people, the stars and the Milky Way light the night, animals now have the forms they keep. The listener's own world is the ending.

Trickster episodes end with escape and revival rather than defeat. Kaggen is beaten or eaten or scattered, comes back together, and goes home to be scolded. Order is restored without anything being settled for good, because the next episode will undo it again.

Stories of broken taboos end in transformation that is often irreversible. A girl who disrespects !Khwa may be turned, with her family, into frogs. The story becomes the warning.

Healing narratives end in a return. The healer comes back from the sky or from the edge of death, and the sickness has been taken out of the camp.

In this tradition, a satisfying ending is one where people recognise the world they live in, often with a laugh, rather than one where a conflict is closed off.

Narrative time has two layers. The First Order is the time of the Early Race, when animals were people, the sun lived on earth and death was not yet final. The present order is the time of people as they are, with game, rain, seasons and mortality. Most myth is set at the hinge between the two, when the first world is giving way to the present one.

The layers are not strictly past and present. The first time remains open. In trance, healers reach a state that tellers and painters link with the Early Race: people take animal form, and the boundary between the living and the spirits thins. The rock paintings, with their human-animal figures, appear to show both times at once. That interpretation comes from Lewis-Williams and his colleagues and is widely held but debated.

Within the present order, time follows cycles: the moon's death and return, the rains, the ripening of mongongo nuts and tsama melons. Stories of the moon place mortality inside these cycles. The moon returns and people do not.

Tales follow the order of events loosely, and tellers often step outside the tale to explain or comment.

In the tales, the community usually appears as a household. Kaggen's household in /Xam lore is a good example. It includes his wife the dassie (rock hyrax), their adopted daughter the porcupine, her husband Kwammang-a, and their son the young Ichneumon. The household feeds Kaggen, rescues him and tells him off. It acts as a chorus of good sense.

In the stories, as in camp life, the group is the place where right conduct is defined. A character who acts alone, hides food or ignores advice is the one who brings disaster. Rescue comes from kin.

Listeners expect a story to be shared property. It should be recognisable, open to comment, and funny where it can be. They do not want to be told what to think. They expect to laugh at the trickster and recognise themselves in him.

In healing narratives the community acts directly. The women's singing and clapping heat the healer's n/om, and the healing works only because the whole camp takes part. A healer acting alone would be helpless.

Morality is a matter of relationships. Right action keeps the relations between people, and between people, animals and the rain, in good order. Wrong action breaks them. The same deed can be judged differently depending on who did it, to whom, and whether they made amends.

People are condemned for stinginess, arrogance, anger that turns into violence, boasting about a kill, and disrespect toward the rain, the dead, potency or a girl in seclusion.

People are honoured for generosity, modesty, humour, skill that serves others, and the courage of healers who go through the pain of trance for the camp.

Stories teach these rules mainly through laughter and consequence. Kaggen's greed makes him ridiculous, and his family's patience shows the better way. The !Khwa stories show that some breaches bring harm on a whole family. No one in the stories lays down rules. Listeners work them out from what happens and talk about them afterwards.

Transformation is the basic motion of the tradition. Kaggen turns himself into a hartebeest to trick a group of girls, who cut him up for meat. His body parts then reassemble and chase them. Animals and people of the Early Race separate into the forms they now have. A girl's ashes become the Milky Way. The old man Sun is thrown into the sky and becomes the sun.

Transformation is also part of present experience. Healers in trance are said to take on animal power, and Ju/'hoan and /Xam accounts speak of healers travelling as lions. Many scholars read the human-animal figures in rock paintings as images of this change.

Transformation can be celebrated or mourned. Healing transformation is celebrated: the healer 'dies' in trance and returns with the power to cure. The world's turn into the present order is mourned in one respect, because it made death final for people. The Moon and Hare story carries that loss. The tradition holds both feelings together and does not resolve them.

In Ju/'hoan thought, things are sacred because of n/om, a potency that the gods give and that lives in certain songs, animals, plants, places and people. The more n/om something holds, the more powerful and the more dangerous it is.

Healing songs, such as the giraffe and eland songs, are among the most potent things a community has. They are said to come from ≠Gao N!a, often through dreams. The eland holds a great deal of potency, and the giraffe, honey and certain rain-associated animals hold some too. The healing dance itself is sacred: the circle, the fire at its centre and the singing women. Rain is a being as well as weather, and in /Xam lore it is personified as !Khwa.

Places such as the Tsodilo Hills are sacred to the people who live around them. So, many scholars argue, are the rock faces where paintings were made. Names carry weight, and some, such as those of the recently dead, are avoided.

This kind of sacredness works through power, not purity. Potency is not good or bad in itself. It has to be handled correctly, by the right people, at the right time, with the help of the group.

San communities do not keep ancestor shrines, and the dead are not revered as guardians of the lineage. Among the Ju/'hoansi, the //gauwasi, the spirits of the dead, are close by and active, and they are dangerous. They live with or near ≠Gao N!a. Because they miss their living kin and want their company, they send sickness, which in effect pulls the living toward death.

The living deal with them mainly through healers. In trance, a healer sees the //gauwasi at the edge of the dance, argues with them, insults them, throws things at them and pulls the sickness they sent out of the body. Ordinary people avoid speaking the names of the recently dead.

In /Xam lore, the dead are linked with the wind and with the stars. Narrators told Bleek and Lloyd that when a person dies, the wind blows away their footprints, and that a star falls when someone dies. In these narratives the dead are part of the natural world rather than a separate realm.

What the dead want is company and attention. What the living want from them is distance.

In Ju/'hoan accounts recorded by Lorna Marshall, the universe has layers. The world of the living lies in the middle. The great god ≠Gao N!a lives in the sky in the east, and the lesser god //Gauwa lives in the west. The //gauwasi live with the gods. Some accounts also describe a realm reached by going down, through the earth or into water. Waterholes are where the /Xam rain-animal lives.

These realms are close to the ordinary world. The dead come to the edge of the firelight during a dance, and the rain walks across the veld on its legs of rain.

There are three ways to cross. In trance, a healer's spirit leaves the body and travels, sometimes climbing threads or ropes into the sky to plead with the god. In death, a person's spirit goes to the god. In dreams, songs and messages arrive.

The gods and the dead can come in, bringing life, rain, songs and sickness. Living people go out only as healers, and only with the support of the singing group. A healer who goes too far risks not coming back.

The healing dance is the central ritual. It is held when someone is ill, when game or rain has failed, when meat has come into camp, or simply because people want to dance. The women sit in a circle around a fire, clapping and singing, and the men dance around them. As the night goes on the n/om heats up, healers go into trance and lay hands on everyone present. It works both as a cure and as a way of setting the whole camp right.

Transition rituals mark the main stages of life. At a girl's first menstruation there is seclusion and the Eland Dance. When a boy makes his first large kill, there are first-kill rites with small cuts into which meat and medicine are rubbed. Marriage involves a period of bride-service. Among the Ju/'hoansi there is also a men's initiation, the Tshoma, whose content belongs to the initiated.

In the stories, ritual usually works as a frame or a warning. The !Khwa stories set out what happens when the rules of seclusion are broken. Accounts of trance give the healing dance its meaning. The ritual is assumed, and the stories explain why it must be done properly.

The pattern most often recorded is a pair of gods. Among the Ju/'hoansi, ≠Gao N!a is the great god of the east, creator and giver of life and death. //Gauwa is the lesser god of the west and is closely tied to the dead and to sickness. Among the G/ui, George Silberbauer recorded N!adima and G//awama in a similar pair. Among the Khoekhoe, Tsui-//Goab, the god of rain and life, is set against //Gaunab.

This order is not fixed. Marshall and others found that the names, characters and relationship of the two gods vary between tellers and change over time. The great god also appears in the tales as a trickster. Guenther treats this variation as a basic feature of San religion, not as confusion.

In /Xam lore, Kaggen the Mantis stands at the centre of story but not at the top of any ranking. !Khwa, the rain, is a separate, powerful being. The Moon and the Sun are persons from the Early Race. Below them are the spirits of the dead and the animal-persons.

The gods are unpredictable toward humans. People pray to them, scold them and bargain with them, and through healers they sometimes win.

Tellers act out the voices of their characters. Animal persons speak with their own sounds. Bleek and Lloyd noted that in /Xam tales several characters, among them the Moon, the Tortoise and the Jackal, speak with altered sound patterns, in which clicks are changed or dropped, so that their speech marks who they are.

Repetition carries the pace. An action is repeated with small changes, such as Kaggen calling the eland again and again or a pursuit carried out stage by stage. Ideophones and imitations of animal sounds, footsteps and rain fill in the scene.

From the transcriptions it is clear that tellers often step out of the tale to explain, comment or link it to known places and people. /Han≠kass'o and Diä!kwain added detail about the country, kin and custom in their tellings.

The pace can be fast and comic during a chase, then slow during a moment of danger. Laughter, both the teller's and the listeners', is part of the sound of the telling. So are pauses for listeners to react. A story is a sound event as much as a plot.

Ordinary storytelling uses no costume or props beyond the teller's body. The teller uses gesture, mimes animals and their gaits, draws in the sand, points to the stars and imitates calls and tracks.

The healing dance is the full performance setting. Women sit close together around the fire and clap complex interlocking rhythms while they sing medicine songs in overlapping parts. Men dance in a deep track around them, with rattles made of moth cocoons tied to their legs. Healers stamp, shudder, sweat and cry out as their n/om boils up, and they lay their hands on people to draw sickness out.

Other forms include the Eland Dance for a girl's first menstruation, in which women dance and older men play the eland bull, and the women's Drum Dance found in some Ju/'hoan and Naro areas. Music is also played on the mouth bow, the thumb piano and the musical bow.

Many scholars read the rock paintings as linked to performance: the dancers' bent-forward posture, nosebleeds and raised arms correspond to trance as Ju/'hoan healers describe it.

Listeners take an active part in a telling. They laugh and react, and they interrupt with comments, questions and corrections. An older listener may add a detail or say that they heard a different version, and the teller may take it up. Megan Biesele recorded that Ju/'hoan tellers vary and remake stories in this back-and-forth, so that each telling belongs to the people around the fire.

In the healing dance, the audience cannot be separated from the performers. The women's clapping and singing heat the n/om. Without them the healers cannot enter trance, and the healing cannot happen. Everyone present is healed, so everyone takes part in being healed. Children copy the dance at its edges and so learn it.

During the Eland Dance, the women dance around the girl in seclusion and the men stay mostly at a distance. Everyone has a role in protecting her and in marking her new state.

Listening also has rules. Some knowledge is for initiates only, and some songs belong to particular healers or groups. Being allowed to hear something depends on your relationship to the people telling it.

Knowledge lasts because it is used every day. People do not memorise stories as fixed texts. They retell them often, with variations, and that keeps the core alive. Motifs, characters and kinds of episode recur, and tellers recombine them, so a story is remembered as a set of parts that can be told again.

Names carry memory. A child named after a grandparent or other relative takes on that person's relationships, and the names hold kin together across generations. Songs are passed from healer to healer along with their potency. Knowledge of country, including water, plant stands, animal behaviour and tracks, is built up through daily practice, and stories are tied to the places where events happened.

The rock paintings and engravings are a visual record that lasted thousands of years, although the knowledge needed to read them in full has partly passed from use.

The written record now matters too. The Bleek and Lloyd notebooks hold /Xam stories that would otherwise be gone. Ju/'hoan transcription projects at Nyae Nyae, and published collections, let communities read their own tellers' words.

The central power is n/om, the healing potency. Among the Ju/'hoansi it sits in the belly or at the base of the spine. In the heat of the dance it 'boils' and rises up the spine to the head, and the healer enters !kia, the trance state. In !kia, healers say they can see inside people's bodies, see things far away, travel to the sky and confront the spirits of the dead.

With it a healer can draw sickness out of bodies with their hands and throw it away with a shriek, protect the camp, plead with the god for the life of a sick person and, according to some accounts, travel in animal form. Among the /Xam, practitioners called !gi:ten were said to make rain by leading the rain-animal across the land, to heal, and to send or turn back harm.

There are limits. A healer cannot heal against the god's firm decision. N/om cannot be used alone and needs the singing group. It cannot be bought or used to rank above others.

An unstated rule runs through all accounts: power is dangerous to the holder. A beginner can be overwhelmed, and an experienced healer who goes too far may not return.

In Ju/'hoan accounts, n/om ultimately comes from ≠Gao N!a. It reaches people through songs, which are often received in dreams or in moments of strong experience. Richard Katz and Lorna Marshall recorded that the Giraffe song was received by a woman named Beh after she saw giraffes running ahead of a storm. Potency also lives in animals, above all the eland, and in some plants.

Power is gained by learning. A beginner dances for years under experienced healers, who 'put' n/om into them and help them through their first trances. It is not inherited, but it often runs in families because children learn from parents. It is open to women as well as men. Katz reported that in the camps he worked in, roughly half the adult men and a smaller but significant number of women were healers.

The cost is pain and fear. Healers describe the boiling n/om as burning, and the first trances as a kind of death. The healer gives effort and endurance for the camp's benefit and gets no material return. Taking power for oneself, through sorcery, is condemned and is rarely claimed in the record.

In /Xam lore the most serious prohibitions surround a girl at her first menstruation. She is secluded and must not look at the game or the waterholes. She must eat only what she is given and must treat !Khwa, the rain, with respect. If she does not, !Khwa may come as a whirlwind or a storm, and in the stories the girl and her family may be turned into frogs. The consequence falls on the group, and it cannot be undone.

The hunt carries its own rules. Bleek and Lloyd recorded that a /Xam hunter whose poisoned arrow has struck an eland must behave as if he were the dying animal while the poison works. He walks quietly, avoids certain foods and does not run, so as not to give the animal strength.

There are also rules of speech and relationship. The names of the recently dead are avoided, people avoid certain in-laws, and sexual relations between close kin are forbidden. Boasting about a kill and hoarding food are not formal taboos, but they draw strong social sanctions.

Some breaches bring immediate harm, such as storms, lightning or failed hunts. Others build up into sickness and quarrels that a healing dance must set right.

For girls, the main rite is at first menstruation. The girl is secluded in a small shelter, and women carry her there and look after her. The Eland Dance is performed around her. The women dance and show the eland's ways, and older men may wear horns or carry them to play the eland bull. When she comes out she is a young woman, marked with ochre and adorned with beads. The rite is public, and the eland stands for fertility, fat and good order.

For boys, the first-kill rites follow a first large antelope, often one male and one female animal. Older men make small cuts on the boy's body and rub in a mixture of meat fat and medicine. This marks him as a hunter who may marry.

Among the Ju/'hoansi, the Tshoma is a men's initiation that has been held at long intervals. Its content belongs to the initiated and is not described here.

Becoming a healer is a separate, gradual initiation. Over years of dancing the beginner learns to bear the boiling n/om and goes through a 'death' in trance. Older healers guide them, and the singing women support them.

Ethnographers of the Ju/'hoansi from the 1950s to the 1970s, among them Lorna Marshall, Richard Lee and Patricia Draper, described relations between women and men as unusually equal. Later scholars added that this equality changed as communities settled. Women gathered much of the food by weight, including nuts, roots, berries and melons. They kept control of what they gathered, took part in decisions and could leave a marriage.

Men hunt, and meat has high symbolic value. Megan Biesele's study Women Like Meat shows how Ju/'hoan stories link hunting and marriage. In the stories, wives and husbands negotiate desire, food and respect in images taken from the hunt.

The gods of rain and weather are sometimes gendered. The Ju/'hoansi distinguish 'male rain', the violent thunderstorm, from 'female rain', the gentle, soaking rain.

Women hold real ritual power. Their singing drives the healing dance, women can be healers, and some groups have a women's Drum Dance. Girls are at the centre of the most serious /Xam taboo stories, as the ones in danger and as the ones who make the stars.

Age brings respect and knowledge but not the right to give orders. Older people are the main holders of knowledge about kin, names, territories and water, and of the longer stories. Their voice counts in camp discussions. Among the Ju/'hoansi, the core owners of a territory, its k'ausi, are often older people. They are the ones visitors ask before using its water and food.

Older healers hold the most experience of trance, the dead and the songs. They decide when a younger dancer is ready, and they guide them through it.

Children grow up in mixed-age play groups and learn by copying adults, joining the edges of dances, tracking small animals and listening at the fire. They take on adult work gradually rather than being trained for it. The first-kill rites and the first-menstruation rites mark the move into adulthood. After marriage and children, a man or woman becomes a full adult.

Very old people, especially those too weak to travel, depend on the care of kin. Ethnographies record that their care is a duty, and their knowledge is still sought.

Within San camps there are no inherited classes, ranks or chiefs in the farmers' sense. People who stand out are pulled back into line by joking, by insulting the meat and by sharing rules. This leveling is a deliberate practice, not an accident. Richard Lee and others have described it in detail.

In the wider society of southern Africa, San communities have often been placed at the bottom. In parts of Botswana, Tswana and other cattle-owning households held San people in hereditary servitude. Colonial farmers in South Africa and Namibia used San and Khoekhoe labourers under coercive terms. Today many San communities remain among the poorest in their countries and fight over land and recognition.

Storytellers have no special status. Anyone can tell stories, and older people are respected for doing it well.

The outside hierarchy enters stories told in the twentieth century and later. Some Ju/'hoan and Naro tales and testimonies speak of cattle-owners and farmers, of land taken, and of a time when San people were 'first' in the country.

The basic unit has long been a camp of roughly ten to thirty people. A camp is related by blood and marriage and centres on a waterhole or a stand of food plants. Among the Ju/'hoansi each camp is linked to a territory, a n!ore, through its core owners. Other people use it through kin ties and permission.

Camps split and regroup through the year. In the dry season people gather at permanent water. In the rains they spread out across the country. Lee and others called this 'fission and fusion'.

Beyond the camp, people are linked through the namesake system and through hxaro. Hxaro partners trade gifts such as beads, arrows and tools across long distances, and those partnerships give each person places to go in hard times. Polly Wiessner showed how these networks spread risk.

Membership means sharing food, joining the dance and taking part in caring for others. Expulsion is rare. The usual way to settle serious conflict is for one party to move to another camp where they have kin, so leaving takes the place of punishment.

The Kalahari is a vast sand basin covering parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. It is not a true desert. It has grass, scrub and woodland, and rainfall rises from the dry south to the wetter north. Rain is seasonal and unreliable. In the dry months, surface water shrinks to a few pans and waterholes. Food sources include mongongo nut groves in the north, tsama melons and roots that store water, and a wide range of game.

The /Xam lived further south, in the dry Karoo and the Northern Cape around the Strandberg and Bitterpits. Other San peoples lived in the Drakensberg and the Cederberg, where their rock painting is richest.

This landscape shapes the stories. Rain, water and the hunt are central, and so is reading tracks. Louis Liebenberg's work with San trackers presents tracking as a science: a hunter reads tracks as evidence, forms hypotheses and tests them on the ground.

To the people who live in it, the land is a known country of named places, waters and kin. The core owners of a n!ore know every feature of it. Taking the land therefore takes away the setting of their stories as well as their living.

The Tsodilo Hills in northwestern Botswana carry more than four thousand rock paintings. They were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2001. Ju/'hoansi and Hambukushu living there both hold them sacred. The hills are known as Male, Female and Child, and Hambukushu and Ju/'hoan accounts tell of a spirit or god creating people and animals there. The archaeologist Sheila Coulson argued in 2006 that a python-like rock in Rhino Cave was a focus of ritual about 70,000 years ago. Other archaeologists dispute that claim and its date.

In the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, a World Heritage Site since 2000, rock shelters hold thousands of paintings. At Game Pass Shelter in the Kamberg area, a panel shows a dying eland with a human-animal figure holding its tail. Lewis-Williams called it a key to reading the art as a record of trance.

Twyfelfontein, /Ui-//aes in Namibia, inscribed in 2007, holds thousands of engravings of animals, tracks and human figures.

In stories and experience these sites work as thresholds. They are places where the first times and the spirit world are close to the surface.

Ju/'hoan accounts recorded by Lorna Marshall give the cosmos an east-west axis. ≠Gao N!a, the great god and creator, lives in the sky toward the east, where the sun rises. //Gauwa, the lesser god, lives toward the west, where the sun sets. Life and good things come from the east, and sickness and the dead are associated with the west. Other accounts give less precise places.

In /Xam lore the sky holds persons from the Early Race. The sun is an old man whose armpit shone, thrown up into the sky by children. The moon is Kaggen's creation in one story and a man in another. The Milky Way is a girl's ashes, scattered as a path for people walking at night. Jupiter, the Dawn's Heart, is a hunter, and other stars are hunters and game.

Water and the earth form a lower layer. Waterholes are the home of the rain-animal and openings to another realm.

Movement between realms is vertical. Healers climb threads into the sky in trance. Spirits come down and approach the dance. The dead rise to the god.

c. 77,000-73,000 years ago, people at Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast engraved ochre and drew cross-hatched lines. These are among the earliest known symbolic marks, made by ancestors of the region's peoples.

c. 44,000 years ago, people at Border Cave left digging-stick weights, a poison applicator and beads that resemble the San toolkit, according to a 2012 study by Francesco d'Errico and colleagues.

c. 30,000 years ago, people at Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia painted animals on stone slabs, among the oldest dated art in Africa.

c. 2,000 years ago, sheep herding reached southern Africa, and Khoekhoe pastoralism developed alongside foraging.

By the first millennium CE, Bantu-speaking farmers had settled south of the Limpopo, and in time they absorbed click sounds into isiXhosa and isiZulu.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company set up a station at the Cape. In the late 18th century, settler commandos killed and captured San people along the northern frontier.

In 1870, //Kabbo began telling /Xam stories to Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. In 1873, a Maloti San man named Qing told Joseph Orpen stories of Cagn.

In 1911, Specimens of Bushman Folklore was published. In 1951, the Marshall family began fieldwork in Nyae Nyae.

In 1961, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was established.

In 1997, Botswana began removing residents from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

In 1999, the ‡Khomani won a land claim in the southern Kalahari.

In 2002, most remaining residents were removed from the reserve. In 2006, the High Court of Botswana ruled the removals unlawful.

San peoples are not a migrant population in southern Africa. Their ancestors were living in the region long before herders and farmers arrived. The main kind of movement was seasonal, within known territories: camps followed water, ripening plants and game across the year.

Large movements came with pressure from outside. As herders and farmers spread over the last two thousand years, San communities in the better-watered east and south were absorbed through marriage and service, or pushed into drier lands. Others were killed in the colonial period. The /Xam speech community of the Northern Cape had ended by the early twentieth century, and its stories survive in the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks.

In the twentieth century, many !Xun and Khwe men were recruited by the South African Defence Force during the war in Namibia and Angola. In 1990 they and their families were moved to Schmidtsdrift in South Africa, and later to Platfontein near Kimberley.

What moved with people was carried in their bodies and voices: dance, songs and stories. What was often lost were languages, territories and the knowledge of particular places. Several San languages now have few or no speakers.

Contact with Khoekhoe herders was long and close. The two share click languages, many words, and beliefs about rain, the moon and the dead. The Khoekhoe Heitsi-Eibib, the hero honoured with cairns of stones beside the roads, has close parallels in San tales. The boundary between foragers and herders was often fluid, as people moved between the two ways of life.

Bantu-speaking farmers took in a great deal. The clicks in isiXhosa, isiZulu and Sesotho came from contact with Khoisan languages. Farmers often treated San healers and rainmakers as powerful specialists and consulted them, while also dominating San communities economically.

With the colonial order came Christianity, schooling, farm labour and new languages: Afrikaans, Setswana, English. Ju/'hoan and Naro communities have adopted Christian practice in many places without giving up the healing dance. Mathias Guenther describes San religion as flexible and open, able to take in new elements while keeping its own centre.

The tradition has stayed itself through this openness rather than by closing itself off. What held its integrity was the practice of n/om and the ethics of sharing, more than a fixed body of doctrine.

Yes. The healing dance is still practised among the Ju/'hoansi, Naro, !Xun and Khwe and in other communities. People still tell the stories of ≠Gao N!a and the Early Race, and young people still learn tracking. Ju/'hoan, Naro, !Xun, Khwe, Taa and G/ui are still spoken, though most speakers also use other languages.

Much has changed. Few communities live mainly by foraging. Most live in settlements, on farms or at the edges of towns, and depend on wages, pensions and crafts. Land loss, poverty and schooling in other languages strain the passing on of knowledge.

Some things are lost. /Xam as a spoken language is gone, and its stories survive on paper. The southern San languages, among them N|uu, have very few speakers. The painting tradition of the Drakensberg ended in the nineteenth century, although the paintings remain.

Contemporary practitioners include healers and dancers at Nyae Nyae and in the Ghanzi and Okavango regions, trackers certified through tracking programmes, and artists at D'Kar's Kuru Art Project. Writers include Kuela Kiema of the Central Kalahari.

San and Khoekhoe peoples were not carried across the Atlantic in large numbers. Their great displacement happened at home. Colonial commandos captured children and forced adults into farm service and indenture at the Cape. Many San and Khoekhoe descendants became part of the communities classified under apartheid as 'Coloured', often losing their languages and their named lineages.

The best-known exile is Sara Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman. She was taken to London in 1810 and exhibited, and she died in Paris in 1815. Her remains were returned to South Africa and buried in the Gamtoos valley in 2002. Her story is now a touchstone for Khoe and San descendants.

In towns and cities, descendants have built new forms. Khoe and San identity groups in Cape Town and elsewhere revive names, dress and ceremony, sometimes drawing on the Bleek and Lloyd record. Since 2000 South Africa's coat of arms has carried a /Xam motto, !ke e: /xarra //ke, usually translated 'diverse people unite', and figures based on the Linton rock painting.

What survived displacement most strongly is the sense of being first people of the land, together with fragments of language, healing and song.

Revival work is led by San communities and their organisations. The Nyae Nyae Conservancy, set up in 1998, gives Ju/'hoansi some control over land and wildlife. Village schools there teach in Ju/'hoan. At D'Kar, the Kuru Family of Organisations and the Kuru Art Project support Naro artists such as Qwaa Mangana and Coex'ae Qgam (Dada), whose prints and paintings draw on story. !Khwa ttu, a San heritage and education centre in the Western Cape, trains young San people and holds exhibitions on San history.

Ouma Katrina Esau, one of the last first-language speakers of N|uu, has taught the language to children in the Upington area and worked with linguists on teaching materials.

In law, the San Council and partners have negotiated benefit-sharing agreements over traditional knowledge, including Hoodia in 2003 and rooibos in 2019. In 2019 South Africa passed the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act. In 2017 San organisations issued their own Code of Research Ethics.

Much remains lost: languages with few speakers, knowledge tied to lost territories, and the full meaning of the rock art. The work goes on as recovery and as new making.

≠Gao N!a (Ju/'hoan) is the great god of the east, creator of people, animals and things, and giver of rain, n/om, life and death. In prayer he is distant and powerful. In tales he is a foolish trickster with many wives. Songs come from him, and healers plead with him in trance.

//Gauwa is the lesser god of the west, associated with sickness and the spirits of the dead. Some tellers merge him with ≠Gao N!a, and others make him a separate being.

Kaggen, the Mantis (/Xam), is a creator-trickster who made the eland and helped bring the moon into being. He is a meddler who can change shape, die and reassemble. His family includes the dassie, the porcupine, Kwammang-a and the young Ichneumon.

!Khwa, the rain (/Xam), is a being who appears as a bull or another animal and is linked to girls' first menstruation. !Khwa punishes disrespect with storm and transformation.

The Moon is a person of the Early Race whose death and return set the pattern for mortality.

Tsui-//Goab (Khoekhoe) is the god of rain and life, prayed to at dawn, and is set against //Gaunab.

No images of these beings are made for worship. They are addressed through prayer, dance and, for healers, direct encounter in trance.

The //gauwasi are the spirits of the dead among the Ju/'hoansi. They live with the gods and come to the edge of the camp, especially during dances. They send sickness out of longing for their living kin. Healers in trance confront them, argue with them and drive them off. Ordinary people avoid speaking their names.

The people of the Early Race are animal-persons of the first times. They are not worshipped, but their deeds shaped the world, and they continue in the animals that bear their names. In /Xam lore they include the Hyena, the Lynx, the Blue Crane, the Ichneumon and the Hare.

Animals with potency, especially the eland and the giraffe, are not spirits in the strict sense, but they carry n/om and are treated with care. Healers in trance may take their power.

In trance, healers themselves cross into the spirit world. Some are said to travel as lions, and their spirits move outside their bodies.

In /Xam lore, the rain-animal and the forces of wind are beings that respond to human conduct.

The main rule is to keep the right distance and conduct. Spirits are not to be summoned for private ends.

The eland is the most important animal in San thought: the largest antelope, rich in fat, and full of n/om. In /Xam myth Kaggen made it from a piece of his son-in-law's shoe and loved it above all creatures. It appears in girls' first-menstruation rites, in healing songs, and in a great many rock paintings.

The rain-animal (/Xam) is the rain in bodily form. It is often called the rain-bull, a heavy creature that lives in waterholes. Rainmakers lead it across the country so that its blood and milk fall as rain. Rock paintings appear to show it being led on a thong.

The mantis is Kaggen's form, a small insect that holds a creator.

The lion is the dangerous rival of hunters and the animal shape some healers are said to take in trance.

The All-Devourer, //Khwai-hemm, is a being in /Xam lore who swallows everything in his path, including Kaggen and his family, who must escape from inside him.

The hare is the animal of the death story. Its split lip is the mark of its quarrel with the Moon.

These beings stand in relation to humans, and the danger or blessing they bring depends on conduct.

Kaggen and the Eland, as told by /Xam narrators to Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s.

Kaggen, the Mantis, took a piece of the leather shoe of his son-in-law Kwammang-a and put it into the water among the reeds. He went away and came back, and the piece of shoe had become a small eland. He fed it honey, rubbing the honey onto its flanks, and day by day it grew. He called it by name, and it came out of the reeds to him. He kept it secret and brought less honey home to his family.

His grandson, the young Ichneumon, noticed that honey was missing and followed him. He saw the great eland come to Kaggen's call, and he told his father. Kwammang-a and his people went to the reeds and found the eland. When it came out, they killed it and began cutting it up.

Kaggen arrived to find the blood of his eland on the ground, and he wept and raged. The men drove him off. In one telling, he pierced the eland's gall, and the gall burst over his eyes and blinded him in darkness. He wiped his eyes with an ostrich feather and threw it into the sky, where it became the moon, giving light at night.

The story holds the tradition's tensions: love of the animal and the need to kill it, secret possession and the duty to share, and a creator who is also a fool. It explains the eland's potency, why hunting it is solemn, and where the moon came from.

The creator-trickster (Kaggen, ≠Gao N!a) is greedy, curious and boastful, and also a maker and giver. His arc is a repeated cycle of trouble, disaster and revival. He is never defeated for good and never fully reformed. The community laughs at him and also needs him.

The sober kinsman (the young Ichneumon, Kwammang-a) corrects the trickster, gives sound advice and rescues him. He stands for the community's good sense.

The animal-person of the Early Race, such as the Hyena, the Lynx or the Blue Crane, each has a temperament that matches the animal: the Hyena greedy and treacherous, the Lynx proud. Their arc ends in the forms they still have.

The girl at the threshold is the girl in seclusion or the girl of the Early Race. She is in danger and has power. She may make the stars or bring disaster, depending on how she and others act.

The healer is the one who goes through pain and 'death' and comes back with healing. In this tradition the healer is the closest figure to a hero.

The hunter is skilled and modest. He reads tracks and shares the meat, and he is punished in stories when he boasts.

The Moon and the Hare (/Xam). The Moon told the people that as he dies and comes back to life, so would they. The Hare's mother had died, and the Hare wept and would not believe that she would return. In anger the Moon struck the Hare and split its lip, and from then on death became final for people. The structure is a message refused, a quarrel and a fixed outcome. It shows how belief and conduct shape reality, and it places human mortality within the world's cycles.

The Girl Who Made the Stars (/Xam). A girl of the Early Race, angry with her mother, threw wood ashes into the sky. They became the Milky Way, a path of light so that people could find their way home at night. She also threw edible roots, which became stars. The structure is a single act of defiance that creates a lasting feature of the cosmos. It shows that girls hold power to shape the world.

The Sun's Armpit (/Xam). The Sun was once an old man on earth whose light shone only from his armpit when he raised his arm. The old women sent children to throw him into the sky while he slept, so that his light would warm the whole earth and dry the people's food. The children lifted him and threw him, and he became round and gave light to all. In this story, the community acts together for the common good, and the result is the present order.

Titles: Great God; the god of the east; also appears in tales as a trickster

Domain: Creation, life and death, rain, n/om and healing songs

In the stories: Ju/'hoan creation accounts; ≠Gao N!a trickster tales of his wives and appetites

Notes: In Ju/'hoan prayer he is distant and powerful, giving and taking life. In the tales told at the fire he is a foolish, lustful trickster. Scholars treat this double character as central to San religion, not a contradiction.

Titles: Lesser god; the god of the west

Domain: Sickness, the dead, misfortune

In the stories: Ju/'hoan accounts of the dead and illness recorded by Lorna Marshall

Notes: //Gauwa is associated with the west, where the sun sets, and with the //gauwasi. Some tellers merge him with ≠Gao N!a, and others keep him separate. His relationship to the great god varies between tellers.

Titles: Spirits of the dead

Domain: Sickness brought on the living; the edge of the dance

In the stories: Ju/'hoan healing narratives; healers' trance accounts

Notes: They live near the gods and send sickness out of longing for their living kin. Healers in trance confront them, argue with them and drive them off. They are not worshipped.

Titles: /Kaggen; the Mantis; Cagn (in Qing's telling to Orpen)

Domain: Creation, trickery, shape-changing, the eland

In the stories: Kaggen and the Eland; The Mantis assumes the form of a hartebeest; Kaggen and the All-Devourer

Notes: Kaggen is the central figure of /Xam lore, a creator who is also a greedy, meddling fool. He changes shape, dies and reassembles. His household of dassie, porcupine, Kwammang-a and the young Ichneumon corrects him.

Titles: The Rain; the rain-bull

Domain: Rain, storm, girls' first menstruation, transformation

In the stories: The girl who angered !Khwa and was turned into a frog

Notes: !Khwa is the rain personified, often as a bull or another animal. !Khwa punishes disrespect, especially from girls in seclusion, with whirlwinds and storms. Rainmakers lead the rain-animal across the land.

Titles: A man of the Early Race

Domain: The moon's death and return; mortality

In the stories: The Moon and the Hare; the moon made from Kaggen's feather or shoe

Notes: In /Xam lore the Moon is a person who dies and returns each month. His quarrel with the Hare made death final for people. Some tellings say Kaggen made the moon.

Titles: Great god of the G/ui

Domain: Creation, life, the order of things

In the stories: G/ui accounts recorded by George Silberbauer

Notes: N!adima is paired with a lesser being, G//awama, in a pattern close to the Ju/'hoan pair. Silberbauer's Central Kalahari fieldwork is the main published record.

Titles: Tsui//Goab; Tsuni-//Goam (Theophilus Hahn's spelling)

Domain: Rain, life, healing

In the stories: Khoekhoe accounts of his struggle with //Gaunab

Notes: Tsui-//Goab is the Khoekhoe god of rain and life, set against //Gaunab. Nama and Korana prayers to him at dawn were recorded in the nineteenth century. He shows how belief is shared between Khoekhoe herders and San foragers.

Titles: The adversary of Tsui-//Goab

Domain: Death, sickness, misfortune

In the stories: Khoekhoe accounts of his struggle with Tsui-//Goab

Notes: In Khoekhoe tradition //Gaunab is the one who brings death and is defeated by Tsui-//Goab. His name is related to the Ju/'hoan //Gauwa, which shows a shared root. Accounts vary on how the two relate.

Titles: Heitsi-Eibib; Haiseb

Domain: Hero, trickster, death and revival

In the stories: Heitsi-Eibib tales; cairns honouring his many graves

Notes: Heitsi-Eibib is a Khoekhoe hero who dies and returns many times, so he has many graves. Travellers add stones to the cairns said to be his graves. San tales hold parallels to his stories.