The oldest culture in Southern Africa faces huge changes if it’s to survive
LOOKING like odd anthills, the hundreds of dark brown army tents set up between the scraps of bush and vast stretches of dusty nothing add to the outlandish appearance of this harsh Northern Cape area.
This is a tent-town called Schmidtsdrift. It was built on a South African Defence Force (SADF) base in 1990, at first as a temporary arrangement for the 4 500 San people who now call it home, many of them originally moved by the SADF from Namibia. Houses were promised for them within the first month of moving to Schmitsdrift; nine years on, nobody has much hope that they will ever materialise.
Schmidtsdrift San Combined school was rated the poorest school in the Northern Cape on the Norms and Standards for Schoolfunding Resource Targeting Table for this year. As such, the school will be receiving a favourable share of funding from the provincial education department — but the needs of the school and the community it serves are so huge that no matter how much they receive, their situation is likely to continue to be a struggle.
Principal Jomo Jonkers describes the difficult conditions the school operates under. Even though tents were exchanged for more solid corrugated iron structures, schooling remains at the mercy of the elements: ”One week there wasn’t any water. When that happens you don’t have a choice but to dismiss the school because the children are thirsty and therefore can’t concentrate,” says Jonkers. ”We sometimes also have to dismiss the school when it’s 42 degrees in the classroom, or when there’s a sandstorm, or when it rains.”
Beyond the extremes of the climate, the next biggest obstacle to effective education for these people is the issue of culture and language. This particular group of San people, whose ancestors were the first peoples to inhabit our country, continue to speak the ancient languages of !Xhu and Khwe. However, not one of the 39 teachers who work with the 1 370 learners speaks their language — in fact, all of the teachers come from outside the community, travelling about 80km a day to reach the school. As a result, explains Jonkers, ”we have three translators [in grade R] because when the children start school they can’t speak a word of English or Afrikaans.”
There is clearly a resistance from the learners to speaking these ”foreign” languages. Laments Jonker: ”If only the pupils would accept that Afrikaans is the medium of instruction and that they should communicate in Afrikaans with each other outside the classroom as well. It could make our life easier because a lot of them fail because of the language.”
The matric class of 1999 — consisting in total of four young men — have a lot to say about the issue of language and culture. Asked whether they could relate to the history syllabus they had just been examined on in their final matric exams, 21-year-old Markus Jedembo responds emphatically ”Nee, nooit! [No, never!].” This is how Jedembo understands the syllabus’s silence on his people’s history: ”I think it’s because the languages in the western civilisation have developed enough to ensure that their history is recorded.”
He adds, ”The only way we can make sure that our history is also going to form a part of that is to develop our language. We hope that the San children who are growing up now will see our history in the history books the day they go to school.”
Jedembo’s acute awareness of the struggle for his people’s culture to be recognised and respected is shared by fellow matriculant Kordino Samba. Samba has already secured part-time work with the San Institute, and says, ”I want to join them because I want to ensure that our culture doesn’t die out and that our language will be recorded.” Samba says that the first book to be published in !Xhu already exists in Namibia, but that ”they use a completely different alphabet, so it’s a language that we can’t read even though we can speak it.”
Beyond the issue of language, the !Xhu and Khwe cultures are slowly disintegrating in the modern wastelands in which they are trapped. The whole concept of borders and land ownership is absolutely foreign to the San people, who for aeons lived their lives freely moving through Africa — as far north as Angola and Zambia — hunting and gathering to survive. Now fenced in in the army base at Schmidtsdrift, where employment opportunities beyond becoming a soldier for the South African National Defence force are virtually non-existent, many of the older people do little besides wait out the heat of the day under a thorn tree. Shinage Munega, an !Xhu originally from Namibia, says: ”I’m slowly dying inside. I’m a hunter. I can’t just lie under a tree like this doing nothing.”
He also expresses his fears for his culture: ”I’m worried that in 20 years’ time, if the young people are going to continue to get married to people outside of this culture, that the language and the culture will die out.”
Kujema Mukua, a traditional leader from the Khwe community also originally from Namibia, has similar complaints: ”San people don’t buy things coming from the ground,” she says. ”But look at this land — what can you plant here? Now I have to buy tomatoes and cabbage.”
As traditional leader, Mukua does her part to keep the customs of her people alive in the next generation: ”Every December we gather under trees and pass our stories on to the children,” she says. ”We show them how to make a bow and arrow, how to look for honey, how to find water, how to set traps, how to look for berries, which ones you can eat and which ones not. They have to be able to identify all the different plants and trees.”
The challenge for the new generation will largely be to reconcile their heritage with their present realities in Schmidtsdrift. In the meantime, the San people’s culture will remain in its strange limbo, caught somewhere between the ancient past and an ill-defined future.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, February 14, 2000.
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