Namibia | Local encounters

I am drinking gin and tonic on a flight to Doha, listening to Whitney Houston and watching Deadpool 2 at the same time so I can’t promise what this little post will become.

Encounters with local cultures during our travels always filled me with a sense of unease. I always felt like an intruder engaging in the voyeurism of the privileged, perpetrating the subsistent livelihoods of these people.

Here we were though, following two short, sinewy, wrinkled Ju’/hoansi hunters through the Kalahari across the borderlands of Namibia and Botswana. Better known as Bushmen or San, they represent the largest biologically modern group of humans for most of the hundred fifty thousand years of our existence. Few thousand remain in the northeast of Namibia, inhabiting traditional lands, hunting and gathering for all their nutritional needs. Others were invariably massacred by colonial powers, killed by farmers for encroaching on their lands or, too often, deprived of their land and “resettled” into the modern way of living.

Tuka, the elder hunter and community healer, points to fresh leopard tracks. He stops to show us one of almost 150 edible plant species they routinely forage for and looks for honey in the nearby tree. While undeniably a demonstration for us tourists, hunts like these convey an image of fiercely independent people, in harmony with and full awareness of the nature that surrounds them.

Experiences like this make it easy to understand why, in the middle of the last century, they became known as the ‘lost people of Eden’. They responded to everything Western societies reeling from the war asked for. Researchers found a ferociously egalitarian society, living for the day and not accumulating surpluses. Sharing the proceeds of most activities, they seemingly harnessed “the general human impulse to envy”. Hunting for around 15 hours a week, they would manage to find an adequate supply of food and then divide it equally amongst the community. Here were the people that solved the “economic problem” of Keynes before Keynes could pose it.

When we returned to their community to escape the midday heat, I could well see the allure of this idyllic vision. And yet, it is not easy to unpick the reality from the narrative. Subsequent research showed that many of them at times yielded to the low impulses of our species - warring, stealing, wanting more. Even looking around us, we saw youngsters who seemed in a hurry to join the “modernism”. Or maybe it was only me, finding it difficult to comprehend how lives in straw huts, spent foraging and hunting for food, with no education and benefits of modernity, could be fulfilling.

So here I am, sipping gin and tonic, listening to Whitney Houston, watching Deadpool 2, crisscrossing the world on a 6-month tour. I can only imagine my “impulse of envy” will take a lot of work to cure.