SAN

also called Bushmen an indigenous people of southern Africa, related to the Khoikhoin, or Hottentots. They live chiefly in Botswana, Namibia, and northwest South Africa. Bushmen is an anglicization of the Dutch, or Afrikaner, name for them; san (plural) or sa (singular) is the Khoi name, which is now favoured by anthropologists. Formerly, the San were thought to be readily identifiable by physical features, language, and culture. First, by the physical reckoning, the San were identified entirely from external features: light-coloured skin with a tendency to wrinkle; dark hair, tightly coiled in small spirals; small, broad heads; flattish faces and broad noses; prominent buttocks. None of these features, however, is exclusive to the San; and in other, not directly observable features (such as blood-groups), the San have been shown to be similar both to the Khoikhoin and to the Bantu-speaking peoples. Second, the relations among the San languages are unclear, and some San even speak Khoi languages. Third, most of the surviving San have been restrictedby European settlement or by pressure from tribal Africans of other stockto unattractive semiarid areas, so that many of them have to work, temporarily or permanently, for wages on European farms or to continue in a longstanding kind of client relationship with the other Africans (especially the Tswana), whom they serve as hunters, cattle herders, or labourers in return for provision of food, livestock, clothing, and tobacco. Therefore they no longer fit easily into a distinct cultural category. Nevertheless, a San culture did once exist, and among some groups still exists. It centred on the band, which might comprise several families (totaling between 25 and 60 persons). The elementary family within the band is composed of husband, wife, and their dependent children, but it is occasionally enlarged by polygynous marriage. Often all band members are related. Considerable interaction through trade, visiting, and particularly marriage may take place between bands; and kinship, both real and fictional, ramifies widely, thus facilitating the frequent movement of people from band to band, so that the composition of any particular band may fluctuate considerably in time. Each band is an autonomous, somewhat leaderless unit within its own territory, and in most bands influence rather than authority is exercised in particular situations by skilled hunters or older men. The individual shelters of the San are lightweight, semicircular structures of branches laced with twigs and thatched with grass; their equipment is portable; their possessions few and light. Woods, reeds, and animals (and, formerly, stone) are the main raw materials from which their skin clothing, carrying bags, water containers, and hunting weapons are made. For hunting they use bows and poisoned arrows, snares, throwing sticks, and sometimes spears. They have probably always fed on game, wild vegetables, fruits, nuts, and insects; as game becomes less plentiful, they are forced to rely increasingly on gathering or, ultimately, into abandoning their old means of subsistence altogether. The religions of two San groups, the ! Kung and the G/wi, seem to be similar, in that both groups believe in two supernatural beings, one of which is the creator of the world and of living things, whereas the other has lesser powers but is partly an agent of sickness and death. The ! Kung and the G/wi also believe in spirits of the dead but do not practice the cult of ancestors familiar among the Bantu. In the late 20th century some 42,000 San lived in the western Kalahari districts of Botswana. Namibia had about 35,000, and it is estimated that another 9,000 lived in southeastern Angola. A small number were nomadic.