deity of Bushman mythology.
After a gentle initiation in the Kruger, we proceeded to a more extreme wilderness immersion experience: five days backpacking in the riverine bush of the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in what used to be called Zululand, and is now Kwazulu, Natal. We carried all our food and slept under the stars. This was the hunting preserve of Shaka and the Zulu kings, and is still home to the full complement of indigenous, savanna megafauna, including the largest rhino population in the world.* Surrounded by large and potentially dangerous animals, guided and protected by two seasoned rangers, I experienced some of the most beautiful and peaceful moments of my life.
The climax of the trip involved flying to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, renting a Land Rover, and driving into the veldt of Nyae Nyae, East Bushmanland, to visit surviving Ju/twasi** (Ju/hoansi) San communities. After Namibian independence in 1981, the filmmaker and ethnographer John Marshall, who had grown up with the Ju/twasi, helped set up the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia with the purpose of helping the people get access to their traditional land — Bushmanland — and gradually transition from hunting and gathering to farming and raising livestock.* As development priorities shifted, the government started working with international aid and conservation agencies — the US Agency for International Development and the World Wildlife Foundation — to establish the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in 1996. This was in part inspired by the idea that Bushmen were best suited for a hunting-gathering way of life, and they should be encouraged to pursue it as much as possible, together with benefiting from trophy hunting and ecotourism. Large numbers of elephants and lions had migrated to the area, attracted by the water of the newly dug bore holes. The tourist and trophy-hunting markets, however, were fickle, lions and elephants did not mix well with farming, and the land base was too small to support a traditional nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. The result was that the people remained impoverished in what John Marshall called “death by myth” — the myth of the Bushman forever consigned to hunt and gather — the title of the final volume of his five-part film documenting the saga of his family’s time with the San.3
Amazingly, in 1998, some of the old ways still remained. One of the anthropologists who spent many years working with the community introduced me to a young Bushman guide, /Twi (/Ui) Toma, who helped me connect with some of the old healers and shamans. We camped outside a tiny village consisting of a few simple huts, went hunting with the men, gathered veldkos (bushfood) with the women, distributed pouches of the harsh Botswana tobacco that visitors are expected to provide, and shared rounds of tea and biscuits around the campfire. Finally, we found singers and healers in a neighboring village who organized a healing trance dance for the group. The Kalahari Bushmen still practiced the same trance dance that seems to have been universal among diverse Bushman groups throughout southern Africa. The healer-shamans stamped and danced in a tight circle around the singers, who sat shoulder to shoulder around the fire singing and clapping the eerie, complex contrapuntal songs. The healers were bent over, propping themselves up with their dancing sticks, and carried the fly whisk made from wildebeest hair — the signature of the dancer. Once caught up in the trance-inducing energies of the singing and dancing, some of the healers started entering the spirit world, shaking, sweating, shrieking, talking in tongues, circling the group diagnosing and healing sickness and disorder. That night, under the stars, on the sands of the Kalahari, I witnessed an activity that I had seen depicted in rock paintings over a thousand miles away in South Africa, where the now-extinct southern San — the /Xam — performed the same dances and then painted their experiences on the rock walls of their shelters.
I had no illusions of playing anthropologist or of contributing to the empirical fieldwork on the San, one of the most thoroughly studied groups of hunter-gatherers in the world. One scholar estimated that there are over a thousand published pages for every living San. I simply approached them with the big questions of political philosophy in mind. What can we learn about human nature from one of the last and oldest of such cultures that can guide us now? How did the changing context and circumstances of San life shape their society and politics? How can speculations about our distant past illuminate how we all should live together on this single, increasingly crowded, and fragile planet?
After 1998, I continued making regular trips to South Africa. In 2007 I went to Andriesvale on the edge of the Kalahari to visit one of the last groups of Bushmen to survive within South Africa — the Khomani San. They had inhabited what is now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (which includes the old Gemsbok National Park) on the border between South Africa and Botswana. During apartheid, they had been removed from the park and had scattered, losing their language — perhaps the oldest of all the San languages — and much of their culture. Then in 1999 the new South African government returned to the Khomani some forty thousand hectares, half of which were inside the game reserve. Since then some fourteen surviving language speakers have been found, and there are vigorous attempts to revive the culture and establish a viable local economy.
But the Khomani I saw were still living in shacks in the sand, plagued by poverty, sickness, alcoholism, and boredom. I traveled with one of the leaders — now an Afrikaans speaker with an Afrikaans name, Jan van der Westhuizen, or simply “Oom Jan” — into the central Kalahari of Botswana to D’Kar, where dozens of other Bushman groups had gathered from all over southern Africa for the annual Bushman dance and healing festival. There, filmmakers Craig and Damon Foster were filming /Urugab “Toppies” Kruiper, a young Khomani man who with his family was on a mission to reconnect with the “old ways” and become a fully initiated hunter.* Toppies was all muscle and sinew, his front teeth knocked out and his chest marked with long, jagged white scars from several near-fatal knife fights. He was soft-spoken and laughed as he told me, pointing to his scars, that it was a miracle he was still alive. I spent several days with Oom Jan in the red dunes of the Bushman section of Kgalagadi Park, listening to his stories about how as a young man he had been raised in the park and taught how to hunt with a spear, running down antelope. During the day we followed animal tracks, and at night I did a lot of thinking, sitting in front of the campfire, and then lying on my back, looking up — or was it down?! — dizzyingly into those millions of distant suns glittering in the unpolluted blackness of the desert sky.
Primal Political Philosophy
The insight I got from repeated and sometimes difficult returns to Hawai‘i made me realize that I was no longer primarily interested in being a detached academic, applying critical methodologies to solve scholarly problems. Like it or not, I came to understand that my whole life was a struggle with something like the daunting project of classical political philosophy. This traditionally required nothing less than bringing together the totality of one’s lived experience to confront the defining question of the truth quest: “How should we live?” Socrates and Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, all giants among many others, attempted to articulate an integrated vision in response to this question. Entire societies and ways of life were organized around these visions. In each case the philosopher had responded to a personally felt sense of crisis in the life of the larger society. In each case the creative response required a return to beginnings, to asking and attempting to answer the foundational questions around which every worldview and way of life are constructed: What is the human condition? What connects humans to the rest of creation — the community of being? How can this guide our thinking about good governance, a just and healthy economy, and a satisfying and meaningful life for the individual?
From the perspective of scholarly research, the scope of such a project was clearly huge, and I hesitated to admit my ambition and face the accusation of grandiosity. Then the primal perspective gave me courage, reminding me that in a very basic sense no one escapes the challenge facing
