In 1950, a 19-year-old girl left the elite Smith College in Massachusetts to join her family on an expedition that would change their lives. Prompted by her father's desire to visit unexplored places, the family set off for the Kalahari desert in search of Bushmen living out the "old ways" of hunter-gatherers. The girl, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, went on to celebrate them in her 1959 book
The Harmless People, which became a classic of popular anthropology. Nearly 50 years on, Marshall Thomas's latest book
The Old Way revisits the story - and finds that the Bushmen's fate is more complex than it seems.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas went on three expeditions to visit the Bushmen of what is now Botswana and Namibia. They were the last major population of hunter-gatherers. Marshall Thomas returned to her English degree at Smith College, Massachusetts, and has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the best-selling
The Hidden Life of Dogs. Her latest book,
The Old Way, was published in October (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25).
Westerners mourn the loss of this hunter-gatherer society, but you take a rather different view...
Yes, for me they are living in somewhat the same way, but with different economics.
The idea that you help your own is still present. This is what kept the human race alive for 150,000 years.
The hunter-gatherers told anthropologists they don't define themselves by how they get food but by how they relate to each other. We saw that. They tried to keep jealousy at a minimum, with nobody more important or owning more things than anyone else.
You gave things away rather than keep them. You wanted other people to think of you with a good feeling.
Is that the "old way" of your book title?
Yes.
There was a time when the playing field was level and all species lived in this way. How people and their domestic animals live now is profoundly different.
Are there still efforts to help the Bushmen regain that idealised notion of the hunter-gatherer life?
There are, and I think it's unfortunate. Tourists want to see it, and WWF and other organisations want to preserve the local ecosystems - which is a good thing. But it's the Bushmen's ecosystem and the reason that it's there today is because of their way of life. So I have a little problem with some foreign group telling them what they must and must not do.
Also, gathering food is not going to be as viable as it was in the past because back then the population density was one person per 10 square miles, but now there are many more people and much less space. And people don't have the skills they need to live in the old way. Foreign groups are asking young African men to go back to stone-age hunting when these men know perfectly well that everyone else has rifles.
So there's no going back?
No, though anybody could become a hunter-gatherer - you'd just have to learn it. But you don't see a lot of volunteers stepping forward to do it now because it's much too difficult. After the old lifestyle collapsed, the Bushmen were encouraged to be farmers like other Namibians, and they tried. Some farms were started around a place set up for them called Tsumkwe. But for a number of reasons the experiment didn't work very well and Tsumkwe is now a hellhole with a huge alcohol problem. Even so, if the farmers received the help they needed the farms might be a way of moving forward. On land that the Bushmen own they could do all sorts of things, such as sports hunting, where foreigners pay to hunt big game. The Bushmen could be paid guides, for example.
Are these the people you lived with?
Some of them are the very same people. We spent most of our time with the Ju/wasi - also spelt Ju/'hoansi in textbooks, but I use the older spelling because it looks closer to how it sounds. The Ju/wasi we knew lived in what is now Namibia. We also visited the /Gwi people who live on the border between Botswana and Namibia.
You wrote that the expedition was like voyaging into the deep past?
Yes. The Bushmen had Palaeolithic technology. They didn't plant crops and had no domestic animals, no fabric or manufactured goods. They sometimes used small bits of metal for arrowheads, but since the arrows were merely a variation of bone arrows, the technology did not change.
What did they eat?
Most food was gathered by the women. When people think of gathering, they think of it as mostly plant food, but it produced proteins such as turtle, snake, caterpillar, honey ants and the like. The most exciting food, however, was large antelope that the men hunted, and that amounted to about 20 per cent of their food. The success rate of hunting was a lot lower than gathering, but they could get large amounts of meat that would feed the whole group - usually about 25 people - for a while.
A big adventure for a 19-year-old girl. Didn't these experiences end up in a famous novel?
Yes. Sylvia Plath also went to Smith College, and we were in the same writing class as part of our literature degrees. Our teacher used to read aloud from our writings, but didn't give names. But I knew that Plath was in that class later because I recognised the style of poetry. I wish I had known her. But I believe I appeared briefly in
The Bell Jar as a girl who won a prize for writing about her adventures among the pygmies of Africa.
What do you make of the accusations by some academics that your writing is too sentimental?
My mother Lorna also wrote about the Bushman culture and we were both accused of over-emphasising the lack of violence in Bushman culture, but we were only reporting what we had seen. In the Bushmen groups we visited, we observed that there was much emphasis on cooperation and on avoiding jealousy. The reason was that life was pretty marginal and one way to get through was to have others who help you in your hour of need. Everything in their culture was oriented to this.
So it isn't that they have a natural "niceness" - I never said that they did. They're just like everybody else. What they have done is recognise the damage one person can do to another and try to put a limit on it.
What about research that shows if you scale up the violence in Bushman society, it's as bad as Detroit?
There is no question that violence did happen in Bushman societies. I knew of a group of 15 where one man killed two others with an arrow. The men in that group killed the killer. So now three had died, and three in 15 is a pretty high percentage: that's higher than the murder rate of Detroit. But the reason the Bushmen we encountered were focused on not fighting was because they were
a society that recognised the human proclivity for fighting and tried to remove its causes.
They had the same difficulties as everyone else but they treated it differently, and they
recognised the value of having a low-violence society.
Did you sense that this kind of life couldn't last?
It was obvious that in the outside world there was a desire for land expansion. The pastoralists wanted it for grazing, and the white farmers for farms. People thought: "Why not take the land from the Bushmen, they're not doing anything with it?" The farmers and the pastoralists thought the Bushmen would be put to "better use" if they were made to work on the farms. My father saw it all coming. The first year we were there, a farmer followed our tracks and captured some Bushmen for slaves. My dad found out and went and got them back.
How did it all come to an end?
The /Gwi we knew were displaced by farmers from the lands they had always used. Most of them died of thirst, starvation or disease. Part of the Kalahari was designated "Bushmanland" in 1970. Unfortunately this was meant to be home not only to the original inhabitants but to all Bushmen from all language groups. The density of people meant the end of hunting and gathering. Many of the Ju/wasi now live in Tsumkwe, and depend on the wages of the few who can find work.
Did the ideas about Bushmen becoming hunter-gatherers again stop the farms taking off?
Yes. And that's my brother John's message too. He made a film called
The Kalahari Family, and the last section is titled "Death by myth". He believes Bushman farms failed because they didn't get the support they needed, due to the efforts channelled towards getting them back to a hunter-gatherer way of life.
From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 52-53