National Khoisan Consultative Conference 2001 "Khoisan Diversity in National Unity" Oudtshoorn, 29 March to 1 April Keyan G Tomaselli Director and Professor Graduate Programme in Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal Durban 4041. Chair of the South African Commission on Urgent Anthropological Research. E-mail: tomasell@nu.ac.za Fax: 031-260-1519. Web: www.und.ac.za/und/ccms (what follows are extracts from the above) Academics, film makers, photographers, advertisers and development workers have been involved in intense debates about media representation of Khoi/San peoples. Yet, much of this discussion seems to leave out the direct opinions and experiences of the Khoi/San themselves. Khoi/San perspectives are usually transmitted in the words, theories and images created by these same cultural intermediaries. Many commentators, however, narrowly refer to First Peoples in terms of a fixed location in time, before written history, and locate the San in a particular space/place (the desert). San languages, cultures and identities, like all other societies, exhibit social practices that adapt, change and develop continuously through time, space and place. This process contradicts the many films and TV programmes which depict the San as a `vanishing species', as a culturally isolated desert people, frozen-in-time, who are supposedly losing some very precious (pre-industrial) innocence in their encounter with the modern world. rise Thanks to the recent internationalisation of struggles of indigenous minorities via First Peoples' organisations and global communications networks, the Khoi/San in the 1990s connected with global First Nations movements. This secures them a potential of power beyond that of the cultural intermediaries whose images have previously defined them and, in many instances, confined them. As Tsamkxao …Toma says, "The white road from the west brings us visitors as numerous as birds before the rains. If these visitors want to know the thoughts which are inside my head, they have only to ask me" (quoted in Biesele 1993). As …Toma indicates, the San are quite capable of speaking for themselves. What has hitherto been lacking, however, was direct access to the media. The film makers, the photographers, the anthropologists, the development workers, the politicians and the funding agencies no longer have total control over Khoi/San interpretations. The balance of power, of course, remains skewed in favour of the former. It is they who control capital, the media, and knowledge production in general. However, new imaging and transmission technologies have opened up new ways for even remote communities to stamp their imprints on the world media. Indigenous communities like the San and Khoi, all over the world, are beginning to organize themselves so that they themselves can explain their lives in a world with these technologies, but now using the stories that they know and understand. The first clear break with historical convention on representations of the San occurred when North American anti-apartheid anthropologists and film makers accused Jamie Uys' The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980, 1989) films of being racist, pro-apartheid propaganda (see Tomaselli, 1992). The second phase was surely the questioning of a scene in John Marshall's preview of A Kalahari Family (1995) by 18 anthropologists who had worked among, and on, the San (Barnard et al 1996; Marshall 1996). Their objection was to a scene which depicted the outcome of a discussion on development choices - which they argued would be injurious to the Ju/'hoansi. The third phase were Khoi/San responses to Pippa Skotnes' Miscast Exhibit (1995) at the South African National Gallery to which San groups were invited (Douglas and Law 1997). Miscast was an important event in the ways that San and Khoi peoples were able to define, negotiate and disagree in the hard political negotiations for South[ern] African identity/ies after apartheid. While the Khoi/San as authors are notable by their absence from the book (Skotnes, 1996), their voices very much dominated the exhibition's opening. The tough arguments which ensued followed the earlier disputes about naming. Those who control names empower themselves as representatives of those being spoken `for' and `about'. For the first time the voices of the subjects - whether for, against or in between - were emphatically heard (see Robins and Jackson 1988). The fourth stage was the establishment of the Khoisan Legacy Project and the Khoisan National Committee. The Khoi/San are taking control of their identity, intellectual property and indigenous knowledge. The best way to empower this control will be a strategic and structured alliance with film makers, academics, technologists, and development workers. Not just any of them, but specifically those who understand the practice and power of participatory communication and research, and who follow this through in the editing, product development, marketing, distribution and reception phases of these historical records and representations. Negotiating the San/Image The Hunters of the Kalahari (1995) trades on the image of the San as `primitive'. This emphasis remained despite the anthropological consultant's efforts to reposition the director's assumptions about the San (Biesele annd Hitchcock, 1999). In contrast, The Great Dance (2000) which very successfully, taps into a post-industrial primordial need for a return to a romantic pre-modern condition, strategically negotiates this essentialism by referring to the impact of modernity: says !Nqate, the hunter depicted, "but now [the gemsbok] have run into the wildlife reserve. We must leave them, otherwise we'll be put in jail". Hunting with traditional weapons (rather than the more usual use of dogs, donkeys and horses, spears and rifles) is one of the emphases of most films on San hunting. In Hunters especially, modernity is only evident in the presence of the observing and recording electronic image. Dance as Power/Power as Dance Notwithstanding my criticism about media representations of the Khoi/San, film makers like John Marshall have proved to be great allies in the task of representing the San as they wish to be represented. The Great Dance, directed by Craig and Damon Foster, is another which tries to understand San cosmology. Dancing amongst the San has religious and healing significance, and Subject and Object are integrated in daily activities: "tracking is dancing". University educated Belinda Kruiper in August 2000 said she was at "peace with this film maker" in "the way the film and the movement and the energy, catching the truth and the essence of what happened between man and beast" was portrayed. "[I]n getting a message across ... he [the filmmaker/hunter] speaks to the animal and becomes the animal in the palming of the heart". Of her hunter husband Belinda observed: "Vetkat could feel that by watching it. So he [the Fosters] got that message to the hunter, the feeling of the hunter" (see also Wieczorek 1998). Dance recovers an imagined past, an empowering self-reliant condition, and cinematically restored the memory of the San's lost sense of mobility. Such films are empowering to dispossessed people, like for example, Baptiste Salavador, Liaison Officer, Schmidsdrift: "The film makes us feel really San ... and that we have never lost our culture and our tradition ... If a San loses his hunting rights, it is like putting him in a camp like cattle" (Press Kit, 2000). The film is also empowering to ordinary people: "I have never seen anything like this, as I grew up in town. Now that I am in the Kalahari, I feel like a Bushman. I do not deny that I am a Bushman" (Press kit, young man at Witdraai, 2000). Dancing/healing provides an integration between the modern secularism of the world in which the San now find themselves and traditional cosmologies by which they negotiate this world. As concluded by !Nqate in Dance, "Everyone will respect us again as hunters, as men. But what will become of our sons - the future hunters? Now they go to school and learn to speak English and Setswana. School is good, but we must also teach them the ways of the dance." These kinds of essentialistic / empathetic / spiritual / identity-driven responses are not necessarily what Western critics and academics want to hear from Khoi/San viewers and actors. The West associates hunting with `primitivity', bows and arrows with backwardness, and gathering with scavenging. Media depictions of real hunts such as shown in The Great Dance and The Hunters (1958) sometimes are associated by critics with mischievous attempts by the West to perpetuate debilitating myths about `Bushmen'. I have met many pro-African US academic activists who go to extraordinary lengths to rubbish films and articles which argue that hunting (or the memory of it) remains an essential element in San cultural, economic and religious life. When I explain to Western anthropologists that I have accompanied some hunters from Ngwatle and that this experience had influenced my response to The Great Dance, their responses tend to be guarded. In contrast, Craig Foster who co-directed the film, asked me about whether I had discovered a deeper (existential) self in the experience. I had not, as I had merely on two occasions driven the hunters to the hunting grounds three hours drive away. However, hunter Baba (Kort Jan) Nxai, from Ngwatle, told South African film maker Rob Waldron on skinning a jackal (which looked like a dog) that: God did not give us other food today, only this one so that we can have life. There is no other food today for the Bushman. If this is the food which is due to us, then we must eat. I cannot take it away. I must not bundle it and take it away. This is the only food that will give us strength to find other food (Hunt or Die, 2000. Translated from Afrikaans). Hunting, tracking and eating have existential meanings for Kort Jan. These interrelated activities are a deep spiritual process whereby human life goes on. Furthermore, they constitute a bonding process amongst the men of the community. Bonding and Hunting: Imagined Origins Waldron, whose film on changes in San hunting technologies and tracking techniques, talks for instance about his experience of learning hunting in terms of male bonding, trust and skill: I am particularly interested in the bonding that happens between men when they go hunting. I believe that this bonding, harmony, great friendship and deep love for each other that is evident and is echoed in their statements about each other, is a very valuable thing that we could learn something from. [If] all of us, having probably derived from hunter-gatherer societies at some time or another, would have had that, [we] would have united our societies rather than disintegrating them (Jeursen 1999; Tomaselli 2001). Hunting on foot with only dogs and spears is a dangerous exercise. Survival requires close empathetic relationships between the hunters themselves, and between them and their prey. The nature of relationships and the ways in which they are discussed are vulnerable to essentialist accusations. But this essentialism is a prevailing discourse amongst also some of the more reflective sport and professional hunters (Wieczorek 1999). It is both an intellectual and empathetic response, recovering, in its own way, the imagined structure of feeling of a different time and place, and a different set of economic, social and distributive relationships. The language of this reflection discloses a certain world view that marks such hunters and film makers as culturally embedded in a romantic ideology that possibly negotiates their own cultural origins. They perhaps believe in an existentialist explanation of experience. The strong emotional experience of the hunt and the emotional bond between hunters is identified as a form of life perhaps since lost - a recurring theme in the first two Gods films. Thus when visitors looking for a return to origins visit and research communities like the San, they perhaps experience some kind of redeeming quality about such communities that confirms their questioning of their own culture. Questions of employment become less important than the recovery of an imagined primordial state of innocence and purity. Many TV and film viewers are positioned by film makers to believe that the San actually choose to live in premodern conditions, irrespective of the nature of their encounters with modernity. Because of this, few researchers or film makers have ever asked the San themselves what they think about the films in which they have acted, or which they have seen. Academic debate is certainly one necessary level in redressing the conditions of First Peoples. But we have already seen that another is occurring amongst the First peoples themselves in the ways that they negotiate with film makers, photographers and tourists, development workers and politicians. This social and individual agency is the key to ensuring the popularisation of Khoi/San perspectives in addition to those popularised internationally by academics, development agencies, and tourists. The Khoi/San's power to negotiate meaningful relationships in a global political economy partly lies in their capacity, where possible, to manage the making, exploitation and exchange of images and interpretations. For example, in Southern Botswana we found wall posters of South African soccer players in the homes of San people at Ngwatle and D'Kar. These posters are not examples of South African imperialism. The men who put them up told us that the posters are a form of resistance against the Botswana government's repressive policies towards them. The players in the posters are representatives of, and a way of identifying with, democratic South African policies regarding minorities. Can the Khoi/San really engage politically and globally via the spectacle of cultural villages, video intermediaries, and taped archives. Or will the hard won record become just another form of entertainment as they, too, become comoditised? As /Angn!ao /' Un stated at Miscast: "we have to be concerned now about ourselves ... These days we have to work with our own heads, because in the past it was someone else's head that got us into trouble" (quoted in Biesele 1993). It's the nature of the relationship between the collaborative heads that will make the difference. Questions of Identity Our postmodern age in which mobile people adopt the cultures of where they find themselves, is in conflict with the chimerical pursuit for a static authenticity. The former assumes constant change, as is evident daily amongst the secret San. For them, the constant shifting of identities, names and ethnicities constitutes a survival strategy within larger populations which are ill-disposed towards them. They have preserved their `Bushmanness' in a different way to the Kruipers who display and exchange it for tourists, cameras and photographers. Both are survival strategies; both represent responses to conditions beyond their control. Both are therefore empowering resources in negotiating survival and power. The quest for `authenticity', however, is ultimately sterile and essentialistic. While essentialism can be empowering in the short term, it can also be misused for nationalist sectarian purposes. Such uses are anti-democratic, as they work on the basis of exclusion of minorities and people considered `different'. Film makers need to be aware of this. On a Personal Note I am greatly humbled by my invitation to speak at this conference. I am probably one of those academics whom I have been criticising; but I have always taken my political and social responsibilities very seriously. Academics are not disconnected from ongoing social and political processes; we are part of them. Our work can sometimes have an impact on the processes, and even influence them. Our studies do have consequences. These can be both positive and negative. My hope is that my participation here today will become a collaboration with the Khoisan that leads to strategies that will improve conditions under which all South Africans work and live. I also hope that it will help the later settlers= descendants find new and different ways to relate to all the Khoisan we speak about today. This has to be possible because, as Masilela (1987) has argued, today's Khoisan are representatives of a First Culture, and as such offer pre-nationalist solutions to the future of our racially divided country. They offer a culturally and historically binding cement as depicted in our new national coat of arms. The Khoisan may be amongst the smallest of South African minorities, but historically, the Khoisan could and should play a cultural, political and reconciliatory role of proportions way beyond the size of their actual numbers. Such is their historical legacy. Empathetic alliances between the Khoisan and cultural intermediaries are possible, through which the San are themselves able to popularize their struggles on the international TV and cinema stages. The task that remains is how to achieve this more equitable social contract. Acknowledgements This research is partly funded by the Natal University Research Fund. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation: Social Sciences and Humanities toward this research is hereby also acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and not necessarily attributed to the National Research Foundation. My thanks also to my colleagues who have contributed to the broader research project, and for commenting on this paper: Arnold Shepperson made a major contribution, and to Chantel Oosthuysen, Ruth Teer-Tomaselli and Anthea Simoes Caleb Wang. Thanks also to Craig Foster for providing me with information relating to his film, and who proved to me my most demanding critic, and to Frans Prins for discussion on aspects of the paper. The outcome, however, is solely mine.

 

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