Bill Wresch, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point USA
A recent issue of Newsweek contained a beautiful picture of an African tribesman in full traditional dress holding a spear in one hand and a cellular phone in the other. What a brave new world. What a lie. In a continent where there is less than one phone line per 100 people (despite persistent UN efforts to increase that number), the idea that the average rural African has a cellular phone is about as well grounded in fact as the belief that the average American will soon be taking the Space Shuttle to work.
Wishful thinking and staged photos aside, the world’s poor are in deep trouble, and are making no transition to the Information Age visible to anyone who makes the effort to look beyond the glossy ads. No one knows that better than the Bushman. For the tale of the Bushmen, and of the village of Tsumkwe, Namibia where "The Gods Must be Crazy" was filmed, shows just how far the world’s poor are from the dawning of a new millenium.
The tale of the Bushmen begins with a history far less funny than any movie script. The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and The Bushman Myth by Robert J. Gordon and numerous other accounts describe in detail the large scale slaughter of the Bushmen during the last century. Nor has the destruction of the Bushmen stopped. Thomas describes how into the 1960s Afrikaner farmers in need of laborers would simply drive into the Kalahari, tempt Bushmen into their trucks with sweets or small gifts, and then drive off to their farms where the Bushmen would work for meager food and a few trinkets.
In the 1980s the South African military needed trackers for its war against Namibian guerrillas. They went out into the Kalahari and hired all the men they could find. Those who survived the fighting in Angola came back to the Kalahari with pockets full of Rand and no place in a subsistence culture to spend it. So the state opened a bottle store in Tsumkwe where the money went quickly on beer and liquor. In her horrifying 1988 appendix to her book, Harmless People, Thomas describes how every person she knew in the 1950s is either murdered or becomes a killer under the influence of liquor.
The Bushmen are fighting back, but face overwhelming odds. Virtually every development in the information age leaves them more vulnerable and demonstrates the problems faced by people like them around the world. To understand these problems, a good place to start is Tsumkwe, Namibia. Established in 1959, the village started out as little more than a farm where experts hoped to teach Bushmen cattle-raising skills. Tsumkwe is not an easy place to reach. You begin by driving four hours north of Windhoek on two lanes of asphalt. Then you turn right - east - into the Kalahari. For the next four hours you bump along over gravel and sand leaving a long cloud of dust in your wake. You pass a few hills and a few trees, but no people or structures as you drive hour after hour through a grassy plain. Occasionally you see another car or truck, but only occasionally. After the first couple hours you feel a sense for just how isolated this community is.
The Germans wanted it that way. When they ruled the country from 1885 to 1915 they put their settlers on land that had water, good pasturage for cattle, and easy access to markets. During the South African occupation from 1915 to 1990, the policy remained the same. Non-whites, especially the Bushmen, were pushed to corners of the country, while white farmers and merchants controlled the middle. And so the Bushmen, who once controlled much of the center of Namibia were pushed out to the edge, out to the desert. They had once been miners and traders but that part of their land was taken from them. Reduced to hunting and gathering, they struggled to pull a living from the Kalahari.
The extent of their isolation becomes increasingly clear as you bump along the gravel road hour after hour. For the first hundred kilometers there are phone lines strung along the right side of the road. Then they stop at a government agricultural station. Fifty kilometers farther your car radio fades into static. For the next hundred kilometers there is just the sound of gravel popping up against the underside of the car. There are no people here. At one point I passed two Bushmen cattle herders waiting for a lift into Grootfontein. They were still there eight hours later as the sun set. I picked them up on my return.
After such a long, silent drive, Tsumkwe just seems to pop up out of the low brush. It would be easy to miss. There isn’t much there, and what there is, is spread out. There is an intersection - another thin gravel road crossing yours. To your left is the school set back fifty yards from the road. A set of block rooms, it enrolls 300 in grades 1-10. Across the intersection is the only store. It looks like an old gas station. Also made of blocks it is about thirty feet square and painted white. The inside is dark and largely empty. Shelving bolted to the walls contains a scattering of food and household goods. There are two low coolers each about four feet long. One has soft drinks, the other meat. The center of the store stands empty.
Back out at the intersection, the road to the right is Main Street. On one side is the police station, then the gas station. Some days there is gas, some days not. Next is the home of the rural development official, followed by the home of "The Bushman movie star" as he is known locally. No one in town has seen The Gods Must be Crazy but they remember the filming. Across the street is the clinic. All these buildings are set well back from the road and separated from each other - space is not a problem here.
There is one residential street with eight houses for government workers. The first one is the town leader’s. He also gets the generators in his backyard. Down the street are seven more houses, all about twenty years old, ranch style brick with single car attached garages and grassy front yards. It looks like it could be a suburban block from west Texas. Driving the short distance up the gravel streets, there are few Bushmen to be seen. The store keeper is white, the government officials black. The rural development officer, Charles Chipango, is on leave to study computer science at the University of Namibia. A student of mine, he volunteered to show me the other side of Tsumkwe. He drove me back down the one residential street, but kept going past the end of the gravel, past the end of the electricity, out onto a dirt track. In a few hundred yards we came to the Bushmen. One group was living in a collection of square block structures about eight feet on a side. There were eight or ten such buildings. Across a small field were smaller stick and mud homes. We bounced over the dirt track through fields of mahango and corn.
As we came around one bend we had to stop. A Bushman was passed out drunk in the middle of the track. We edged around him and found the "shebeen" that had supplied him. In a clearing was a small structure - four poles about five feet high with a lattice of branches across the top to provide shade. Sitting in the shade was the wife of one of the local government officials. She had a two liter box of wine, a boom box, and a small half pint whiskey bottle. For ten Rand she would fill the old whisky bottle with wine. The twenty or so Bushmen at the shebeen would pass the bottle around, dancing barefoot in the dirt as they drank. It was just 1 PM, and she was doing a good business. Profit margins were among the best in the world. She bought the wine for 22 Rand a box. She could fill the ten Rand bottle thirteen or fourteen times from one box. Twenty two Rand becomes one hundred and thirty with no taxes and no overhead. Not a bad profit margin.
The shebeens farther down the track didn’t have any business yet. But it was early. Each had a forty gallon plastic garbage pail sitting in the shade. Home made beer was brewing in each pail. By night each would be empty, to be refilled the next day. That was the second Tsumkwe. The dirt paths and stick houses and home brewed beer back off the road, out of sight, back past where the gravel and electricity stop. For these people there are no happy natives living the simple life of "The Gods Must be Crazy." The Gods out here seem hostile, or cruel.
This is the real Tsumkwe. No happy natives fascinated by a Coke bottle. No lives of peace and contentment. This is also the real information age. For there are no magic information bullets ready to solve every problem in the village. On the contrary, Tsumkwe illustrates every single obstacle to full inclusion in the new age of information.
Tsumkwe isn’t four hours from markets, it is four hours from a road to markets. Besides which, most Kalahari Bushmen don’t live in Tsumkwe, they live in small bands farther into the desert. If they wish to sell handicrafts or skins or visit relatives (or see a doctor), they have to travel a full day or more just to get to Tsumkwe. The distances hurt economically - products in the local store are far more expensive than in Windhoek because of shipping costs, yet Bushmen get less profit from their own goods because of shipping expenses. The distances also hurt personally. Relatives who move to a larger city are essentially gone forever.
It makes no economic sense to run phone wires across the Kalahari. So there are no phones. The only connection to the rest of the world is a radio phone. It is difficult and expensive to use just for voice communication. Nobody will be hooking up to electronic mail anytime soon and 400 channel TV doesn’t seem to be in their future. There is mail. Once every week or two someone volunteers to drive the four and half hours to Grootfontein to get it.
The general store in Tsumkwe sells no newspapers. Radio reception is only possible with a really good antenna and then only at sun up and sun down. At those times the faint signal is as likely to come from Botswana as Namibia. TVs don’t exist.
The school in town is less than twenty years old and appears solid. The problem is the teachers. They have broken into two factions - the qualified and the unqualified. The qualified teachers either have university degrees (one’s an American Peace Corps Volunteer), or have attended a teacher training college. There are four of these teachers. They are out numbered by the eight unqualified teachers who have completed eighth grade and little else. These teachers tend to be both unqualified and uninterested. One regularly comes to class drunk. Another sleeps at his desk most of the day. His fellow teachers can tell when he is asleep, his students climb up into the ceiling area under the roof and look down on adjoining classes. A third teacher was finally run off when he was confronted with numerous students who said he paid them ten Namibian dollars for sex. The battle between the two groups continues, with the unqualified teachers generally winning a maintenance of the status quo.
Namibia has had several national languages. During the German occupation it was German (it is still the principal language of commerce), under the South African it was Afrikaans. With independence in 1990 the official language became English. The problem for the people of Tsumkwe is that the official language has never been Bushman. The language problem affects their children (and the problems they have in trying to learn), it affects their ability to keep up with the world around them, it affects their ability to defend themselves in a court of law.
One of the cruder ironies of the information age is that rich people get their information practically for free, while poor people pay dearly for every morsel. Be it a telephone call, a newspaper, a drive to the store - all cost more in Tsumkwe than they do in Beverly Hills. They cost more in absolute terms, they cost astronomically more in relative terms - as a percentage of a days wage. How many Americans would work an hour for a newspaper, two hours for a phone call, a day to see a movie, a lifetime for a home computer? Yet for those on the edge of survival, information is more important. If every evening for a month goes into making a basket, what kind of baskets are selling in Windhoek? What size? Will the new crafts store in Tsumeb pay more? Are tourists coming to Tsumkwe who might buy it? The poor can’t afford wasted effort - unsold production. Yet they know almost nothing about the world. Where a phone call costs more than a basket, you don’t call around to check markets.
The Bushmen of the Kalahari are an extreme example of people who are disconnected from the new age, but they are unfortunately not alone. All over the world are people and groups who, for various reasons, are off the information highway.
For more information, please contact:
Mr. Bill Wresch at bwresch@uwspmail.uwsp.edu