Bushmen of the Kalahari Forcibly Settled

The Bushmen who have roamed the Kalahari wilderness for eons eking out a difficult existence are facing an even greater struggle to save their ancient way of life. Government control of their ancient homelands has left most of the Bushmen with very little of their own except memories of a past that is perhaps beyond reclamation.

This excerpt from the New York Times story by Barry Bearak about the Bushmen's plight brings home the harsh reality of the Bushmen today:


"However humble their lives, the Bushmen of Botswana’s central Kalahari are well known to the world, the subject of books, films and anthropological studies. They are frequently portrayed — or, as many say, romanticized — as classic hunter-gatherers, a living link to humankind’s collective beginnings.

But for decades, they have been entrenched in a tug of war over their fate that has often gone unnoticed, a saga now replete with edicts and court cases, with alcohol abuse and sundered families, with an aboriginal people despairing about the uncertainty of their future. Since the 1980s, Botswana, a landlocked nation of two million people, has both coaxed and hounded the Bushmen to leave the game reserve, intending to restrict the area to what its name implies, a wildlife refuge empty of human residents. Withholding water is one tactic, and in July a High Court ruled that the government had every right to deny use of that modern oasis, the borehole. An appeal was filed in September.

These days, only a few hundred Bushmen live within the reserve, and a few, like Mr. Taoxaga, still survive largely through their inherited knowledge, the hunters pursuing antelope and spring hares, the gatherers collecting tubers and wild melons, tapping into the water concealed in buried plants.

But most of the Bushmen have moved to dreary resettlement areas on the outskirts, where they wait in line for water, wait on benches at the clinic, wait around for something to do, wait for the taverns to open so they can douse their troubles with sorghum beer. Once among the most self-sufficient people on earth, many of them now live on the dole, waiting for handouts.

“If there was only some magic to free me into the past, that’s where I would go,” said Pihelo Phetlhadipuo, an elderly Bushman living in a resettlement area called Kaudwane. “I once was a free man, and now I am not.”



Joao Silva for The New York Times

A resident of New Xade, an area outside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve where many Bushmen have been resettled.
For Some Bushmen, a Homeland Worth the Fight
By BARRY BEARAK
Published: November 4, 2010

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Nomadic Mongolian lifestyle fades but yurts, shepherds on motorcycles, remain

Nomadic Mongolian lifestyle fades but yurts, shepherds on motorcycles, remain

By Sisi Tang (CP)

CHIFENG, China — It's no longer about the armed warriors, Genghis Khan and the robed nomads prancing through lush greenery on horseback.

In China's barely populated Inner Mongolian grasslands, what had defined Mongolian culture for outsiders have long been swapped for leather outfits, motorbikes, cellphones and tourism.

Five hours outside Inner Mongolia's southeastern city of Chifeng and deep in the grasslands, I chanced upon a local couple riding a mule-pulled cart on a quiet road, heading toward their coal-heated yurt. The old woman said she loves watching drama shows on TV, gesturing toward the dish propped up against her roof. On the freeway nearby, cars and buses seem to be the only other form of transportation, with horse-riding existing mostly for tourists.

The old storybook nomad life has dwindled, with most nomads now farming, living in compact brick huts, tending to tourists, or working in nearby cities. Desertification, too, is real and apparent, as you drive past yellowing grass where little livestock roams and sparse green shoots struggling through dried, gritty earth. The few who have maintained a nomadic lifestyle only camp on the grass during the wetter June to September months, making those the best times for travellers seeking an authentic glimpse of the old ways.

But while nomadic pastoral life is fading, echoes of it can still be found in some of the grasslands in southeastern Inner Mongolia. Windmills and nodding sunflowers dot endless expanses of rolling green fields, and there isn't a clearer blue sky to be found in all of China — although the view is occasionally interrupted by power lines or neon-yellow tour buses that honk relentlessly to prod the cows and sheep to the side.

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Archaeologists discover Britain's oldest home By David Keys

Archaeologists discover Britain's oldest home
By David Keys

Archaeologists have found Britain's earliest house - constructed by Stone Age tribesmen around 11,000 years ago.

The discovery is likely to change the way archaeologists view that early period.

Just 3.5 metres in diameter, the circular post-built house pre-dates other Stone Age buildings in the UK by up to a thousand years.

Located at one of Britain's most important prehistoric archaeological sites, Star Carr in North Yorkshire, the newly discovered building may have been home to a Stone Age hunter - or conceivably even a prehistoric priest or shaman.
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Ethnographic parallels elsewhere in the world suggest that, in hunter-gather societies, well-built structures of this kind were often the homes of shamans.

It's also known from previous excavations that the site as a whole was probably used, at least partially, for ritual activity. Back in 1950, archaeologists there discovered 21 Stone Age head-dresses made of modified deer skulls and antlers - which were almost certainly used for ceremonial hunting-related rituals, possibly dances. High value beads - made of amber, shale and deer teeth, and elsewhere associated with ritual activity - have also been found on the site.

And, over recent weeks, archaeologists at the site - on the edge of a now long-vanished prehistoric lake - have been uncovering the remains of a well-built wooden platform which they believe may have been used as a ritual location from which Stone Age tribesmen threw high value objects into the water as offerings to their deities or ancestral spirits.

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A Bitter Spring for Mongolia’s Nomads

Photo: Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Winter Leaves Mongolians a Harvest of Carcasses

By ANDREW JACOBS - New York Times
Published: May 19, 2010

SOUTH HANGAY PROVINCE, Mongolia — They call it the zud, a prolonged period of heavy snows and paralyzing cold that adds to the challenges of living on a treeless expanse nearly the size of Alaska. But this year’s zud followed a punishing summer drought that stunted the grass and left Munkhbat Lkhagvasuren’s herds emaciated and his family in debt after borrowing money for fodder.
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The yurt of a herder who lost 280 of his 300 animals over the winter.
The New York Times

About 17 percent of Mongolia’s livestock died, the United Nations says.

As the snow piled waist high this winter and temperatures plunged to 40 below zero, Mr. Lkhagvasuren crammed two dozen of the weakest goats and sheep into his yurt. The unlucky ones, more than 1,000 animals, froze to death in a great heap outside his front door. “I tried everything but could not fight against nature,” he said tearfully in a recent interview, the stench of rotting flesh overpowering despite a devilish wind. “I am broken and lost.”

Mongolia and its 800,000 herders are reeling from the worst winter that anyone can remember. According to United Nations relief officials, nearly eight million cows, yaks, camels, horses, goats and sheep died, about 17 percent of the country’s livestock. Even if the spring rains arrive soon, 500,000 more animals are expected to succumb in the coming weeks.

“This is not only a catastrophe for the herders but for the entire Mongolian economy,” said Akbar Usmani, the resident representative for the United Nations Development Program. “We expect the ripple effects for months and years to come.”

The last serious zuds, three consecutive harsh winters between 1999 and 2002, sent thousands of destitute nomads streaming into the capital, Ulan Bator. A decade later, their tattered yurts still crowd bleak neighborhoods on the city’s fringe as the former herders struggle to fit into the modern world. The United Nations estimates that the current disaster may prompt as many as 20,000 herders to abandon their nomadic life and flee to the city.

“A lot of the herders have no skills so they usually end up breaking the law and falling into poverty,” said Buyanbadrakh, the governor of a small administrative district, known as a soum, who like some Mongolians uses a single name. He said 70 percent of the livestock in his soum, Zuunbayan-ulaan, were wiped out this year with at least 2,800 families losing their entire herds.

With so many desperate nomads selling off their remaining animals to survive, the price of meat has dropped by half in recent months. “People are taking it very hard,” he said. “Some have gone crazy.”



The disaster poses a challenge to a government already struggling to address the needs of the third of the population that lives in poverty. But it also raises a host of thorny questions about climate change, environmental degradation and whether the pastoral way of life that sustains many of the country’s 3 million people has a future.

Mongolians are fiercely proud of their millenniums-old nomadic ways, best personified by the deification of Genghis Khan, the 13th-century leader whose horseback warriors conquered much of Asia and Eastern Europe. Although mining and tourism are a growing portion of the Mongolian economy, a third of the population still depends entirely on husbandry for its livelihood. “The key question we have to ask is whether this way of life is sustainable,” said Mr. Usmani of the United Nations. “It’s a very sensitive issue.”

Despite the severe winter, one of the more sensitive long-term issues, oddly, is how to curb the explosive growth in livestock, which has quadrupled to 40 million head since the 1990 revolution that ushered in democracy and ended a socialist system that tightly controlled the size of the nation’s herds to prevent overgrazing. Environmentalists and government officials agree that the two decades of unbridled privatization and a boom in cashmere exports upended the traditional mix of livestock, which had long favored sheep over goats.

In the past, sheep made up 80 percent of small-animal herds and goats the rest. But as the price of cashmere soared over the last decade, that ratio reversed, with devastating results for the ecology of the steppe. Voracious eaters, goats often destroy the grass by nibbling at the roots. Their sharp hooves also damage fragile pasture by breaking up the protective tangle of grass and lichens, allowing the wind to sweep away topsoil and encouraging desertification.

The other wildcard is climate change, which many herders blame for the increasingly inhospitable weather. Winters are longer and colder, the winds blow stronger and the summers, they say, are drier. “I don’t know what happened to the mild spring rains that the grass needs to drink,” said Degkhuu, 62, a lifelong herder who lost his entire flock. “Now, when the rains come they are heavy and create flash floods.”

A recent World Bank study found that hundreds of rivers and lakes had disappeared in Mongolia, and the diversity of plant species had plummeted by a third since 1997, although researchers partly blamed the proliferation of goats.

For the moment, the government is focused on clearing the millions of dead animals that litter the grasslands and are beginning to decompose now that spring has finally arrived. A work-for-cash program, financed with a $1.5 million grant from the United Nations, pays herders to gather the carcasses and bury them in pits. It is grim work, but those lucky enough to get a spot on the crews are happy for the income.

At best, the money will only delay a looming crisis among families who have run out of food and are saddled with bank loans they took on to buy emergency feed. Mr. Lkhagvasuren, 34, the herder who lost 1,000 animals, said he owed over $1,800, a huge sum given that the average Mongolian earns $3,200 a year. He said he lost most of his most prized animals — horses, cows and about 200 yaks — and that it would take at least a decade to replenish his herd of goats and sheep, about 100 of which survived.


Photo: Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

The yurt of a herder who lost 280 of his 300 animals over the winter
As he sat in his yurt drinking salty milk tea and smoking tobacco rolled in a strip of newsprint, a crew dragged off the carcasses and heaved them into rickety trucks. “I can’t bear to watch,” he said.

Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the 'Medieval' History of Mongolia.

Book Review

Bold, Bat-Ochir, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the 'Medieval' History of Mongolia. New York: Palgrave Publishing (St. Martin's Press), 2001. 204 pp. + xvii. ISBN: 0-312-22827-9. $59.95 cloth

Reviewed by: Timothy May, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, tmmay(a)students.wisc.edu


The vast majority of what Westerners have learned concerning the Mongol Empire and Mongolia between the days of the Empire and the twentieth century has been through two methods: the interpretations of Western scholars and through translations of works by Soviet scholars who rarely deviated from the theoretical and ideological methodology prescribed to them. With the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, such as Mongolia, have been freed from their intellectual shackles and now must analyze their history with a fresh perspective. This is not to say that previous work under a more repressive regime did not have merit, but nevertheless, variance from the official interpretation of Marxism was marginal. While many Western scholars disagreed with Marxist interpretations of history, the Marxist influence concerning pastoral-nomadic society, though often criticized, continues to have a great impact on the interpretation of Mongolian history. This fact alone makes Bat Ochir Bold's book, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the 'Medieval' History of Mongolia, an important development in the historiography of all aspects of Mongolian history.

Bat-Ochir Bold, a Mongolian scholar at the University of Iceland, has set forth to examine the current views on Mongolian nomadic society, namely that it was a feudal structure. He views his book as an attempt to study the structural and developmental characteristics of Mongolian nomadic society over the course of Mongolian history. Approaching this topic from theoretical and empirical perspectives, Bold focuses his work from the twelfth century to the twentieth century due to the source material available. After the twelfth century a fairly stable and independent Mongolian society existed. In his opinion, although political institutions changed, nomadic society remained relatively unchanged until the 18th century, when the combination of Manchurian rule and the growth of Buddhism hampered the development of Mongolia and altered nomadic society.

Mongolian Nomadic Society is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter focuses on the source material. Bold evaluates the primary and secondary materials through historiographical and cultural interpretations. The core of the study, chapters two through four, examines the structural elements of nomadic society. These include the roles of social and economic factors as well as tribal and political-administrative elements. In these chapters, Bold compares pre-industrial Europe with feudalism in Mongolia, essentially comparing Europe with a Mongolian model of production. Although this, on the surface, seems absurd, is it not the reverse of what Marxist and non-Marxist scholars have done? The fifth chapter focuses on the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia and its ramifications on nomadic society. The sixth chapter attempts to depict the essence, function and evolution of traditional nomadic society. Then, in his concluding remarks, Bat-Ochir Bold outlines the internal structure and evolution of traditional nomadic society.

In Bold's view, attempts to evaluate Mongolian history have been mired in two problems. Attempts prior to 1921, when Mongolia entered the sphere of Soviet influence, were bound to tradition, which included Buddhist and Chinese interpretations of events. After 1921, a new generation of scholars made their own attempts to reinterpret their history, but suddenly found themselves, both willingly and unwillingly, examining their past through the lens of Marxist dogma, often dictated from the Soviet Union.

According to Marxist-Leninist theory, society moved through five stages: primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and finally socialism, with communism being the pinnacle of socialism. For Mongolia, and their Soviet allies, this presented a problem. If these stages were applied to Mongolia, it was quite apparent that Mongolia never reached a capitalist stage. Therefore, they were in a feudal stage before the intervention of the Soviets and the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP). To accommodate this and similar problems in Central Asia, the Communist party adopted the idea that certain stages could be bypassed en route to socialism. During this period, the Soviet scholar Vladimirtsov coined the idea of nomadic feudalism in 1934. Although many scholars discussed this concept, most adhered to it. Even as late as 1976, it remained an essential part of Mongolian historiography, although many scholars, Western as well as Soviet, rejected it based on its theoretical ambiguity. Nevertheless, nomadic feudalism remains a model that scholars examine and use today.

To dispute the concept of nomadic feudalism, Bold delves into the structure of nomadism. In doing so, he asks two questions: to what extent has ecological change influenced animal husbandry in Mongolia; and, how has the origin of livestock keeping been determined ecologically? Although the questions are similar, they intertwined and have not received much attention. After examining this, he then compares the results for the Mongolian nomadic economy with that of feudal Europe.

In the third chapter, Bold examines the evolution of the Mongolian socio-political organization, ranging from the tribe to the various forms of kinship, both fictive and non-fictive. By doing so, we see the development of the state, prompting Bold to ask: should this state be considered feudal? And if so, how should feudal be defined?

During his examination of the social strata, Bold relies heavily on the research of Mongolian, Soviet and Hungarian scholars. An integral part of chapter four focuses on the terminology used in discussing the social structure before and after the Manchurian period, and how both periods differentiate between Chinggisids and non-Chinggisid taiji, or nobles.

Many readers will find chapter five especially interesting. The debate on the effects of Buddhism on Mongolia has always been a heated one. Arguments range from Buddhism essentially ruining the martial ardor of the Mongols and depleting it of manpower to the other end of the spectrum that it benefited the Mongols by introducing a world religion and ending the influence of shamanism. Bold, to his credit, does not fall into the trap of entering this debate. Instead he turns his attention to how Buddhism or rather Lamaism affected the nomadic economy. One aspect that he covers, which is often overlooked, is that permanent monasteries did not spring up overnight. Instead, they gradually evolved from a ger and eventually became the large fixed structures that are commonly associated with Lamaism.

In the final chapter, Bold examines the dynamics of the development of Mongolian nomadic society, particularly in the areas of livestock, family, political structure, and military conflict. Through the study of these elements, Bold then examines why the nomads of Central Eurasia were so aggressive and why they were so successful. As part of this study, Bat-Ochir Bold includes climatic problems, the mobile lifestyle of the nomads, their strategies, and, surprisingly, the role of shamanism with its focus on the Möngke Köke Tengri, or Eternal Blue Heaven. The religious element of the nomadic conquests is something that is all too commonly overlooked and has attracted little research. In his discussion of the evolution of nomadic society, he concludes, quite plausibly, that it is erroneous to conclude that a single dramatic change occurred, such as with the introduction of Buddhism, or the Mongols' incorporation into the Manchu Empire, but rather change was gradual and not immediate.

Bold concludes that Mongolian nomadic society is so different from Medieval or Northern Europe that one cannot study Mongolia based on models draw from those used to study Europe, and for that matter, China. The evolution of agricultural and nomadic peoples are simply too disparate to establish a model from one and apply it to another.

Mongolian Nomadic Society is a welcome addition to the study of Mongolia as well as the study of state formation. Too often scholars, often unconsciously, apply methods based on one culture or society that are woefully inadequate and inappropriate for another. The cultural context must always be kept in mind. There are a few minor issues with his system of transliteration, such as his use of "Genghis Khaan." In his note on transliteration, he maintains that he prefers to use this as it is more familiar to Western readers, but the use of Khaan is not familiar at all. Although it is a perfect transliteration from the modern Mongolian, it is odd to the Western eye. Nevertheless, these are minor issues and do not detract from the questions he poses. The importance of this volume is not so much his overall conclusions, but that it may serve as a stimulus for scholars to rethink how they view Mongolian nomadic society, even if they disagree with the author.