Who Are the SAN?

In their mythology, God created all of southern Africa for the San (Bushman).

Then he created the San, then he created the San's animals for and even from the San. God left them to guard it all, which they did for eons, until we more 'advanced' people arrived. These are the world's oldest surviving pragmatic environmentalists.

The San are some of the last nomadic hunter-gatherers on earth. We have too soon forgotten that 10,000 years ago, before the start of the Agricultural (or Neolithic) Revolution, all humans were hunter-gatherers. Then, the population of our earth was a mere 10 million! The Agriculture Revolution entailed humans first discovering or being introduced to the technology of domesticating plants and /or animals. A profound results was mankind becoming more sedentary vs. nomadic. This led to the significant increase in our population growth. We reached 250 million by the birth of Christ, 2 billion by 1930, and near 6 billion today. It is estimated that world population will double to 11 billion by about 2020! As we post-Agricultural Revolution humans multiplied we took the land from the nomadic family clans of hunter-gatherers. It happened again and again; Africa, North and South America, Australia, in recent centuries, earlier in Europe and Asia.

At the start of the Agricultural Revolution, the San had all of Africa up to the southern edge of the Sahara, except for the Pygmies occupying what is now the Congo (old Belgian Congo, then Zaire), and the Bantu blacks having only westernmost west Africa (their black cousins the Nilo-Saharans were then in the eastern Sahara). With the belated arrival of the Agricultural Revolution technology south of the Sahara, the blacks expanded East across Africa, and as land demands increased with population growth, south, along with the Nilo-Saharans.

The majority of the San were 'ethnically cleansed' for their land in South Africa by the Dutch who landed in 1652, invading from the south, and by the Zulus and other blacks migrating from the north. By the time of Custer's last stand (1876), no later than Wounded Knee (1890), the last of the San had been exterminated in South Africa, leaving only their haunting rock paintings, and a few of their genes in the South African 'coloureds'.

also visit http://www.indigenousheritage.org/ where they are working to raise funds to lease or purchase ancestral lands in southern Africa, where communities of San can redefine their traditional way of life.