San village, North Namibia: 26th Aug 09

An early start this morning (again), to travel north west and visit a village of the San people. The San are indigenous tribesmen of northern Namibia who, until recently, lived as traditional hunter gatherers. The Namibian government have been ‘encouraging’ the San to forgo their traditional ways and have been banned from hunting and given huge plots of land to farm instead. There is some resistance among the older San who don’t want to farm, whilst the younger generation receive formal education, move away and become integrated into wider society.

Fortunately for us (and other tourists to the region) the traditional ways of the San are maintained as part of a living museum in the bush. We were escorted by an English speaking guide into the bush where we met up with the rest of the tribe. The traditional dress of the San is very little indeed, the men folk wear a simple and skimpy thong made from animal hide, whilst the women folk wear wraps over their midriffs of the same material, but leaving the upper body exposed. There was just one man and several women, two of which had young babies, another one of which had the biggest baps we’d ever seen, ever. They were so enormous they were practically raking the sand on the ground. They must have given the poor woman terrible back ache.
We were shown the traditional methods of tracking and hunting animals, all described to us by the male head of the tribe in the local language which is dispersed with a series of clicking noises, which sounds very odd indeed. Apparently the San have 30 characters in their alphabet, the last 4 of which are different clicking sounds. Later in the evening the tribe put on some traditional dancing which involved a lot of hand clapping, singing, and bouncing boozongers! The head tribesman spent the entire dance parading in front of the women shaking his but cheeks at a million miles an hour, occasionally interrupted with a spot of hot coal snatching from the fire in order to rub all over his body. The dance was called the ‘elephant dance’, quite why we were left wondering!

The last part of the day before we had the dancing was spent playing with the local children, who loved to act up in front of the camera and try on our shades and hats. Earlier in the day the same children were going nuts dancing to Michael Jackson on the truck’s stereo, they really got into it big time and knew all the moves (they must have a tv stashed away somewhere), nobody had the heart to tell them MJ died. The kids seem very amused by our attempts at communication via the medium of clicking noises, god know what we were saying!