A LIFETIME quest and sheer dedication has seen the traditional crafts of the San people of the Northern Cape turned into useful, marketable products.
It stands on top of a pale, pimply sand dune in the so-called Green Kalahari; an old blue school bus with “Emergency Exit” peeling off its side window and its route “Rural Bus Service: Bokspits ? Tsabons” carefully hand-printed on to its forehead. A thatch lean-to covers an outside kitchen of enamel cups and old CX 20 oil cans cut messily in half to hold Robertson’s spices. A Wendy house chair with a hand-painted fairy and a sign with the words “We can all fly if we really try” sits nearby.
This is the unusual home of a remarkable woman and her son Simon (7), who have given up everyday luxuries in a lifetime quest to uplift the Khomani San people in the Northern Cape.
Betta Steyn walks towards me and extends a plump hand; a red turban is wrapped around her head like a lazy puffadder and a tattooed ant lies still on her right foot. The unruly edges of a pink, jagged ring stretch towards her nail and remind me of a lucky packet. “I bought it in Milan,” she says. “Nobody knows what it is.” Her chuckle is smoky and fibrous.
Steyn first came to the desert three years ago to visit an artist friend running a workshop with the San.
“I saw how the people were selling crafts on the side of the road and realised that I could help them,” she says. “I also loved the openness, the space where you can see and go for ever. This is what made sense for me for the first time in my life.”
And so she gave up her profession as a journalist and moved to the Kalahari Desert where she set up a craft project called Khomani Sisen (Sisen means “we work” in the ancient language of the Khomani San) just outside a Northern Cape town called Askham, 200km north of Upington.
“When I first arrived the quality of the work was non-existent,” she says. “The people were bored and their art catered for a cheap tourist market.”
The degeneration of their age-old and stylistically simple rock paintings ? into gaudy, side-of-the-road crafts ? stems from a history of land removals, empty political rhetoric and abuse dating back to 1931 when the Kalahari Gemsbok Park was proclaimed and the San were ejected across the Botswana border into South Africa. In 1973 under the apartheid laws they were reclassified as a coloured race and were forbidden to re-enter the park.
The Khomani San have been surviving in the dunes outside the fence ever since. They were no longer able to hunt and gather and so lived by selling their crafts on the side of the road.
In 1999 negotiations led to President Thabo Mbeki signing the Xhomani land claim. Traditional leader Dawid Kruiper accepted 55 000ha, of which 25 000 are inside the park. Despite Mbeki’s famous words that day: “We shall mend the broken strings so that our dreams can take root,” nothing changed fundamentally. After the furore surrounding the land claim had died down, the San continued to sit on the side of road trying to sell their crafts.
If restoring the dignity of the San people was the point of the land restitution process, then the government failed. The San’s lives spiraled into a haze of blurred boundaries where alcohol, domestic violence and boredom were the realities behind a conjured media image of agile bushmen in their traditional leather !ais (loin cloths) tracking their gemsbok prey with paleolithic bows and arrows.
It was into this confusing mixture of unfulfilled hopes, substance abuse and lost traditions, submerged in tawdry modern doeks, jeans and Castle lager T-shirts, that Steyn was plunged when she arrived. Rather than alter their lifestyle to suit the tales of San lore, hunting and gathering, she set about channeling their cultural heritage into useful modern- day crafts that provide them with both dignity and capital.
“Why sell a bow and arrow in the modern world when they can apply their skill and make crafts that are of more use,” she says matter-of-factly.
With the financial help of the South African San Institute (SASI), she started with 26 people and now has more than 50 working for the project, which channels the talents of the San people into crafts that are internationally recognised. Everything is made from natural materials and includes puppets made from gemsbok horns and steenbok skin, ostrich egg shell pendants with delicate San drawings burnt into them, leather desert sandals and intricately inscribed ostrich eggs.
“It’s a pleasure that some people are feeding themselves again and it is a great privilege to learn their culture. I get unbelievable satisfaction from seeing how their enthusiasm and quality of work has developed,” says Steyn.
Last year the Khomani Sisen Craft Project won a subsidy from the government at the National Crafts Ibiza in Johannesburg to sell their crafts at the Milan Trade Fair. Steyn and two San women, Susanna Witbooi and Mietjie Bok, flew to Italy in December as representatives.
“The Italians literally bought the clothes, adornments and desert sandals off their bodies,” says Steyn. “The women coped extremely well and handled most of the sales.” She also managed to secure a lucrative contract with fashion house Ascoli Buttoni to supply 3Â 000 ostrich eggshell buttons.
In just three years, through sheer dedication and confidence, Steyn has helped the San to lift the quality of their work from frayed tourist artefacts to work that is more subtle and sophisticated and deserves the recognition of the world’s top fashion and jewellery designers.
It is midday and a group of San people are sitting on the side of a dirt track in their leather !ais, engrossed in threading necklaces with chips of gemsbok horn and the pods of camel-thorn trees.
As I record the authentic scene, a scantily dressed woman demands R20 for their “help”. I am slightly irritated at the breach of journalistic ethics and at them trading for their heritage, but realise that they only dress like this to maximise the marketability of their position, seeing no fault in it.
The woman’s name is Elsie. She is smoking a “zol” and sucks on it so hard that a deep shadow forms in the hollows of her cheeks. She explains that since living on this land, she is very happy, “we suffer but we’re making a life out of it”. She talks at length about the traditional healing herbs that grow in the desert: kankarbos, kamagoo, bitterhout, and jackalbos.
A pale day moon hangs in the sky and follows me back towards the bus. An obese Puffadder and a San woman lie on the road. Both are motionless. One from the heat. The other from too much alcohol.
“I don’t want to make excuses for the alcohol problem because it is inherent in any society,” Steyn says. “It is hectic because the bushmen are trying to forget. But they cannot use their past as an excuse for much longer.”
Although I admire the serenity of Steyn’s lifestyle I wonder how she copes with the relentless solitude and dryness. She answers simply: “Life here is fantastic. There is no electricity and the quality of life to me is perfect. We don’t have a TV so I spend wonderful times with my kid lying in the dark, talking and playing.” She describes herself as a loner. “Since I was young, I looked for stillness. I’m happy here and can’t ever imagine leaving.”
Bringing up her son Simon, she believes that the simple lifestyle is far superior to life in the city. “I only have one rule,” she says seriously. “That he is home before dark.” She adds an afterthought like an unexpected burp: “This is the only place in the country that you can have legal siestas between 10 and three everyday! No one looks at you askance if you lie down for most of the day.”
I suppose the desert has a silent way of slowing everything down, of quietly shifting things to where they are supposed to be and of exposing life’s small wisdoms.
That evening a southern wind blows, encouraging deadly scorpions to emerge. Warily I sit perched on the Wendy house chair. Steyn sits sprawled next to me in the sand drawing patterns. There is a fire with sweet pumpkin and couscous cooking. “It’s like a Big Brother house here,” she says, as if reading my thoughts about the future of the San people. “After so many years a group of people from all over, with different experiences, are thrown together again. They weren’t forced to live like this but were given shared land. Social and political problems are inevitable. What makes me cross is when people come here and say that they’re not traditional. The San lifestyle hasn’t been traditional for years.
“You can’t stop the bushmen from developing. It’s a natural process. I believe that every individual is at a different stage in their development. You can’t force them to maintain tradition nor can you force them to modernise, but they need to strike a balance otherwise future generations will become more and more marginalised as the rest of the world moves forward – or backwards.”
I realise that what Steyn is fighting is the incredibly naïve mindset of trying to create a place that man hasn’t touched. Although the land claims were the correct move in sentiment, taking these Western-clothed, Afrikaans-speaking people back to the bush was simplistic. It assumed that they would slip back into their ancient lifestyle, leaving behind them the modern trappings that they had experienced in the years that they were dispersed outside the park.
“It’s like telling someone to dig a hole after they have been exposed to a modern toilet,” says Andrew Hall, the Northern Cape provincial official for the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. He has motivated for a R2-million grant for the craft project from the government in the name of development.
The media, less interested in the severity of the problem than with the dramatic appeal of their primordial lifestyle, simply created an industry of perpetuating the past and romanticising the San as some sort of noble savage. There is little concern for the social and psychological damage that they were doing to a people who are trying to create a realistic lifestyle in the modern world.
A donkey cart with Yokohama four-by-four tyres and three San men wobbles up to the bus. A whistle for the mules to stop and the men clamber down with no other reason but to greet Steyn with cheerful grins.
It is ironic that her flamboyant style of dress and self-adornment actually helps her blend into the starkness of the Kalahari, making her one with her surroundings and with the San people she loves so much.
“Remember, little cousin,” a Bushman elder once said to a little boy, “everything has its own dignity, however absurd it might seem to you, and we are all bound to recognise and respect it if we wish our own to be recognised and respected.”