Renowned writer and conservationist David Bristow, and award-winning photographers Roger and Pat de la Harpe, teamed up not only as talented friends and business partners, but as passionate Africans searching for the must-see treasures of this continent. One chapter in their adventure to produce the book African Icons is a chapter on the Bushmen of the Kalahari.
The fascinating ‘first people’ who once lived off the earth and survived the arid heat of the desert, have become legend. Their primitive lifestyles were lost when the law took over, and the hunter-gatherers were no more. Until a handful of private safari camps offered their subsistence lifestyles back to them. One of these establishments is Haina Kalahari Lodge, and the African Icons team headed straight there for an experience with the Kalahari Bushmen.
Take a look at African Icons video clip of their experience with the Bushmen community at Haina, where they walked, danced, stalked, and ate with the first people of the desert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVBN_5-7mNo
The last count of these hunter-gatherer people living in Southern Africa was at about 6000 in the 1970s, at which point the population of Bushmen had plummeted from about 60 000 in the 1950s. The erection of game fences and the reallocation of land during civil wars meant that the natural way of life and the movement along migration routes was destroyed. Little villages set up where boreholes were sunk and cattle ranches were established leading to the foreign concept of employment and a modern lifestyle that introduced the abuse of alcohol among other things. Due to a culmination of reasons – one being the apparent discovery of diamonds in the area – the last of the Bushmen people were evicted from their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari.
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