18 hours is barely enough time to sum up a culture that has been lost to, discrimination, bureaucracy and modernisation. Africa's earliest inhabitants the Bushmen were driven from their land and denied their natural heritage.
I am fortunate to have shared this brief time with these extraordinary people who have an inborn wisdom of the earth they inhabit. They are a small people and the harsh environment has etched its’ geography in the harrowed lines of their faces.
For generations their land sustained them. Sadly their livelihood today comes from the tourists who pay to watch them perform their tribal stories and show them how they foraged their land.
The Bushman people have suffered great injustice, loosing the rights to live, forage and hunt off a land where they have lived for generations. Women were abused by white colonialists, their breasts a sort after pouch to hold tobacco. Only a few hundred true Bushmen have survived, their modern lives now plagued with alcoholism, TB and HIV AIDS.
It was a privilege to have the opportunity to photograph this incredible tribe. I hope I have to opportunity to return one day or hear that their land has been returned to them.
Credits:
Philippa Logan