The San, now designated the Basarwa in their home country of modern day Botswana, are not one tribe but an amalgamation of a few different people. They have been pejoratively called "Bushmen" as they are known to live off of the African "Bush". The Basarwa incorporate the many tribes, including the Zu, Ta'a, and !wi peoples. The common thread that binds these hunter-gatherers is a shared language, the San language, known for its use of clicks.
In many ways the Basarwan lifestyle is at odds with that of modern society. Livestock, permanent home structures, and the very concept of owned wealth are foreign ideas to the hunter gatherer, which often leads to conflict between their society, and the society of their more ownership minded brethren. In recent history, attempts have been made to allot land to the Basarwan people, to give them space in our industrialized world to practice their ways of life.
As mentioned earlier in this blog, The Basarwa are hunter-gatherers. This means that 90% of their sustenance comes from foraged food sources, like wild vegetables, tree nuts, mushrooms, roots, grains, etc. A much smaller portion of their food comes from hunted meat, when it is readily available. The Basarwa will utilize whatever food sources are available to them. For example, a food staple of the !Kung is a hard shelled nut known as the Mongongo. The many foraged foods must often be processed in order to be edible. Of all of the foraged, plant-based foods that the Basarwa make use of, only the berries and gums are eaten without some sort of mashing, mixing, or cooking.For nuts, they are cracked with the aid of hard stones, roots are often boiled or roasted.
Meat is a much more specific process among the Basarwa, being significantly rarer in their diet and having many more rules surrounding its processing and utilization. The animal will be skinned, gutted, and cut into pieces. After this process the liver is roasted and eaten by the men who hunted the animal. After cleaning, the stomach is made into a bag to contain the blood of the animal. If the skin is suitable, it will be made into many useful tools, including bowstrings and sandal straps, before they are even finished butchering the animal. The meat is then carried back to the dwelling, called a //gaus, to be divided amongst the band, each piece according to the person who obtains it. Once the meat has been hung in a central place in the //gaus, the chief will arrive to oversee the operations of dividing the meat. He orders a selection of the hunters to open the bones to extract the marrow, placing it in a pot separate from that of the blood near the fire. Some of the meat is roasted at this point. It is worth noting that the man who shot and killed the animal is disallowed from participating in any of this work. As soon as the meat is ready to eat, the chief will remove a piece of the meat from the pot and taste it for himself. This indicates that the meat is now ready for consumption by the tribe.
The meat is pounded with a stone to tenderize it and placed in a pot along with the blood and the marrow to create a dish known as =koms. All parts of the meat will be consumed, but each portion is ascribed to a specific group of people. For example, the superficial meat of the hindflank, the trotters, and the entrails belong to the wife of the man who killed the animal, but may not be eaten until after the chief has tasted the food.
It is my hope that my readers have found these facts about the Basarwa interesting and informative. Please leave a comment below, and I'll be happy to answer any questions asked about the subject.
Works Cited
I really enjoyed reading your blog post it goes into great detail and is very easy to understand. I was a little taken back that the chief will take the first bit since in some other cultures that have taste testers for like poison or bad quality. Do you think there have been times a chief was killed by tasting it first or got sick from it even?
ReplyDeleteGreat question! I think it is definitely possible that the chief might take ill or die from eating the food first, but I also think that with small bands like these, that maybe that is the point. I think its a concept of "leaders should lead" and "the chief is responsible for the health and safety of the entire tribe".
DeleteHey Christopher, I really enjoyed reading about how they use almost everything from the animals they hunt.
ReplyDelete