11 - Sharing the Land with Others

Summary

Bushmen are not alone in the Kalahari. They are not even the majority people there. Rather, Bushman communities frequently share their land and its resources with Ovambo, Herero, Khoekhoe, Tswana, whites, ‘Coloured people’, Basters and many others. Even these groups are diverse in several ways, not only in traditional lifestyles (herder, rancher, white-collar worker and so on), but also in terms of social class and education. The Kalahari happens to be one of the least populous regions of the earth. Yet the environments are fragile, water is limited and activities like livestock rearing require lots more land than other existences. My earliest intention as a field researcher had been to study ethnicity, and in this chapter I return to that topic at a theoretical level. There are more than 200 ethnic group names in the literature, and many are synonyms (for example, there are at least 23 labels for the !Xoõ, and one of these, ≠Hoã, is also the name for another small group). My goal here is explore what it means to adhere to any of these labels.