This book offers a unique look behind the scenes of anthropological fieldwork amongst the Mende in Sierra Leone in the mid-1930s. The Dutch anthropologist and sociologist Sjoerd Hofstra (1898-1983), Rockefeller research fellow of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures and one of Bronislaw Malinowski’s three ‘Mandarins’ (as were also Meyer Fortes and S. Frederick Nadel), reports in long, bi-weekly letters to his adoptive mother about his experiences with the Mende. During his first stay in Sierra Leone (January 1934 – March 1935), Hofstra got blackwater fever, a complication of malaria tropica. His second stay (May – September 1936) came to an untimely end because he again developed symptoms of blackwater fever and was advised to return to Europe. Because of this his fieldwork remained unfinished, and Hofstra never got round to publishing the planned book on the Mende. However, Hofstra published four articles on the Mende in English, photocopies of which are included in this book. Next to these articles Hofstra’s letters to his adoptive mother contain valuable first-hand information about his fieldwork. His daughter, cultural and social historian Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, has edited and translated these letters, while also including contextual information.

ASC Occasional Publication 19 – ISBN: 978‐90‐5448‐138‐6 – 2014

Download book (PDF): https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/24890

Young female soldier of the Eritrean Liberation Front Eritrea 1975 – Photo: eritrea-chat.com

Introduction
In the second half of the twentieth century, Eritrea was an arena of uninterrupted armed conflict that went on for about three decades. The conflict was basically rooted in history and geography. But it was also aggravated by outside intervention for many years. Ethiopia being supported first by the US, Israel, and latter on by the USSR, and the Eritrean nationalists by socialist oriented Middle Eastern and Asian countries and organizations turned Eritrea into a proxy battle field between opposing forces during the Cold War era.

The protracted Eritrean war of independence started in 1961 under the auspices of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF (1960-1981) was the first, and largely Muslim-based, armed resistance movement that emerged to contest Ethiopian rule over Eritrea. Formed in 1960, the ELF carried out political and military activities for the subsequent twenty years in an attempt to gain independence. This armed resistance movement was, however, unable to accomplish its stated goals of achieving independence. Rather, the task of achieving de facto independence was realized by its offspring organization in 1991. This study is, therefore, an attempt to reconstruct the history of a socio-political movement that has been important in the recent history of Eritrea: the Eritrean Liberation Front. In the following sections an attempt is made to outline the fundamental research problem and the motivation for my interest in undertaking the intended study, research questions, scope of the study, theoretical framework, methodology, relevance of the study, and organization of the thesis.

Problem Statement and Rationale
In 1950, the UN passed a resolution that federated Eritrea with Ethiopia, without any form of plebiscite. Within few years, Ethiopia dismantled the pillars of the federation that guaranteed Eritrea’s limited autonomy one by one without hesitation. Throughout the federal period, Eritreans protested against Ethiopia’s violations of the Eritrean autonomy. As it became quite difficult to organize and agitate inside Eritrea, the task of organizing a movement to promote the Eritrean cause fell on the Diaspora. Frustrated with the system, a new breed of Eritrean nationalists founded the underground Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELM)[i] in Port Sudan in 1958. The ELM sought to terminate Ethiopian rule through a coup d’état. But before the ELM could attempt a coup, the war for independence was launched in 1961 under the auspices of the ELF.[ii] After that the country lapsed into a cycle of political disorder, violent conflict and human suffering in the three decades that followed.

The founders of the ELF were Eritrean political exiles and students in Cairo, Egypt, who drew inspiration from the Algerian revolution.[iii] The initial ELF leaders, who were living abroad, came mainly from Muslim backgrounds and this had a profound impact on the membership and mobilization of the ELF. Consequently, during the early years of the first decade of its history, the movement favoured Muslims over Christians.[iv]

In the 1960s, the movement nevertheless grew steadily as it started to attract support from diverse segments of the population and from the Diasporas. The fighters (also called Tegadelti in Tigrinya, one of the most widely spoken languages in Eritrea) were individuals who came from diverse economic, social, educational, gender, and age backgrounds and came to be marked by their devotion to the success of the struggle. Some of the early fighters received training in Syria, China, Cuba, and Iraq; whilst the rest were trained in the liberated areas. Within the next ten years, the ELF became a serious threat to the Ethiopian rule in Eritrea. The impact of its existence was felt beyond the boundaries of Ethiopia, especially when Ethiopian planes were subjected to subversive activities. In 1970, there was a major breakaway from the initial movement. Three splinter groups emerged and latter coalesced to form the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which became a strong rival to the parent Front. The ELF remained a viable organization for the next ten years, but in the 1970s a series of armed clashes between the two dominant movements occurred. These clashes were typically exemplified by a struggle for dominance. Finally, in 1982, the EPLF superseded the ELF and other smaller groups as the most effective armed resistance to the Ethiopian forces, and defeated the ELF in the process. The ELF fighters fled to Sudan, and many went on to Europe and North America, while some members opted to return to Eritrea and join the rival nationalist movement, the EPLF.
In May 1991, the EPLF took control of the whole country from Ethiopia and Eritrea achieved its de jure independence in 1993 after holding a UN observed referendum, in which 99.8 percent of Eritreans voted for sovereignty. The EPLF transformed itself into the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in 1994 and has been leading the country since its independence.

The ELF, emerging years before its rival the EPLF, and having been in a position of prominence in military terms with regard to the latter, nevertheless was superseded and destroyed in a relatively short period of time. This calls for investigation into the reasons why one movement, from the outside looking stronger, so spectacularly failed not only to achieve its aims but even to maintain itself as an organization, while a seemingly weaker front, the EPLF, not only managed to outflank and supersede its rival but also went on to occupy the whole of Eritrea. The Eritrean example, in this manner, offers a unique comparative example of two movements with different strategies and with very different fortunes. Although it is beyond the scope of the study to address the ELF from a comparative dimension, it is important to at least note that the Eritrean example may hold general lessons on the variables that affect the viability and strength of national-revolutionary movements.

In my previous career as a junior researcher and archivist at the Research and Documentation Centre (RDC), the acting national archive of Eritrea, from 2004 to 2012, I was confronted with a large amount of archival materials concerning the movement in question. Despite the availability of such bulky serviceable source materials, the history of the Eritrean struggle for independence remained by and large incomplete and undeveloped.[v]
This absence of well researched publications and analysis poses a challenge in developing a broader understanding of the dynamics of the Eritrean politics prior to the independence of the country. This experience instilled in me the desire to study the nature and development of the ELF using the idea of writing history from the stand point of those former ELF fighters. In this study,special attention has been given to its origin, development, and demise of the movement, and the how and why questions have also been investigated thoroughly.

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Notes
[i] Ruth Iyob, The Eritrean Struggle for Independence: Domination, Resistance, Nationalism, 1941-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 98-101; see also Dan Connel and Tom Killion. Historical Dictionary of Eritrea (2nd ed.) (Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2011), Connel and Killion, 218-20.
[ii] Ruth, 103; see also Redie Bereketeab, “Eritrea: The Making of a Nation 1890-1991” (PhD. diss., Uppsala University, 2000), 183-184.
[iii] John Markakis, National and Class Conflict in the Horn of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 113.
[iv] Redie, 185
[v] Bairu Tafla, “Interdependence through Independence: The Challenges of Eritrean Historiography,” in New Trends in Ethiopian Studies, ed. Harold G. Marcus. (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1994), 500.

The ‘Bushmen’ or ‘San’ of the Kalahari could well be called an iconographic people. Partly as a result of this, over the years abundant social research has been carried out among the San. Keyan Tomaselli and his research team from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa form part of that tradition; however, in this book Tomaselli is also able to reflect critically, and not without a touch of irony, on the way the San have been represented over the years. Hardly ever has there been a researcher who so uncompromisingly and aptly illustrates the many ethical contradictions in doing fieldwork among the San, and at the same time manages to reconstruct and represent the actual fieldwork experience and the San people so vividly that you almost taste the dust of the Kalahari and smell the raucous world that is depicted.

Note on the Author
Keyan G. Tomaselli is Professor in Culture, Communication and Media Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. He is a Fellow of the University and serves on the advisory board of !Kwa ttu – The San Cultural and Educational Centre. He is Old World book review editor of Visual Anthropology, and has published on visual anthropology in this and other publications such as Appropriating images: The semiotics of visual representation (Intervention Press, 1999). Other journals in which Tomaselli has published include: Visual Studies, Cultural Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Research in African Literatures, etc. He is published in translation in Italian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Arabic, amongst others. Tomaselli is editor-in-chief of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

Contents
Acknowledgements, Acronyms, A Note on Pronunciation
Starting Off – Different people, different communities – Specifically, what are we doing?
Chapter 1. Negotiating Research with First Peoples
Chapter 2. Reverse Cultural Studies: Field Methods, Power Relations and 4X4s … 
Chapter 3. ‘Dit is die Here se Asem’: The Wind, its Messages, and Issues of Autoethnographic Methodology in the Kalahari
Chapter 4. ‘Op die Grond’: Writing in the San/d, Surviving Crime 
Chapter 5. Psychospiritual Ecoscience: The Ju/’hoansi and Cultural Tourism
Chapter 6. Textualising the San ‘Past’: Dancing With Development
Chapter 7. Stories to Tell, Stories to Sell: Hidden transcripts, negotiating texts
References

© Keyan G. Tomaselli, 2005
Cover photograph: Frederik J Lange (Jnr). Taken between Witdraai and Welkom, Northern Cape, June 2005.
Coverdesign: Ingrid Bouws, Amsterdam
Editing: Saskia Stehouwer

Published by Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam, 2005, ISBN 90 5170 481 X

Acknowledgements
The research on which this book reports is greatly indebted to The Protea Hotel, Upington, for sponsorship of accommodation on the way to and back from the Kalahari. Riann and Jeannne de Klerk, Bill and Kathy Fisher, and Kathleen and Willie Burger provided other accommodations in Upington at one time or another. Thanks to the Molopo Lodge for dealing with our often-idiosyncratic requests, like students having to study and write exams during fieldtrips.

To Bronwyn Spicer, who worked as my editorial assistant on this book, my abiding and enduring appreciation. Thanks to Kamini Moodley, the project’s research manager, who worked hard and diligently behind the scenes, and also assisted with copyediting. In field trip and research management Kamini was preceded by Vanessa McLennan-Dodd, and Chantel Oosthuysen. My thanks also to Catherine Dunphy for copyediting. Nelia Oets was a superb camp provider, translator and co-researcher. Nelia was always ready to volunteer her 4X4 for our visits to the Kalahari and assisted in many other roles. Our research team could not have accomplished as much as it did without her consistent and systematic support – both in material resources and intellectually. Thanks to all my students and research affiliates who contributed to the project over the ten-year study period. All have been an inspiration to me and have provided significant depth to the analysis. (A second strand of this project has been conducted in Zululand, not reported on here.) Contributors are listed in Table 1 in Chapter 2 together with the their publications and thesis titles. A special mention must go to Mary Lange who acted as facilitator, translator, and advisor and who brought a unique empathy to our research relations with our hosts. Arnold Shepperson was an ever-present intellectual source in both this and other of our publications on the topic. Thanks to all our partners in the Kalahari, Belinda Kruiper, Roger Carter and all those who engaged in discussion with us. Paul Rodda provided computer support.

The research was partly funded by the University of Natal’s Research Fund, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The National Research Foundation also funded it: Social Sciences and Humanities. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and not the Foundation. An UKZN-based Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship enabled Matthew Durington to join the project for 18 months. His critique of an earlier draft of Chapter 2 proved very helpful. The research was started while I was a Fulbright researcher in the African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1990-1, working on its African Media Program.
Other organisations which facilitated aspects of our research at one time or another include the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution; Documentary Educational Resources; the Working Indigenous Minorities Group; the South African San Institute; the Nquaa Khobee Zeya Trust, the Kuru Development Trust; and Rob Waldron.

I must also mention Jake Homiak whose early support via the Smithsonian’s Human Studies Film Archives underpinned the early stages of the research. Others on whom my students and I have drawn include John and Lorna Marshall, Cynthia Close, Fiona Archer, Nigel Crawhall, Meryl-Joy Winschutt, amongst many others. I am also deeply appreciative of the sustained support and encouragement for our autoethnographic turn offered by Norman Denzin of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thanks also to Frans Prins, Bob Hitchcock, Garth Allen, Megan Biesele, Dave Wiley, amongst many others, who have liaised with me and some of my students on our work.

Chapter 1, ‘Negotiating Research with First Peoples’, is revised, adapted and updated from Shepperson, A. and Tomaselli, K.G. (Eds) (2003), ‘From one to an-other: Auto-ethnographic explorations in Southern Africa’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 4(4). Chapter 2 is a very extensively updated, totally revised and much elaborated version of my earlier article, ‘Blue is hot, red is cold: Doing reverse cultural studies in Africa’, first published in Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 1(3), 2001. Chapter 3, ‘Dit is die Here se Asem: The Wind and its Messages’ is adapted from Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 3(4), 2003. Chapter 4, ‘“Op die Grond”: Writing in the San/d, Surviving Crime’, is revised from Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 15(3), 2003. Chapter 5, ‘Psychospiritual Ecoscience: The Ju/’hoansi and Cultural Tourism’, and Chapter 6, ‘Textualising the San “Past”: Dancing with Development’, are revised from Visual Anthropology, 12(3/4), 1999. Chapter 7, ‘Stories to Tell, Stories to Sell: Resisting Textualisation’, is adapted, revised and updated from Cultural Studies, 17(6), 2003. My thanks to the various publishers for permission to rework these articles into this book.

Keyan G. Tomaselli, August 2005

Acronyms

• CCMS Culture, Communication and Media Studies (University of KwaZulu-Natal) (Howard College Campus, Durban)
• CKGR Central Kalahari Game Reserve
• IGWIA International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs
• CPA Community Property Association (Based in Andriesvale)
• CRAM Cultural Resources Auditing and Management Project
• JFP Jesus Film Project (Based in Kimberly)
• LIFE Living in a Finite Environment Program
• NNDFN Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia (Based in Windhoek)
• NNFC Nyae Nyae Farmers’ Cooperative (Based in Baraka)
• SABC South African Broadcasting Corporation
• SASI South African San Institute (Based in Kimberley)
• SBB Safaris Botswana Bound (Based in Maun, operating in KD/1 Area)
• SI Survival International
• SIM Serving in Mission
• SACOD Southern African Communications for Development
• SWAA South West African Administration
• SWAPO South West African People’s Organisation
• WIMSA Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (Based in Windhoek, Namibia)

A Note on Pronunciation

All !Kung and San languages have clicks, which are additional consonants. The most commonly used clicks are:
≠ Alveolar click made by sucking the tongue against the ridge behind the upper front teeth.
//  Lateral click made at the side of the mouth.
!   Palatal click made by clicking the tongue on the roof of the palate.

For further information on language see Dickens and Traill (1997); Dickens (1992); Barnard (1992: xix-xxii).

Map adapted from Willet et al. (2002)

Red sand dunes are set against an endless sky of indigo blue.
At night the Milky Way envelops a seemingly untouched land.
People who come here are changed forever
(Molopo Lodge brochure).

This book deals with three geographically discrete groups of people generally referred to as ‘Bushmen’ or ‘San’. The controversial debates on naming are well known (Gordon 1990a) and need brief mention here. The politically correct terms are ‘San’ in South Africa and Namibia and, in Botswana, the official naming is ‘Basarwa’ (singular ‘Mosarwa’). I will however use the clan names of the communities with which my students and I have been working, e.g., Ju/’hoansi (pronounced ju-twan-si), ≠Khomani and !Xoo. Often those who call themselves ‘Bushmen’ or ‘Boesmanne’, do so as a form of resistance against the politically correct externally imposed naming (Bregin and Kruiper 2004: 52-5). San is derived from a Nama word, meaning bandit (Barnard 1992: xxiv, 8; Hahn 1881: 3), while Saa means ‘to pick things up’ or forage. It is in this context that I will occasionally use the term Bushmen. Single quotes indicate where I am distancing myself from such use.

The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park spans both South Africa and Botswana. It features endless rolling dunes with shrubby vegetation and isolated tall savannah thorn trees. The semi-desert is interspersed with numerous pans, ranging from small to well over 50 kms in diameter. The communities with which we worked resided in three locations, Ngwatle in south central Botswana, Witdraai and Blinkwater in the Northern Cape, and the Nyae Nyae, Eastern Bushmanland, Namibia.

Ngwatle was a community of perhaps 100 plus displaced people in 1995, with over 184 in 2004. It is located in the controlled Hunting Area called the Kgalagadi District 1 (KD/1). KD/1 is 13,000 km squared and three villages within its boundary include Ngwatle, Ukwi and Ncaang. It has a total population of about 800. In 2001, the villagers told us that the number had risen to 200 plus, the majority being inkomers (newcomers/incomers) mostly of Kgalagadi origin. The !Xoo are the majority at Ngwatle during hard times, but sometimes become a minority in good periods of rain. Ngwatle is living on borrowed time: the villagers have been told to move to other settlements, as the area is reserved for wild animals. Their response is one of resistance, a refusal to move, and requests to publicize their plight.

Ngwatle consists of two main ethnic groups: The !Xoo and the Bakgalagadi, although the !Xoo typically build their shelters away from the Bakgalagadi. The Ngwatle Basarwa community comprises a mixture of Bakgalagadi and !Xoo who have defined themselves as Bushmen. This small group coalesced around two Afrikaans-speaking !Xoo brothers in the late 1980s (Simões 2001a).

The community is severely poverty-stricken and is serviced by a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), some state departments, and a safari company (Flyman 2001). ‘Destitute rations’ are delivered monthly to a third of the Ngwatle population. In July 2004, we watched as the district officials placed 66 rations of maize meal, sorghum, tea, cooking oil, etc. on a large tarpaulin on the sand, readied for distribution. The goods looked like a multi-coloured miniature magic city glistening in the fading sunlight. Those who qualified for these rations also received a monthly allowance of P55 [i] from the Department of Pensions. The community is supplied with one water tank that is filled approximately every two weeks by the government. The larger settlements are also provided with salt water for their livestock. However, because Ngwatle is deemed too small, its villagers have little option but to share their water supply with domestic animals. Their main cash income is through craft sales to tourists, roadwork for the government and through various opportunities available via the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust.[ii]

Two hundred kilometres south of Ngwatle, on the South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the Nama and Afrikaans-speaking ¹Khomani live in a variety of scattered settlements in the Northern Cape (1,400 kilometres from Durban). During the apartheid era, ‘Bushmen’ were classified as ‘coloureds’, and lived in harsh conditions. The violence and dislocation wrought by colonialism and apartheid resulted in the dispersion of the ¹Khomani, their language and their cultural practices. The lodging of a restitution land claim in August 1995 brought together about 200 adults. It was the first time that many of the surviving ≠Khomani (meaning ‘large group’) had come together as a community. This name was constituted to further the purposes of the land claim. Their diverse backgrounds, however, made it difficult for the ¹Khomani to form a cohesive community or clan identity, a contributing factor in conflict and division (cf. Robins et al. 2001: 26). The claimants were the ten families of the extended Kruiper clan who had been born in the area later declared the Gemsbok Park, from which they had been evicted in 1972.

The claim was granted in 1999 and culminated in a ceremony attended by the then Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, and community leaders Dawid Kruiper and Petrus Vaalbooi. Many previously employed in a cultural tourism venture at the Kagga Kamma Game Park a thousand kilometres to the south, returned to the north. The previously scattered group of a few thousand people, few of whom were connected to the Kruipers, chose different paths following the claim. Some became pastoralists and farm sheep and goats (the Vaalbooi group); others moved into small towns in the area; and one small, self-declared, relatively alcohol-free group lived on a sand dune between April 2000 and May 2005, known as Blinkwater (‘Sparkling Water’). The remainder, about eighty, try to live ‘traditionally’ on an inadequate tract of wilderness opposite a liquor store run by the Molopo Kalahari Lodge.[iii] This ‘traditional’ group has been – on paper at least – the recipient of huge amounts of development aid from both the state and international donors. Its members have been also employed in a variety of cultural villages and game parks in four different provinces. This community is internationally well known in movies, TV-advertisements, photographic books and academic studies (White 1995; Buntman 1996a; Bester and Buntman 1999; Simỡes 2001a; Ellis 2000; Isaacson 2001; Weinberg 1997).

The extended Kruiper clan constitutes itself as ‘traditionals’. The Kruipers seem to be much more embattled than their counterparts to their north in Botswana, or the pastoralists led by Vaalbooi. The Kruipers’ encounter with modernity has had a negative impact on their social fabric. Sections of this community are often alcohol-driven, and at Witdraai, the gene pool of the ‘traditional ≠Khomani’ is further threatened, argues Roger Carter,[iv] by incestuous last grasp attempts to retain community, lineage and cultural cohesion (see also Bregin and Kruiper 2004: 106-7). AIDS, spread by unconventional sexual relations, suggested one of our informants during our July 2003 visit, will more than likely see the imminent demise of this community. Where deaths at Ngwatle occur through natural causes and illness, at Witdraai death by murder and domestic violence – often in public – is prevalent. Perpetrators were not held accountable by the police for these acts. In general the ‘Bushmen’ were ill treated by state agencies; indeed the police may have been part of the problem (Special Assignment 2004). This lack of attention to the needs of the community was rectified in 2004, through an inquiry launched by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). The inquiry concluded that despite the land restitution, the ¹Khomani lived in poverty and neglect. In addition, the conflict between the community and the local police was in need of a fundamental change, accompanied where possible by a change in police personnel, in order to restore positive relationships. Two policemen had been charged with the killing of Optel Rooi, and the court case resulting from the Commission’s work was the talk of the area when we visited Witdraai in June 2005. It was via the Commission that the source of community divisions became clear. The original land claimants were encouraged to swell their ranks. Individuals not born in the Park were thus included, resulting in a challenge to Kruiper’s authority and his traditional cultural objectives. The communal land managed by the CPA, in which the traditionals are a minority, resulted in Kruiper wanting to secede from the agreement (Ancer, 29 October, 2004).

Dependency characterises the Kruipers, but individual and communal agency was evident amongst the adjacent five family-community of Erin.[v] Individuals tend to migrate between a variety of Northern Cape and other locations, however. Witdraai and Erin resist the push towards pastoralism as indicated by the Westerse (‘Western’) (pastoralist) constituency located a few kilometres away at Scotty’s Fort where Vaalbooi resides.[vi] Where the Kruipers consider themselves ‘special’ – a status allegedly conferred upon them by donors, media professionals and the state – at Ngwatle, the !Xoo call themselves the ‘undesirables’, as the government would prefer that they move to better serviced settlements in the KD/1 area, such as Ukwi and Ncaang, which have clinics, schools, borehole supplied water and other amenities.

The Ju/’hoansi [vii] in Namibia are part of the broader San population scattered over large tracts of Southern Africa. ‘Ju/’hoansi’ translates to ‘the real people’, with about 12,000 living in Namibia and Botswana. It is the Ju/’hoansi which were studied and filmed by the Marshall Family Expeditions during the 1950s, resulting in the most continuous record of any people living anywhere at any time (cf. for example J. Marshall 1993; L. Marshall 1976; 1999; Marshall Thomas 1959; see also Wilmsen 1999).[viii] About 3,000 live in small communities in Nyae Nyae, where they have semi-control over their much reduced land area, now a conservancy. The rest live farther west or south in towns or cities with other cultural groups, or on farms.

Our visits to Ngwatle started in 1995. We began visiting the ≠Khomani in 1999 at Kagga Kamma, and Witdraai and Blinkwater in 2000. We also worked with the Ju/’hoansi in 1996, though a systematic analysis of the Marshall Family Film Archive started in 1991 (cf. Bishop 1993; Tomaselli 1999a; Cabezas 1993a).

The Ju/’hoansi coexist with herders and agriculturalists such as the Ovambo and the Herero. The Herero are Bantu-speaking and breed cattle to the south of the Ju/’hoan conservancy. Numbering about 100,000, the Herero have lived in the Namibia area for over 350 years. The Herero came under the colonial rule of Germany at the end of the 19th century. By 1904, a rebellious struggle between the Herero and the encroaching Germans lasted for three years. The conflict was a result of both the racist German attitudes as well as a cattle plague, called the rinderpest. Three-quarters of the Herero population was exterminated and the rest were forced to resettle in the mostly inhospitable portions of the Kalahari Desert (Holmes and Ford 2002) where they are locked in a land struggle with the Ju/’hoansi (see Chapters 5 and 6).

The individual actors in our story are mentioned below.

Different People, Different Communities

≠ Khomani

Northern Cape

Belinda Kruiper (Neé Matthee) – lived in Cape Town before working for the Parks Board in the then Kalahari Gemsbok Park, where she met the Kruiper family. She married Vetkat Kruiper, and lived on a rented sand dune, Blinkwater, six kilometres south of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. She worked for the South African San Institute (SASI), but left due to differences with management. Belinda started, but did not finish, her university studies in social work. Her role in the community is that of an organic intellectual. She promotes her husband’s artwork (see Bregin and Kruiper 2004; Tomaselli 2003; 2006a).
Vetkat Regopstaan Kruiper  Belinda’s husband, and the younger half brother of Dawid Kruiper. A talented artist, his work has been exhibited and sold at a variety of museums since 2001 and was in 2004 exhibited at the United Nations. Family conflict resulted in their living at Blinkwater instead of one of the allocated farms. In 2005 he and Belinda moved to the nearby Welkom settlement and established an art centre.
Dawid Kruiper – Traditional leader of the ≠Khomani; lives at Witdraai (cf. White 1995).
Petrus Vaalbooi – Formerly the chairperson of the ≠Khomani San Community Property Association (CPA); has assumed the role of leader of the ‘western’ Bushmen.
Silikat van Wyk – Artist and craftsman, cultural performer (cf. Dyll 2003).
Elsie Witbooi – Silikat’s former wife. Her new boyfriend murdered Elsie in September 2003.
Toppies Kruiper – Dawid Kruiper’s son, who makes and sells crafts at the roadside; lives at Witdraai.
Jon Kruiper – Son to Dawid Kruiper; it is expected that he will be their next traditional leader.
Anna Festus – Previously fieldworker for SASI and personal assistant to Dawid Kruiper until 2005.
Anna Swart – Grandmother and original speaker of N/u who lives at Witdraai.
Isak and Lys Kruiper – Worked as cultural performers at Kagga Kamma (cf. Buntman 1996b) and Ostri-San. Returned to Witdraai as crafters in 2005. Isak is a traditional healer.
Rosa Meintjies – Wife of Abraham, previous manager of the Witdraai Tentepark (camp site). She works at Erin making patterns on sheets and other items.

Many of the traditionals have worked as cultural performers at the Kagga Kamma Game Park in the Western Cape (cf. Tomaselli 2002; Buntman 1996a), at Ostri-San and Mabilingwe in the North West Province and a park at Ellisras, Limpopo province, and elsewhere.

Ngwatle/southern Botswana

Miriam Motshabise  – Young single mother who lived at Ngwatle and Monong. Miriam died in April 2004 at Ngwatle.
Pedris Motshabise – Miriam’s brother; also lives at Ngwatle. In 2002 he was at Ukhwi, looking after camels for the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust.
Baba (Kort-Jan) Kies Nxai – Kort-Jan is an Afrikaans name meaning Short John, given this name because of his short stature. He is seen as a leader by his family within the Ngwatle community.
Jon-Jon – Kort-Jan and Katrina’s son, who worked briefly for SBB
Vista-Jan – Kort-Jan and Katrina’s son.
Johannes Nxai – Johannes’ family was killed by South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) soldiers, and he was raised by Kort-Jan.
Gadiphemolwe Orileng – Was living at Ngwatle in 1999; worked briefly as a tracker for SBB.
Kaptein – Kaptein (‘Captain’) is the official leader. He was allocated this role by a local council under the Hukuntsi district and is paid a salary by the government. The position of Kaptein or chief used to be hereditary, but Kort-Jan’s late brother, Petrus, was the Ngwatle community’s last ‘Kaptein’ of this family, as he died before he could select the next Kaptein. The present Kaptein is a Mokgalagadi. He is, however, recognised to some extent as a leader or figurehead in the community, although his authority is challenged in some instances.
Tshomu – Worked on the mines in Witwatersrand and retired to Ngwatle.

Ju/’hoansi

≠Oma Tsamkxao – Also known as Leon; acted as the interpreter for the group during the 1996 visit.
N!ai – Subject of John Marshall’s film, N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman (1978), and acted also on Jamie Uys’ Film, The Gods must be crazy, amongst others.

Specifically, what are we doing?
This book deals with the interactions between myself, my co-researchers and students, and the three communities in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Each chapter presents a discussion and interpretation of the various interactions and gives attention to the often overlooked aspects of power, communication, symbolism and fieldwork experience that are usually back-grounded in favour of more objectified information on culture, livelihood and social life. The strength of this participatory project lays in its empirical, real-world basis, namely, a regularized series of field trips to the Kalahari (inaugurated in 1995) (Chapters 2-6). The chapters delineate a broad network of interrelations, within various networks and at different levels of social interaction, and between observers and observed.

On one level, this book deals with the variety of fieldwork experiences around transport, logistics, negotiating entry, and establishing authentic reciprocal relationships, which are important in making research possible in the Kalahari. The project started as a relatively formal exercise in the conceptualisation of the Marshall film record and Jamie Uys’ The Gods must be crazy films (1980; 1983), and Ju/’hoansi responses to them (Tomaselli 1992; 2006b; McLennan-Dodd and Tomaselli 2005). The project developed into a wider study of researcher/researched interaction, cultural tourism, and the deconstruction of cultural studies, ethnographic research and ‘Bushman’ studies in general. I discuss experiences in the field recorded over a ten-year period, and I deconstruct essentialised categories often invoked to explain the behaviour of the Other, or in reverse, the behaviour and perceptions of the European Same.

The study is also an extended critique of a disengaged metropolitan cultural studies, one that lets form prevail over content. In reaction, this project is a cultural studies ethnography of doing research. On yet another level, our work is a record of the dialectic between cultural change on the one hand and political and economic change on the other. Another core theme of the study is the importance of human rights issues and politics. Included in the analysis of power relations are the relationships in the following dyads: people:government; female:male; and visitors:hosts.
The product of this approach lies outside conventional ethnography. I call it reverse cultural studies. Our autoethnographies are reflexive of the researchers’ impact on the subjects and vice-versa.

Chapter 1, co-written with Arnold Shepperson, sets out the basic research questions, which have underpinned the approach as a whole. Shepperson’s contribution was to assist in the development of a methodological framework in which to situate the ten-year-study. This chapter should be read in conjunction with Chapter 7, as both offer theorised explanations of the fieldwork experience. Chapter 1 explains the questions within an implicit Peirceian (1965; 1966; 1998) semiotic framework, while Chapter 7 in drawing together the various theoretical strands of the study in general, also deals with questions of ethics, intellectual ownership, and interaction.

Chapter 2 sets the methodological scene. A vehicle breakdown resulted in the genesis of a theorised diary of fifteen field trips to the Northern Cape, Ngwatle, the Kutse and Central Kalahari Game Reserves and adjacent areas. It provides the basis of a reflexive argument in discussing problems in fieldwork, globalisation, academic access, and research accountability. The narrative aims to forge a space in the global publications industry for kinds of cultural studies done in Africa, in which detail is as important as theory, in which human agency is described and recognised, and in which voices from the field are engaged by researchers as their equals in human dignity and thus as producers of knowledge.

Chapter 3 continues the Kalahari story on issues of representation, research methodology, and reverse cultural studies. It discusses relationships between observers and observed in terms of dependency, inclusions/exclusions, and borders and othering. Continuing with autoethnography, it reflexively analyzes tensions and contradictions set in motion by the writing of this chapter within the Ngwatle and Northern Cape communities, and between myself, development, and other agencies.

‘“Op die grond”: Writing in the San/d, Surviving Crime’ (Chapter 4) is a theorised, detailed and densely narrated account of a series of unplanned ethnographic encounters which simply happen en route to the focal encounters intended to take place with members of the ≠Khomani and Ngwatle communities. Interacting both conceptually and experientially with the host communities in which it is conceptualised, and the scholarly circles within which I am anchored, this study enacts, among other things, the processual coming-into-being of a written ethnographic documentary in contemporary Southern Africa.

Chapters 5 and 6 are interlinked in that they examine the impact of the visual on the everyday life of the Ju/’hoansi in Namibia. The results of a fieldtrip in July 1996 to Otjozondjupa (previously known as Eastern Bushmanland or Nyae Nyae) in Namibia are discussed in terms of the question: How do subjects make sense of the anthropological? The ‘texts’ interrogated via Ju/’hoansi popular memory were those made by documentary film maker John Marshall, South African feature film director Jamie Uys, and a documentary made for the Discovery Channel.

Chapter 7 presents the theoretical core developed in Chapters 2-6. Where Chapter 1 offers a theoretical entrance into our work in the Kalahari, Chapter 7 systematizes and theorises our early fieldwork. It thus offers a hindsight reflexive argument in discussing problems in fieldwork, academic access and research accountability. Chapter 7 analyzes tensions and contradictions set in motion by the writing of chapters on observer-observed relations within the communities themselves and between myself and other agencies working in these areas. Questions addressed relate to ownership of information, the relationship between the local/particular and the national/policy, and on how to ensure campfire dissemination/involvement of, and popular access to, the written product by a-literate and largely non-English speaking communities.

The kind of writing published here aims to ‘show’ the making of, rather than simply being the ‘telling’ of, a story. Each chapter uses scene-by-scene constructions rather than large chunks of narrative. Extensive use is made of dialogue, third person point of view, and detailed dramatic narrative descriptions recording everyday routines, styles and gestures. Multiple narrative digressions are intended to evoke critical response from the reader. At the same time, the style I have developed often resorts to free indirect speech rather than dialogue, frequently using autoethnographic points of view, suggesting a more personalized mode of shared ethnographic documentation (cf. Laden and Kohn 2003). I hope that this style will be both informative and engaging.[ix]

NOTES
[i] Pula is the Botswana currency. One Botswana Pula = 0.18 United States Dollars (currency rate on 24 August 2005).
[ii] The Ngwatle community has organised itself into the Nqwaa Khobee Xeya Trust. The Thusano Lefatsheng Trust supports it. There seems to be lukewarm support for the Trusts, which are seen to be unresponsive to the needs of the Ngwatle villagers.
[iii] The Molopo Kalahari Lodge is located in the heart of the Kalahari. It offers extensive accommodation, conference and entertainment facilities. The Lodge was one of the production bases for the The Gods must be crazy (1981) film, amongst many others, both features and documentaries.
[iv] Carter was manager of the then German-owned Molopo Lodge situated across the gravel road from Witdraai. He had developed a corporate social policy for the Lodge vis-à-vis its relations with the adjacent ¹Khomani communities. The Lodge was bought by a South African concern in 2001.
[v] Erin is one of the six farms returned to the ¹Khomani after they succeeded in their land claim in 1999.
[vi] One of the white-owned farms bought by the government for the ¹Khomani.
[vii] The apostrophe in Ju/’hoansi calls for a glottal stop, which is a break in the words sound.
[viii] The Human Studies Film Archives in the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, hold over a million feet of 16mm film footage and hundreds of hours of video taped observations recorded by John Marshall between 1950 and 1958, and from the late 1970s onwards (see Homiak and Tomaselli 1999). The released films are available via Documentary Educational Resources.
[ix] I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Becoming not-strangers
In moving from ‘here’ (Durban) to ‘there’ (Kalahari Desert), CCMS researchers and students had to rethink their research assumptions, identities and even their understanding of cultural studies.

The research team’s respective journeys have positioned us, at different times, as insiders and outsiders, as heroes and villains, and as reporters evaluating the said in terms of the more usually unsaid. The complexity and tensions of relationships in Kalahari research is extraordinary, given the relatively small numbers of ‘Bushmen’ who are subject to the intense Western gaze (by researchers, NGOs, film makers, journalists, writers and photographers, many of whom serve audiences of hundreds of millions). Indeed, the nature of this kind of research can be seen as a passage through difficult and scantily known rapids, despite the volumes of published work on specific communities. But in another sense, the passage is more that of a group of individuals with divergent positions, interests or aims, researching together and establishing a consensual position on which their differences may be resolved or accommodated (Shepperson 1998: 348). How do we, the researchers, apprehend, write about and agree or disagree on our observations, interpretations and explanations, and how do we negotiate these with our hosts?

When the first draft of Chapter 7 was circulated for comment, the responses were striking, ranging from outright anger from one NGO-consultant to empathy from most academics, researchers, development workers and those who have had long associations with the ≠Khomani. A few of our often marginalized ≠Khomani sources were ecstatic as it seemed to them that they had finally found a team of researchers who perhaps understood their frustrations, hopes and fears, and who were able to communicate these in understandable terms. We spoke to ordinary people, and to some who had married into the clan. Each engaged with us on our objectives and we on theirs. We soon realised that research encounters are often rearticulated by some of our informants into discourses of begging, poverty, hunger and complaints of exploitation at the hands of journalists, photographers and researchers (especially amongst the Kruipers of the Northern Cape).

We further sensed palpable relief from such correspondents that someone was at last critically examining development politics and research ethics, and engaging practices previously conducted in relative silence. Coming in from the cold (to Tomaselli, if no-one else), a few of these individuals started to write, dictate on tape, and e-mail him their own stories about themselves and their relations with ≠Khomani personalities, researchers, writers, video producers, and all manner of visitors. One or two expressed feelings of liberation as they no longer felt ‘trapped’ within their insufferable ‘own experiences’, some excruciatingly painful, and others extraordinarily heart-warming (cf. for example Bregin and Kruiper 2004). The unpublished stories are both horrific in their implications, and revealing in their stoicism. They had a sense of an emergent and empathetic community of researchers with whom they could do business, and to whom our correspondents could relate their frustrations, fears, and discontentment. But for obvious reasons many of these stories have to remain part of the hidden transcript, the unsaid contingent upon the community and the resolution of its participants.

‘Paradigm fundamentalism’ can easily occur if a scholar remains locked into the research programmes or theoretical structures inherited from preferred theoretical canons. Hidden transcripts, or at least their effects, tend to be suppressed by researchers because they are messy and get in the way of theory. In this kind of situation, students begin their assessment according to a canon provided a priori through the prescribed and recommended readings of various courses. What makes it specifically ‘fundamentalism’ is when the scholar either: (a) decides that items excluded from the canonical list ought not to be read; or (b) seeks to enrol with the consensus-making apparatus that establishes the ‘canonicity’ of prescribed and recommended readings. During our research period some scholars and films became persona non grata as epistemological battles were waged over legitimacy of interpretation (cf. Wilmsen 1989; Wilmsen and Denbow 1990 and responses to them; Barnard et al. 1996; Marshall 1996; Biesele and Hitchcock 1999; cf. also Gordon 1990b).

Despite the somewhat conspiratorial narrative inscribed in this thumbnail sketch of the academy, it is designed to illustrate one possible aspect of the shift in the intellectual vista open to South African academics, development activists, public intellectuals, and other such practitioners. Our (often retrospectively constructed) past as participants in the final struggles against apartheid frequently involved exactly this kind of struggle for canonical hegemony. Leftists of all stripes railed against the apparently monolithic preferences of bourgeois literary and theoretical canons, all the while engaging each other in (mostly) bloodless but nevertheless near-mortal theoretical combat over what should be the canon of the Left. The same kind of bitter conflict occurred over studies of the San, their naming and on who could speak for whom, when, where, and how.[i] The aprioristic nature of canonical thinking amongst both the observers and the observed is far more a feature of both postmodern and modernist thinking than their respective adherents would like to admit. As we discovered among the different subject-communities during our research, the inherent fundamentalism of these traditions (in much the sense that Alasdair MacIntyre [1988] deploys the term) tends to slide glibly over the pre-theoretical, ‘shit happens’ kind of realism that shapes the everyday conduct of peoples like the !Xoo, the Ju/’hoansi and the ≠Khomani.

We wanted to document our dilemmas and dialogues with ourselves as individuals, between ourselves as research teams, and with our hosts as individuals and as communities. The participants involved in the dialogue and performance want to recognise themselves in this writing. We have questions, but not always the answers:
a) How do we understand Theory as a hypothesis abducted from a community of inquiry’s experience of phenomena? In other words, how much of our informants’ (or sources’ or hosts’) explanation informs the products of our research, and how intelligibly is this done?
b)Where does a condition of liminality appear during the course of the research process, and how does this contribute to the knowledge so produced?
c) Does our making explicit of the processes of research interaction meet possible accusations of ‘bias’, lack of objectivity, and so on, especially from NGOs tasked with development briefs?

These questions all relate to the difficulties that inquiry poses for those who are engaged in practical efforts at development. Such agents – whether at community, organisational, or government levels – operate within well-established discourses like ‘empowerment’, ‘development’ and ‘democratisation’. The problem that we try to resolve is whether these concepts are methods or ends. If they are methods, then we are practically constrained to conceiving such ideas in terms of their applications in concrete situations. What is empowerment, development or democratisation for one situation will not necessarily be the same for another. The Kruipers, for example, have squandered their development opportunities, the !Xoo are resisting opportunities, and the Ju/’hoansi have embraced a limited solution to their benefit.

If concepts and methods are ends, however, then the research programme depends on the hope that all distinct but comparable situations are relevant starting points from which communities can direct their successors to a qualitatively different way of relating to the world beyond the boundaries of their immediate experience. This is the route taken by the westerse (‘Western’, modern) ≠Khomani who have embraced modernity. In short, the above questions confront those researchers, academics, and activists who view concepts as situational in themselves, and not as possibilities applicable to situations across a range of contexts.

In addressing these questions, we need to be always aware of the genealogy of autoethnographic methods (Chapter 2). The principal data unit for these methods is not a communicable representation or entity present to the minds of a community of researchers, but the dialogue an individual researcher conducts with his or her own methodological and paradigmatic assumptions. This in turn determines the direction and normative basis of the subsequent dialogue between researchers and researched.

In this dialogical sense, the basic method of autoethnography is barely distinguished from the method of the therapeutic ‘talking cure’. As such, therefore, these questions must accomplish more than self-absolution in a form of neo-analytical therapy. In a strictly therapeutic autoethnographic process, the research topic shifts along a chain of more or less elaborated dialogues between a researcher and an ever-increasingly abstracted hierarchy of partners in the dialectic. The chain may well begin with a dialogue at the research site with culturally authentic sources (e.g., Chapters 2-4). But what happens if the subject matter of the dialogue is taken to the academy? Or to the publishing industry (Chapters 4-7)? Or to the NGO-sector which has assumed so much of the responsibility for development among the ‘usual suspect’ communities who form the subject matter of ethnography and anthropology? How does one attribute responsibility to a dialogue, in a way that raises it to the status of a communicable record?

A tradition of confidentiality carries over from medical therapy to autoethnography as ‘therapy’. Journals, film makers and others are often looking for personal roots, meaning and explanations (cf. e.g. Isaacson 2001; Van der Post 1988; Glasser 1996; Myburgh 1989; Tomaselli et al. 1992). It is thus hard to decide where along the chain of dialogue such representations must become knowledge, or be asserted as truth-claims. Medical (and therapeutic) practice is not to be confused with medical and therapeutic science. It is at the point we choose to assert something about the subject-matter to the general ‘To Whom It May Concern’ of an indefinite scientific future that ethnography must re-present itself as communication and no longer as dialogue or diary. Publication occurs at this stage. We have noted the various stages through which an autoethnographic dialogue can pass; the problem is to anticipate how any functionary (or activist, or practitioner) at one or more of these stages can appropriate the dialogue to ends not conceived as scientific (assuming the logic of science is itself presupposed by an ethics) (Peirce 1998: 196-207, 371-97). Practical ends drive NGOs, publishers, and indeed the academy, whereas the claims of science (which should not be confused with the claims scientists make in their professional or academic capacities) are potentially directed to ends beyond the immediate accomplishment of urgent matters. Without the normative shift, or better, the ethical commitment to do full justice to the reality of the subject-matter (or subject community) of a field of inquiry, as it presents itself to the inquirer, science becomes indistinguishable from engineering.

On this basis, the most urgent need in reviewing our research was to establish where the dialogues ended (or perhaps petered out) and the possibility for a bottom-up record began. Unless subject communities are informed about what is to be asserted about their reality, they can have no effective say in what subsequent agencies in the dialogue do with their representations. But to do this in good faith is not enough: it was decisive that this contact generate a record, and after realising how these questions arose from reading the texts recommended to us, we began to consider our writing as rapportage – the base data for developing a record that contributes to inquiry and resists its appropriation by vested interests. This rapportage will be housed at the Kwa !ttu Museum in the Western Cape, amongst other archives.

The first rapportage that Tomaselli revisited was one that Belinda Jeursen had written on their 1995 visit to Ngwatle. He then excavated a highly unliterary lecture that Belinda had given to the English Department at the Natal University (Durban) following their subsequent trip to the Ju/’hoansi in July 1996. This had languished on his hard drive in the wake of Jeursen’s emigration to New Zealand two years later. In working with Jeursen, who had previously studied /Xam oral literature (1994; 1995), they developed something of an autobiographic method which could incorporate both writers into her narrative. Jeursen and Tomaselli (2002) then, is offered as a prism and a backward glance of the state of play at the time fieldwork commenced in the mid-1990s. They aimed to provide readers with a useful multi‑perspectival pre-history from which to assess the broader ongoing project (cf. also Tomaselli and McLennan Dodd 2003).

Autoethnography is a relatively recent form of writing which permits readers to feel the moral dilemmas confronting us as researchers, to think with our narratives, instead of simply about them, and to join actively in the decision points which define the method (Ellis and Bochner 2000: 735). This approach – in our case – also permits us to write as individuals while maintaining team coherence and project cohesion. This is an important strategy given the fact that individual student members of our research team are constantly changing as they enter and exit, and sometimes re-enter, our graduate programme (see Table 1).

Table 1 Research Students and Research Affiliates (1995-2005)

Notes
-Unless stated, students were registered in CCMS.
– Fieldwork was not necessarily continuous, as students were required to complete course work during term. Many listed above were also employed as tutors in the CCMS-Programme.
– Others who we participated with in various ways include Fiona Archer (development consultant), David Crichton (tourism consultant), Jake Homiak (Smithsonian), Christine Marcham (UKZN Sociology), Thaven Naidoo (SACOD), Frans Prins (Natal Museum), Sonja Speeter, Conrad Steenkamp (NGO-worker), Mzimkulu Sithetho (Lesotho journalist), and Rob Waldron.

Our hosts were initially mystified and even perturbed about the fact that after one or two visits, students with whom they had bonded and learnt to trust, no longer visited them. They feared a lack of a longer-term commitment from us; they felt that they had an investment with the students who had worked with them, and they suggested that they had contributed to my graduates’ supposed success in the job market.

Where initially we did not know what to do with our written narratives and interviews, narrative and self-reflexivity have now become the project’s prime mode of inquiry, thus redefining relationships between authors and readers. More significantly however, this form of inquiry and presentation is also one that is empathetically understood and creatively engaged by the project’s host-communities. Individuals within these communities are beginning to appreciate the symbolic value of being included in someone else’s story, whether in print, photography, or on video. Where conventional social science writing eliminates the observers and often the observed as well, our narratives attempt to write all participants into the encounter ‑ and their observations and often their dialogue and their subjectivities ‑ into the various story/ies being told. For example, an ongoing process of engagement, via independently taped and hand-written commentaries, is regularly posted to our hosts. (There is no postal service to Ngwatle, and few in the community are literate, so we return information via the Trust and by means of screening videos that we have made.) Campfire research, disseminations and interactions (including songs, music and dance, talk and banter, open‑ended interviews, anecdotes, complaints and criticism) between researchers and subjects on the project’s pre-published work, have resulted in an extraordinary process of civil, participatory collaboration, which joins the researcher with the researched in an ongoing moral dialogue (Denzin and Lincoln 2000: ix). Apart from regular visits to the Northern Cape, we are in constant contact via cell phone when one of our informants, Belinda Kruiper, passes a transmitter on the main road while in her donkey cart or other transport, via the postal service in Upington 240 kms to the south, via fax c/o the nearby Transfrontier Kgalagadi Park office, and sometimes by e-mail which passes through a number of hands before reaching its destination.[ii] Belinda and her husband Vetkat annually join us on our university campus in Durban, to work with our students, when they exhibit Vetkat’s art at the Bergtheil Museum in Durban (www.indigenousheritage.org/vetkat.html).

Durban is a very different environment to the Kalahari. Existentialism rules in the Kalahari – what is, is what is. We surmised during our April 2002 visit to Blinkwater and Welkom that people however do want things to happen, and want and need social services. Things happen or don’t happen. Belinda and Vetkat did not buy the sheep from their neighbour (which I offered to pay for), because of the wind. The wind happened, so the sheep was not bought and skinned. ‘We can’t do anything against nature’ – the same feeling of natural agency overpowering action is what led to photographer Sian Dunn’s feeling of frustration as ‘everything went with the weather’ (Blinkwater 2002; cf. Mlauzi 2002). Dunn was unable to fulfil a day’s photographic brief, because the Blinkwater folk simply returned to their huts to escape the wind. Linje Manyozo referred to Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, and described this naturist energy-saving response by our hosts as environmental fetishism. Where industrial societies are shaped and managed by ruling elites via developing a desire for and consumption of largely unnecessary commodities, the ≠Khomani in contrast understand themselves to be at the mercy of the environment, an irresistible and invisible set of forces that shape daily decisions and prior arrangements, irrespective of needs. For them, there is no difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘constructed’ – what is, is what is. I am not sure about Linje’s interpretation of the Marxist concept, but his comment sets off a semiosis. Perhaps what he presages is Levi-Strauss’ (1971) concept of totemism, where the signifier is semiotically collapsed into the signified, and becomes the thing itself. The ensuing metonymic mystification perhaps would be better described as environmental fetishism in the semiotic sense than in terms of Marx’s framework.

A-literates, theories of orality tell us, tend to be without metaphors (Jousse 1977). What is, is what is. The sand is part of the Bushmen; they are part of the sand. The weather, wind, and often the wine govern activities as well. Nature is seen to be capricious, but not malicious. Tomaselli learned about worlds without metaphor when first trying to make sense of the spontaneous Lament of old Piet Draghoender, whom he videoed in 1984, in the Kat River valley, pending his family and community’s imminent dispossession by the apartheid state. Blood, the ancestors/lineage and the ground, for him, were one and the same (Tomaselli 1997). The living are in direct relation with the departed, and are kept closer by going barefoot when dancing.

The contradiction is found in Belinda’s Kruiper’s attempts to bridge a fatalist natural existential cultural fetishism where ‘things happen’ (if one waits long enough) and the world of development and politics in which ‘things are not happening’ (because delivery is tied to a variety of processes, procedures and schedules even more invisible than the wind). The highly active South African San Institute (SASI) was perceived by many of our sources to be largely invisible in the body on the ground. The Khomani Community Property Association was alleged by some to be centralizing available resources; provincial and national governments work according to unknown mechanisms and time scales. (Similar comments are made about the Ngwatle situation by some of our !Xoo informants. In contrast, the Ju/’hoansi are highly involved in the agencies servicing their needs.) The CPA was also considered unrepresentative of the traditionals.

In the Northern Cape, significant resources are being delivered: schools, land, electricity, and reticulated water at the small urban settlement of Welkom, are amongst the new basic services, which attract the youngsters from Witdraai. But these are not ‘seen’ because they are not ‘cash’. The people want more, they want to ‘feel’ their changes existentially – the ‘what is is’ factor. ‘Our world is full of nothingness’, complained Belinda Kruiper (July 2002). At that time of personal hardship their lives were spiritually empty but full of content at the level of the emotional interpretant, the birds and the bees, and the rustling of the trees. As one Ju/’hoan village told us, they deliberately represented themselves as ‘poor’ in order to leverage donations from visitors (Chapters 5 and 6). Here, the villagers were able to negotiate the rapids of modernity by constructing a realist meaning for the visitors notwithstanding their existentially pre-modern condition, supposedly lacking metaphorical signification.

Belinda’s Kruiper’s disturbance in the community – as an educated person who married into the Kruiper clan – is due to the fact that while she accepts existential totemism, she is also an indicator of the potential of personal and social agency (cf. Tomaselli 2006a). Things can be changed at a political and service delivery level even if not at the natural level. But she asks, why give the Welkom house dwellers electricity, when they cook outside on the fire and when the lights attract the moths? The contradiction was evident when Elana Bregin in Durban, who was working on a book with Belinda, twice called Belinda on her cell phone at Blinkwater, which cut out both times. Belinda looked at us, phone in hand, and exclaimed, ‘%@#, I’m tired of trying to deal with technology! Technology doesn’t work in the Kalahari!’

How does one begin to comprehend beguiling totemistic essentialism? The wind happens. The sunrise happens. The rain dance makes things happen (mainly in the rainy season). Things happen. But often nothing happens. That’s because the wind is happening. Skinning animals in the wind invests the carcass with dust. So hunting does not happen. The land happens. It is not developed. Money happens – it comes in, it goes out. None of it is invested. That is known as development. It comes from tourists, visitors and charities. It does not come from NGOs or the government.

Life happens. The ¹Khomani at Welkom tell in July 2002 that development is not happening. We are told this as we sit underneath newly installed electrical cables feeding the house in whose yard we are sitting. People are fetching water from taps, and the streetlights sparkle in the wind and through the drizzle. The brand new craft showroom on the gravel roadside is empty, its windows broken and boarded up. In June 2005, Ruth in investigating the theft of the ceiling, startled an owl living in the rafters, and then found its mate’s dead dried carcass on the sand. The surviving owl was disorientated, much like the people. What about the school? Few of the traditional ¹Khomani children go to school. No money for school fees, we are told. In 2005 some houses have satellite TV, and Belinda complains that parents cannot decode the ratings symbols, that children are watching late night soft porn on eTV and DStv while their parents sleep. Road workers seduce young girls with drink and money, and AIDS is on the march. The people cannot identify the development/s. ‘Give me R5 and food’, a young boy demanded from me in 2002. Now, that is assumed to be development. Or is it? Like waiting for the wind to die before buying and skinning the sheep which Tomaselli offered to buy, perhaps individuals are waiting for R200 notes passed out at random by temporary visitors, rather than the millions which pay for the civic infrastructure. Perhaps the infrastructure is not needed or wanted, but the government provides it anyway. Lights cost money, they attract millions of flying insects; stoves consume electricity, while people prefer to cook over a fire. Debt starts. Where are people to get the money to pay for the electricity? Begging perhaps? Development begets begging. Begging becomes development – money in the hand. William Ellis, an anthropologist from the University of Western Cape, describes the new economy as ‘organised begging’. So the people wait for the better days promised by the liberation government. The NGOs get the blame because nothing seems to be happening; not the government, not the individuals who run the Community Property Association, which manages the ≠Khomani’s not-insubstantial state-provided resources, and which are accused of squandering it. The villagers seem to have little understanding of where or how they fit into the new democratic structures. By July 2005, consumption had replaced community, loud thumping rock music and TV drowned out natural ambient sounds throughout the day and most of the night.

Our methodological problem, as Zimbabwean PhD-student Nhamo Mhiripiri suggested, is how to write an analysis of a situation and a people who have come to take us seriously, but who may not appreciate our analysis, our critique, and our logic. Will we be also identified for blame? It’s easy and fun to be the flavour of the month; it’s a much less happy situation to be excommunicated from a life’s work, blamed for everything that went wrong, and to stick to one’s principles through thick and thin (cf. Biesele and Hitchcock 1999; Barnard et al. 1996; Marshall 1996). The wind comes and goes; legitimacy waxes and wanes, and trust has to be tested over good times and bad. We are concerned with the webs of research, exploitation and deceit that so often cloud academic and journalistic research in the Kalahari. Who is drawing the line around whom?

The problem, as far as method goes, is that there can be no argument against a perception. If there is wind, we will perceive that wind together if we are both exposed to it, though we might disagree on its meaning. We cannot argue against either of our judgements as to the severity of the wind, because perceptual judgements are ‘necessarily veracious’ (Peirce 1998: 204). All we can do is, in effect, to engage in dialogue in the hope that (in good therapeutic fashion) we can amicably resolve any conflict of interpretation. But a comparative analysis of the kinds of inferences from perceptual judgements made about, say, the wind on the day a sheep was scheduled for slaughter, already constitutes something other than a dialogue about wind and sheep. For example, the fact that wind may affect a community’s will to act at all makes it possible to consider what social or communal spaces are available to people, and what needs to be done to make up shortfalls in these spaces such that wind (or rain, or cold) have less impact on the capacity to act. For the present, however, our research has highlighted the need simply to set about presenting these pre-theoretical dialogues so that those who critically participate in them can find a common starting-point from which to move on.

Our long-term research venture/encounter reminds us that (Western) theoretical constructs are not metaphysical ends or sets of values in their own right, but that they must always be laid open to re-examination and change when applied to (non-Western) empirical contexts and real-life subjects/informants. Moreover, by knowingly positioning observers and observed within specific, polyphonic communication circuits at given points in time and space, this endeavour over the decade of our research (1995-2005) problematises received models of authority in formulations of academic inquiry and writing, where the pecking order between researcher and researched, and among scholars themselves, is predetermined at the outset. Accordingly, it suggests new terms of mutual engagement for cultural studies researchers at various stages of inquiry, their host communities, and the targeted readers of the ensuing ethnographic accounts.

NOTES
[i] These discursive and ideological conflicts reached a crescendo with Pippa Skotnes’ Miscast Exhibition in Cape Town in 1996 (cf. Jackson and Robins 1999; Douglas and Law 1997; Skotnes 2002).
[ii] As part of its public service mandate, Telkom, the national telecoms provider, was required to ‘roll-out’ significant new telephone lines to outlying areas throughout South Africa. The two major cellular phone companies, Vodacom and MTN, also extended their network significantly. From 2004 onwards, the Third Generation (3-G) value-added services such as e-mail, video and conference calling over both fixed line and cellular networks, resulted in an enormous infrastructural investment as towers are added to the network, and existing towers upgraded. Ruth Teer-Tomaselli documented much of this expansion, while conducting an independent survey of cell phone towers along the road to the Park in July 2005. By 2006 the entire route between Andriesvale and the park will be serviced by the cellular network.