One of the oldest continually indigenous people on the planet, if the not the oldest, are the Kalahari Bushmen of Southern Africa. It’s been said that the Bushmen have lived in this area for well over 20,000 years, making them one of the few homosapien sapiens to have never migrated from their homeland of genetic and evolutionary origin. The Bushmen are a people and culture utterly alien to the rest of humanity, on account of their isolated living situation and complete lack of exposure to any forms of technological or agricultural progression beyond the Stone Age. When attempting to integrate into modern societies, the Bushmen feel completely separate from the realms of progressive society, and register on an IQ scale as below the line for mental retardation, coming in at the low 70s. However, it is not right to compare culture with culture on such an objective scale, as the way of life of the Bushmen does not require anything of modern society to be successfully lived. However, because of cultural and developmental differences, the Bushmen are unlikely to be able to assimilate or integrate into a Western-culture-centric society such as that in the United States.
The Bushmen are of extremely small stature and have darkened skin with so much melatonin to protect against the harmful UV rays of the sun that their skin almost appears to give off a yellowish tint. The openness of the Kalahari desert also wears the Bushmen’s skin down by a sort of “tactile erosion” to such a degree that even by their late teens many Bushmen have wrinkled skin comparable to that of a geriatric in Western society. The Bushmen still live in a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer lifestyle, with their main means of sustenance coming from the plants, berries, nuts, and roots that are gathered by the women of the tribe. Men occasionally hunt for wildlife using poisoned arrows and spears.
In terms of political structure, the Bushman has none. There is no tribal organization except a very basic framework of a chieftan order, and absolutely no sense of ownership of land or control of a populace. The language of the Bushmen is known as click language, because it does not use the normal phonetic sounds that modern languages outside of South Africa do, rather relying on the clicks of the tongue on teeth or the roof of the mouth. The language itself is extremely primitive in terms of its linguistic development, and has no set standard of rules. Each family clan uses a slightly different version of the click language to every other neighboring clan, although there is a certain degree of mutual intelligibility. The Bushman society, having no sense of ownership of land, is almost entirely nomadic.
The Bushmen way of life is one that is completely entangled with the nature around him or her. The Bushmen’s diet and health is contingent on the available food – whether it be edible or medicinal plant-life – available to them nearby. Because of this, life expectancy for the Bushmen is one of the lowest on the planet, with less than 10% of Bushmen making it past 60 years of age. The life expectancy is sometimes said to be as low as 45 years of age. Many Bushmen die before the age of 20 because of poorly maintained food leading to gastrointestinal issues. Others succumb to illnesses like malaria or syphilis because of no medical structure in place. However, because of the extremely low-stress lifestyle of the Bushmen, the common diseases of the modern Western world, such as heart disease and stroke is relatively unknown to the Bushmen. The Bushmen are also heavily unlikely to be able to gain an immunity to the normal colds and viruses of the Western world, making them face these illnesses to a much more detrimental degree and likely have a very low life expectancy in the west .
Bushmen religion and folklore believes in the existence of two Gods – the greater God and the lesser God. The Greater God is seen as the creator, having created himself, the land and its food, and the water and the air. It is a benevolent God that often teaches people how to live more peacefully and instills good luck on those who do good. The Lesser God is the “black magician” – the God that bequeaths misfortune and bad luck. Water is viewed by the Bushmen as having very magical powers – being able to refresh, revive, and make things flourish or grow. The Bushmen see water in this way because they live most of their lives in extremely dry conditions. In Western society, water is often taken for granted and this will likely be extremely disagreeable to the Bushman.
The modernization of the world around the Bushmen has made life increasingly difficult for them, not to mention the fact that much of the wildlife that they once freely hunted and gathered in is now being fashioned into nature preserves by civilized society. The invasion of the “cattle-breeding” Bantu tribes have been pressuring many Bushmen to leave their way of life and join the Bantu in cattle-breeding, seemingly absorbing the Bushmen ethnicity out of existence.
With the United States being a country that relies almost entirely on market-based economics and the supplying workforce, it is unlikely that a Bushman, no matter how familiar with Western culture he reveals himself to be, would be able to function normally, as the concept of a job, or of even division of labor, is something entirely culturally foreign to him. In his society, collectivism thrives not individualism.
Today, it is clear that the Bushmen are too culturally and biologically specific to their land to be able to survive in any society with a rigidly enforced modern structure of government. Therefore, the Bushman would be completely incapable of functioning in a Western society like the United States, in the same way that a feral child finds it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to adjust its behavior in the modern world after leaving the wild. The Bushman is an example of the one of the few remaining “wild” peoples on the planet, and have grown to be accepted as a sort of “part” of the land of Africa, a human element added to the animal element, that makes Africa what it is.
