Conservation

The Bushman or San people of Southern Africa are some of the oldest indigenous groups of people that occupied some of these regions for the last 120 000 years. The word San means Hunter gathers. The term always used is Koi-San. The Koi-Koi where another group of people that came down the west coast some 2500 years ago. They brought short tailed sheep and practised farming techniques. The term Koi-San was derived from the amalgamation between some of the groups. Not much was known about the Bushman. The people where classified as wild animals, wild animals like them had no place in modern society and that they should rather be eradicated to make place for a higher race being the colonists at the time. It was a case of the gun being mightier than the bow.

In 1870 a German linguist by the name of Wilhelm Bleek arrived in the Cape. He was on his way to Natal to do some work on the Zulu people of the region. He got to hear about the Bushman and was rather intrigued by who they where. He got permission to have 3 Bushman from the Breakwater prison in Cape Town. They stayed with him in his House in Mowbray for a period of 10 years. He got together about 10 to 15 thousand pages of verbatim transcripts. This information is still used today to help us get a better understanding on who the people where and also give some form insight into the paintings.