INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: NOSTALGIA FOR NAMIBIA
When I was reading Anthropology at London,
had a chance to visit the San people of Tsumkwe on four different occasions.
Having intimate knowledge of some other ancient peoples of this earth, I could
see great parallels, but those parallels were mainly about oppression, Christianisation,
coco-colonization and poverty: didn't matter who was perpetuating it, whether
White, Black or people claiming to be indigenous.
I have been fortunate enough to spend long
periods of time with American Indians whose ancient knowledge is given to you
as if by osmosis. No formal teaching, but they convey the message to you. I was
lucky that my first teacher from Meskwakia had warned me and I had taken her
warning to heart:
Show Respect to each and every Indian, if
you can love them, it would be even better.
Air Namibia’s lone, ageing 747 takes off
from London and makes its way south to Windhoek. The book with me on that trip
was one by Laurence van der Post. Never before or after have I found a write
with such an understanding of the Indigenous mind and ways of thinking
Benedict Allen had written:
his
appeal as a writer amounted to more than his achievement in depicting a defunct
lifestyle. "We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it
seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water," he had written,
and we saw in the Bushmen evidence that the widening gap between modern,
western man and his primitive past was a cause of our spiritual and moral
decay. Van der Post's friendship with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung explains
another element of his thinking. "Men had lost their capacity to dream
..." he reflected after the second world war. "I knew that somehow
the world had to be set dreaming again." For Van der Post, the Bushmen
were gatekeepers to the unconscious: "I sought to understand imaginatively
the primitive in ourselves, and in this search the Bushman has always been for
me a kind of frontier guide."
I remember a line ..Why do the outsiders so
dislike and hate the Indigenous people?
After many years of travel among many
Indigenous groups, I realized that question to be universal.. Why do others
hate this innocent man-child?
LvdP provided the answer.. They resent the
loss of the innocence of beginning, this closeness to the original creation of
God…and then he added, Only when the outsiders begin to show respect for the
Indigenous peoples, and understand that they have something to contribute, will
the welfare of them get better.
On the last day of December, I was overcome
with nostalgia for Jhu/Hoansi San whom I had visited. The Clinic, the Kavango
policemen, children doing the tsamma melon dance, Nisa, the middle aged lady
who had been filmed since her birth, now turned into an alcoholic. The Peace
Corps men and women with their Christian zeal and coca cola bottles.
Soon I was watching a documentary on the
very same people I had contacted, and two of the academics appeared also:
Meagan Biesele and Robert Hitchcock, both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting
in the USA.
Dr Biesele was echoing what LvdP had said
very many years earlier (she had worked more than 30 years with San). when the
western world realize that the San has some knowledge that is valuable to them,
the self esteem of the San would increase.
Following the Australian model of Papunya,
the San artists have begun to put down on paper their symbolic stories, and the
project seems to be headed for similar success.
My favourite museum in Paris, for obvious
reasons is Musee Quai d Branley, one of the nicest anthropological museums in
the world.. (In Mexico city, the magnificent collections are about Los Indios,
in Kuching, the Sarawak Museum has excellent displays of life in Borneo, Heard
Museum has Native American artefacts, even went to one in San Juan, in
Argentina!)
And it cannot be a coincidence the special
display was about Papunya and the aboriginal paintings… that began only in the
1970s and 1980s and now has brought them respect, self-government and cash flow
and tribal prosperity.
It was amazing to see the paintings with clarity
of a bird’s eye view of the landscape. American Indians always remind me, Eagle
flies high and has a good vision of what is underneath.
Look what Lame Deer of the Lakota had to
say:
"I believe that being a medicine man, more
than anything else, is a state of mind, a way of looking at and understanding
this earth, a sense of what it is all about."
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-- Lame Deer, LAKOTA
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The Medicine Wheel explains different ways of
looking at the world. The four directions are the East, the South, the West,
and the North. In the East is the view of the eagle. The eagle flies high and
sees the earth from that point of view. The South is the direction of the
mouse. Moving on the earth, the mouse will not see what the eagle sees. Both
the eagle and the mouse see the truth. The West is the direction of the bear.
The bear will see different from the mouse and the eagle. From the North
comes the point of view of the bison. To be a Medicine Man you must journey
through all points of view and develop the mind to see the interconnectedness
of all four directions. This takes time, patience, and an open mind.
Eventually, you understand there is only love.
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I am forever grateful that I had a chance
to know American Indians. Australian Aboriginals and San Bushmen. And visit
many others in India, Malaysia, Finland, and most of the Americas (warao,
macusi, mapuche etc etc).
I am preparing to leave for the American
Indians via London (Bar Italia where once I sat reading Laurence Van der Post)…
I miss their physical presence in my life…
(the above picture taken, just before giving a presentation to the HoCank Indians : Learning from our Ancestors, which is available as a slide show on the top right hand side of this blog)
For the San, hope I can re connect with Bob
Hitchcock and Meagan Biesele and who knows it would be nice to drivE east
from Grootefontein towards Tsumkwe and the Botswana border.
