For nearly three decades, Paul Weinberg has travelled to Namibia, Botswana and South Africa to document the lives of hunter-gatherer communities, the San (Africa’s first people) and their struggles to hang on to their land, culture, and values, as they faced serious threats by outside settlers. Weinberg will discuss his book Traces and Tracks (Jacana Media 2017), the culmination of his thirty-year journey, featuring essays and over 100 photographs that convey the modern-day San’s daily lives, their relationship to nature, game parks, and their ways of adjusting to a fast-changing world.
About the Speaker
Paul Weinberg is a South African-born documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer, curator, educationist, and archivist. He began his career in the early 1980s working for South African NGOs, and photographing current events for news agencies and foreign newspapers. Weinberg’s large body of work portrays diverse peoples, cultures, and human environments, and reflects a sustained engagement with Indigenous people throughout southern Africa. His images have been widely exhibited and published in South Africa, among other countries. He has taught photography at the Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University and holds a M.A. from the same university. He currently lectures on documentary arts at the University of Cape Town.
Paul Weinberg, Photographer
See the related past exhibition: Kalahari Perspectives.
Presented in collaboration with Documentary Educational Resources
Lecture and Book Signing recorded 2/20/19
Transcript
Traces and Tracks: Journeys with the San
[00:00:08.39] It is my great pleasure to introduce Paul Weinberg. He's a documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer, curator, educator, and archivist. Paul is an essential contributor to the exhibition upstairs where we'll be having the reception. His contribution is important in that it brings what would have been a distinctly historical-- i.e. ending in the 1950s-- exhibition into the present.
[00:00:43.28] And Paul also has a special relationship with the Marshall family, whose work is featured in the exhibition, having worked with John Marshall starting in 1984. Paul was born in South Africa and has built up a large body of work, which portrays diverse peoples, cultures, human environments all beyond the headline. His work demonstrates a sustained engagement with indigenous peoples throughout southern Africa, particularly in rural settings.
[00:01:17.72] His images have been published internationally, exhibited Internationally. And the book he will be signing, Traces and Tracks, is only one of four books he has published on the San of South Africa. Paul has also initiated several major photographic projects notably, Then and Now, a book that is a collection of contrasting images by eight South African-American photographers taken during and after apartheid. And he has written The Other Camera about vernacular South African photography.
[00:01:53.63] He is a founding member of Afrapix-- the photo collective that fought the apartheid machine with their cameras. Paul holds a masters degree from Duke University where he has taught photography at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. He currently lectures in documentary arts at the University of Cape Town.
[00:02:15.53] In 1993, Paul won the Mother Jones International Documentary Award for his portrayal of the fisher folk of bay on South Africa's northern atoll coasts. I would like you to join me in welcoming Paul Weinberg. Thank you.
[00:02:33.66] [APPLAUSE]
[00:02:44.47] Thank you very much, Liza, and thank you all for braving the cold weather and being here. I'd like to meet that guy sometime. There's something that sounded familiar. And well, thank you very much for joining me on this journey of the San, Africa's first people, and some would argue the world's first people.
[00:03:10.84] It's a project that took over 30 years. There've been various iterations of it. Primarily, I took photographs.
[00:03:21.55] But as I worked more and more in the area, I realized that it needed more than photographs. And so I wrote the text as well, and it was important to go beyond photographs because there are many complexities, nuances, and contradictions. And I wrestled to find a vocabulary that expressed all of that. But to sort of understand where I fit in, here is something of my checkered past-- photographer, filmmaker, writer with a little r, educationists, curator, and archivist. But essentially, I would describe myself as a storyteller who uses a camera.
[00:04:13.44] And this quote from Scott Russell Sanders really resonates with me. "Through stories, we reach across the rifts not only of gender and age but also of race and creed, geography and class and even the rifts between species and between enemies." But my tributary similarly in this journey was when I was conscripted as a young South African, as we were in those days. I was exactly 17 years and two months, and I was drafted into the South African army to fight apartheid's wars. I was sent to the infantry, and then I was sent to the border in Namibia.
[00:05:02.85] In the same year, the San were also recruited into the South African army to fight the liberation forces of Namibia, namely SWAPO (South West African Peoples Organisation and they established what is called the Bushmen battalion. It was a traumatic event for me, and I'm sure it was equally traumatic for the San. And when I became a photographer, I started to fight back with my camera, and I took this image which in a way reflects the militarization of South Africa at the time.
[00:05:50.15] Before I set out on the journey in the 1980s, this book appeared in South Africa. It was called The Bushmen. It was written in the present tense.
[00:06:04.55] Captions would be something like this. Bushmen collect veld food in the Kalahari. No name of who these particular Bushmen were, no location, no group attributed to them. It was just a generic essentialist concept.
[00:06:28.86] It was a constructed reality, actually. And that kind of constructed reality continues. I recently picked this up from the internet, and these images abound-- generally, of people pretending to hunt.
[00:06:51.93] This photograph down at the bottom is San people in a pose that is associated with aboriginal people. I've never seen a San person stand like this in my life but here's the quote. Bushmen San are hunter-gatherers, Kalahari, South Africa. I will unpack that in this journey. But prior to my trip in 1984, I had the privilege of studying anthropology at the University of Kwazulu-Natal.
[00:07:29.96] And I had an inkling, I had some insight into the San and their lifestyle. It was, I would say, the romantic version, but it is maybe in a way left me with more questions than answers. So in 1984, I embarked on a journey. I met the celebrated John Marshall filmmaker. And he was my guide. We arrived in a place called Tsumkwe in Bushmen land, now called Nyae Nyae, and we found people lining up at the shops, lining up at the bottle stores, and kind of a community in social disarray.
[00:08:20.30] 25 kilometers further at a place called Gaucha, I encountered people who were living in mixed economy. They were hunting. There was some animal husbandry that introduced cattle. There was gathering, but it was a far more peaceful time.
[00:08:40.71] So these two vastly different experiences of the San were the kind of foundation that set me on a course. And what I'd learned at university and the Academy, what I'd seen in reality was desperately out of sync, and it set me on a path to ask questions and find some answers.
[00:09:07.97] In the last 30 years, I've done a number of collaborations, exhibitions, films, books. I worked with John Marshall. I also worked with Megan Beasley to tell the story of the modern day San and get the message out because we felt it was very necessary that people understood what was going on.
[00:09:36.62] In my own right, I also published articles and wrote what I could. But just to give you some sense of the San of today or the modern San, you need to know that there are about 130,000 San who live in southern Africa-- mainly in three countries-- Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. They speak 35 different languages, and the vast majority-- and they share this in common-- have been dispossessed.
[00:10:18.39] As I've alluded to already, militarization has had a dramatic and devastating effect on the San in this region. And they've been drawn into civil wars not of their own making in Angola, Namibia. There is a photograph of San being discharged from an army base shortly before the 1989 elections in Namibia.
[00:10:53.08] But the representation of the San is by far, is in a sense, the most problematic issue to be tackled and John Marshall coined the term death by myth. Feature films, television commercials, documentaries continue a kind of presentation of the San who live in primitive surroundings, primitive affluence in Never Never Land in some kind of Stone Age time warp. Nothing could be further from the truth. I found and counted this Thai group who were doing a recce to do it in an advert on the San directed by none other than Jamie Uys, the famous director of The Gods Must Be Crazy.
[00:11:55.78] In that encounter when I met him, he said, are these Bushmen and asked them to take off their shirts and they were photographing them. I said, yes, these are the Khomani San. He said, I don't think they're Bushmen. I think they Nama referring to the Khoi people. But in Thailand, no one's going to know the difference.
[00:12:25.34] In my journeys, I met Karl Khanna, the star of The Gods Must Be Crazy. And when I asked him how much he was paid for his work as an actor, he said for the first film, he was paid 2,000 Rand, $145. And for the second, he was paid 5,000 Rand, 360 dollars. That film grossed $100 million in its first year.
[00:12:57.63] So let me ask the question rhetorically, how much came back to the San community? Not one single cent. So the San had a perception of that exploitation.
[00:13:14.35] And in a book that Megan Beasley and I did called Shaken Roots, Tsamkxoa Toma pointed out, there are two kinds of films. One kind shows us as people like other people who have things to do and plans to make, this kind helps us. The other kind shows us as if we were animals and plays right into the hands of people who want to take our land.
[00:13:45.97] In 1984, I began my trip. And I was taking many black and white photographs. So when I decided to return to the communities I'd photographed and met over the years, I had a kind of existential crisis because we're now shooting in digital. And you couldn't get black and white film. You couldn't process it-- certainly, in South Africa.
[00:14:16.44] So I had a dilemma, and I called up David Goldblatt where some of his most eminent photographers in the frand. And I said, David, what do I do? I can't just put that into Photoshop and render it in black and white-- just doesn't feel right. He said, no, Paul, put them together-- black and white and color-- just go ahead.
[00:14:39.64] So I followed his advice. When I started out wanting to take photographs of the San in South Africa, the prevalent academic position was the San had been wiped out. They simply didn't exist.
[00:14:59.30] However, in 1990, the San were kind of somehow reconstructed. A group of 4,000 !Xam and Khwe people were relocated from Namibia. We had fought for the South African army and came to live in a place called Smiths Drift.
[00:15:21.98] Between the Vaal and the Orange Rivers in South Africa was where the !Xam people lived in the 19th century. They were decimated. And those who weren't killed were incarcerated in breakwater prison. And I think the only positive thing that came out of that was that Blake and Lloyd created the first orthography of the !Xam people and their folklore, and it's the seminal publication today.
[00:15:56.78] But the presence of the San in South Africa's everywhere. On your left is a museum in the Drakensberg Mountains. And there are over 50,000 rock paintings that are testament to the San of southern Africa. On the right are rock engravings that proliferate in the interior, and they just a testimony to the San being not just South Africa's first people but Africa's first people, long before black settlers came and white settlers came to that part of the region.
[00:16:44.54] In the '90s, I also encountered the rediscovery of a group of people called the Khomani San. At the time, they were living in a nature reserve called Kagga Kamma not far from Cape Town. They had been evicted from the Transfrontier Kalahari Game Reserve. And they kind of were there as a sort of showpiece for the Bushmen experience.
[00:17:13.55] And people came to see the San of today, took photographs. Their leader was a charismatic man called David Kruiper, who loved to tell stories. And this is an encounter with people listening to stories. But his family, he told me, also lived in a scattered way outside the park in a place called Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. And I went to visit them and found the Khomani San who are still living there.
[00:17:52.43] In the 1990s, after the elections in South Africa in 1994, the Khomani San returned to that place called Welkom to embark on a land claim. In 1999, they won a land claim. And Thabo Mbeki, the then president of South Africa, handed over five farms and a small part of the Transfrontier Park where they lived before they were evicted. In 2013, I went to visit that area not far from where the celebration took place. The Khomani San had gathered together.
[00:18:44.19] They were stand pipes. There wasn't waterborne sewerage. And it left me with questions that you might have the land back but are you really empowered to be full citizens of the country? I accompanied Dirk Pienaar who leads this project in the Transfrontier Kalahari Park ecotourist project that has much promise and hope.
[00:19:16.05] Outside the park, San sell crafts to tourists on their way in. The militarized San who lived in Smith's drift, as I said, came in 1990, 4,000 people, soldiers and their families, about 2,000 kilometers from where they actually come from in Namibia and Angola. They are the !Kung and the Khoi people. And they stayed there for 13 years in tents. They were subject to a lot of influences.
[00:20:01.66] And this is that a church, the Dutch Reformed Church service, and here is a man practicing Zionist church at a Zionist church service-- quite a far cry from the traditional hunt together experience that we associate the San with. And then I encountered this rather bizarre scene where 36 couples were remarried because they already had been married traditionally, but they felt that in their quest for assimilation and to be part of the modern world and possibly some pressure from the church, they needed to have a white wedding.
[00:20:50.21] And so they went and hired gowns and suits, traipsing through the dust of Smith's Drift and got remarried. That same group of people live now in the township just outside Kimberly called Platfontein. This is on a cultural day of the three of the Kun people in Platfontein where they still try to keep alive their traditions and their cultural past. Post 1994, there emerges what people have understood as the secret sin. And to believe that the San just became extinct and were wiped out just didn't sit with me.
[00:21:49.47] So I encountered the Duma people on the left who were part of a group called the Abatwa who were supposedly wiped out, but they weren't wiped out. They're much smarter than that. They took refuge amongst the Zulu people and adopted the clan name the Duma people, but they still have the San roots. So this was a ritual to invoke their past and in a sense rekindle their identity.
[00:22:22.62] On the right is a ritual performed by a person who has claims to send dissent. The San are very involved in crafts and have been for millennia. Many of these crafts-- beautiful crafts I might add-- are made for tourists, not for themselves and translated into a cash economy. They are, however, in the number of San artists who become famous and who have taken up painting. This group of San people in Botswana who are part of a collective called Kuru are some of the most famous San artists in the world.
[00:23:27.49] Botswana is the richest country per capita in Africa. However, its relationship to its first people is disastrous, and it has essentially dispossessed its first people. This photograph is of a Naro family who are itinerant farm workers who move from farm to farm. In the 1990s, my research took me right into the heart of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve-- game reserve the size of Belgium.
[00:24:12.10] And this is a man called Roy Susana who lived in a settlement called Molapo. I was told that these were the last of the wild Bushmen, and it was hard for me to believe that was the last of the wild Bushmen. And when I arrived there, the men gathered around.
[00:24:34.91] And you know what it's like when you arrive in a place, and you're searching for a common language. And out of various common languages, they didn't speak English. I didn't speak Setswana.
[00:24:47.68] I didn't speak one of their languages. One of the men started to speak to me in Zulu, and then we had a conversation. It's a language I understand and can speak. And it transpires that the men in that area all went and worked on the South African mines.
[00:25:06.34] So how academics could have come to the conclusion that these were the last of the wild Bushmen remains something of a mystery. People lived on the land. There was some agriculture cultivation. They herded goats. And at that point, they could still hunt.
[00:25:37.66] But most of the San people by then had been rounded up and induced into these settlements, overcrowded, overgrazed. And when I say induced, the lure to go into a settlement was to receive some goats and cattle, and that's how many of the San people were kind of voluntarily forced into these settlements. In 2002, Botswana enacted what many have called the final solution on the San.
[00:26:26.87] They removed the remaining 2,000 people who lived in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. They moved them to two huge squatter camps on the south and the north of the game reserve. I accompanied a legal team, some San activists soon after that, and we encountered people who were resisting the removal and refused to leave. And let me just share with you that experience.
[00:27:04.08] In Metsiamenong, we met a community of people who were also resisting the removal. They were in high spirits. One of these spokesmen for Bopalo Gaberekwe told us we like Metsiamenong because it's our origin. That's why we are refusing here.
[00:27:24.78] Government is saying we must leave this place and go other places, but we are saying no to that. God created us here. That's why we refuse. The government says people were relocated voluntarily. We do not want to volunteer to relocate.
[00:27:43.00] We were brought up here. Our great grandfathers , are here. If you say because this is a place for animals, we are saying no. The animals are ours.
[00:27:55.96] We know the animals. At times, we die. The animals eat our bones. And other times, the animals die, and we eat their bones.
[00:28:06.40] So we are saying no to the government because the animals are ours. Around the fire that night, Roy sang a song. He whistled the melody through his teeth. It had the rhythm of many San songs I've heard before.
[00:28:23.11] Matambo translated, please let the government take our land away. Please don't let the government take our land away. The Kalahari is our home. Botswana is our home-- give us strength, give us strength.
[00:28:40.24] But they were removed, and Bopalo Gaberekwe when I inquired after that what happened to him, they told me he was removed. He went to a place called [INAUDIBLE], and he died of a broken heart soon after.
[00:29:03.39] In 2006, the San managed to win an historic victory in the courts in Botswana, and they were granted the right to return. But this wasn't the 2,000 people. These were just the claimants in the court order. So not more than about 150 people returned to various communities.
[00:29:27.48] So in a sense, it was a Pyrrhic victory. And when I returned to visit these communities in 2013, and '14, I found the waterholes cemented up, and people returning to their traditional ways. These are tsamma melons, and this is the traditional way that San survive in dry and arid areas. In Morocco, there were signs of life. People had goats.
[00:30:04.70] There was cultivation. They had a borehole, which was donated to them by Survival International. But they were not allowed to hunt. Hunting had been banned in Botswana. On the Okavango River, the Khoi people don't only hunt and gather, as they did in the past, but they also fish.
[00:30:31.22] And I met a man called Kashiri back then. It was my black and white time in the 1990s. He made a living from fishing. When I met him again in 2014, he had a boat. He has a refrigerator, and he was doing quite well for himself. The effect of militarization of the San in Namibia was profound.
[00:31:04.62] Here is a photograph of the young boy at a former army camp called Asvoelnes, which translated means vultures nest in Namibia. This is an army camp called a meager base. It was the biggest base that housed the San, the Bushmen battalion.
[00:31:27.99] This is the officers' swimming pools. And here many of the San people still live in disused barracks. You might have heard of the Etosha Game Reserve. It's one of the most famous game reserves in Africa. It's been curated and looked after by the Haikung for centuries.
[00:31:59.46] In the 1960s, the Haikung were also evicted from the game reserve. And when I visited them, they told me they'd lodged a claim, and they were fighting for their land back. Their roots run deep in this landscape. The majority of San in Namibia today are farm workers marginalized. They live in the peripheries, and they work for white and black farmers.
[00:32:35.18] On the left is a Herrera woman with a group of San who work for her. And on the right is a game farmer who bought a game reserve that once belonged to the Haikung people, and these are his workers-- Haikung workers. Further south in the Gobabis area, white farmers work with the [Ju/'hoansi.
[00:33:03.25] And this young boy, no more than 13 years old, is doing a man's work. He's branding cattle. This is an auction event in Gobabis where cattle are sold mainly to the European Union and other countries.
[00:33:32.54] But the last San who have access to the land in a real sense are the Ju/'hoansi-- the same people that the Marshall family encountered in the 1950s. When I first arrived in 1984, there was one settlement. It was called Gaucha. Today, there are 35.
[00:33:59.18] And there are boreholes, and people practice a mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry, ecotourism, and whatever else. In my time and in my journey, I've been privileged to go on hunts with the San and walk with them and the landscape and understand and be part of their incredible knowledge of the landscape. This is one of those villages where people have the land and can survive.
[00:34:45.90] In 1989, Namibia gained its independence, and I was in a place called Auru when the United Nations dropped off the ballot boxes. So I got to see the freedom not only of Namibians but of the San people from their perspective.
[00:35:12.93] In my time that I photographed in the San and all this time, I never found people just wearing skins in the book that I alluded to and showed you earlier. Those were the dressed-up San. The San that I encountered were wearing clothes like this and also playing traditional instruments.
[00:35:38.43] This is called the thumb piano. And the woman on the left is having a good time. She is singing and dancing to a ghetto blaster that was bought with army wages. This young boy was playing a guitar.
[00:35:58.44] The guitar is an instrument also that's associated with the San. And in those days, I didn't have a car, and I'd pitch up at the NGO. And they knew what I was doing, and I had permission.
[00:36:18.59] And they dropped me off in the village with my tent, some rations, and pick me up a number of weeks later. And I experienced life around me. I didn't have to set up any photographs. They just happened around me.
[00:36:37.43] And this is a photograph of two young kids doing a traditional animal dance. And here in Nyae Nyae, these young children doing a melon dance with a plastic soccer ball. I did find people who played instruments, and there were still strong roots to the traditional past, people gathering, and that still continues today.
[00:37:10.18] People have an immense knowledge of the landscape and can survive off the landscape. And if you've studied anything about the San-- and particularly Richard Lee's work-- you will know that 80% of what they eat is derived from the bush, felt food, and hunting is really a small part of their food intake. These two women had been separated during apartheid times for over 20 years and reunited.
[00:37:57.21] When I first went to visit the San, I stayed in a place called Gaucha where N!ai and Gunda lived and John Marshall made a brilliant ethnographic film called The Story of N!ai. And if you see the film, she's playing an instrument called a gwashi, and it's a meditation. She's talking to John, and she's kind of speaking about her life story but all in a song. It's a brilliant film.
[00:38:31.38] So I thought I'd go and visit and remake contact with N!ai and Gunda. And we arrived there and only to hear that N!ai and Gunda and a whole lot of others have gone to a farm in [? Vento ?] and by Angelina Jolie to do their bushman experience there. So I missed out on seeing N!ai and Gunda and this is their family, three generations.
[00:39:08.33] When I took that photograph of the young boy in the helicopter, I was staying in a place called Auru. And at the same time, I photographed the couple called Toma and N!ai. We lived in Keru. And I hadn't seen them for a long time.
[00:39:31.87] So when I saw them in 2013, I bought him a book. And I share them, and they're still alive doing well. And that's Toma and N!ai.
[00:39:47.02] Eco tourism is probably one of the major ways that the San can survive today, and this was an ecotourist experience on the San's terms. We had a suite of possibilities and opportunities that we could choose. You can do a morning walk, afternoon walk, a full day. You can experience a dance performance.
[00:40:17.59] So we opted for a morning walk. People dressed in traditional clothes to show us how they had lived in the past. And it wasn't make believe. It wasn't just for the camera. People in a very short space of time showed us how incredibly knowledgeable They are on the landscape.
[00:40:43.39] Within 5 or 10 minutes, they had shown us a variety of plants that were edible, that were poisonous, tubers that they dug from the ground. And the incredible knowledge that they've carried over thousands and thousands of years still lives with these people. So it was very impressive.
[00:41:06.36] In similar vein, in a place called Auru, we found a group of people working, digging the land, and harvesting what's called devil's claw. Devil's claw can be bought in a chemist. It's an immune booster, but it only exists in the Kalahari. And it only emerges at certain times of the year.
[00:41:33.71] And the San know exactly where and when to harvest it. And in a way, this is another way that they make a living. And Kxau IKashe on whose land this was shared the story with me.
[00:41:52.47] I grew up working under white farmers. I couldn't do things for myself. Those days, I worked on the farmers time and for others people's money. I was paid 30 Rand a month and rations. I think that's $3 a month.
[00:42:09.81] It was hard work. No school-- children also worked on the farm like I did. Now I am a farmer, and I make the money. He's talking and referring to his life in Nyae Nyae.
[00:42:22.84] Here I collect firewood. I built my own house. Life is good now. I make my own life.
[00:42:34.71] So on my journey, I interviewed a number of people, and I chose to film them. And on one level was a record of people whose voices I felt were necessary to hear. And then the exhibitions that I've had, I've created an installation called Voices of the San. I'd like to share with you a clip from that.
[00:43:08.78] But what is important to just underline is that whenever I interviewed people, they would say to me, please take this film and show the world. Tell the world. They need to know what's going on.
[00:43:34.28] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[00:43:35.27] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
[00:45:00.09] - Yeah, that's how we have lost everything. We have lost our culture. We have lost our language. We have lost our identity.
[00:45:06.82] And now government is even trying that made up this to even let us lose our own land, which is the foundation of us, which is the root. If you take me from Etosha, do I have a root? No, I don't have a root.
[00:45:18.85] Do I have a story to tell my kid? No, I don't have a story to tell. I cannot even tell my kids where I'm coming from and where I'm going. So that's where we stand today.
[00:45:26.59] So we say and we claim. And I believe in my heart and in my spirit and everything of mine that I am my own person, and I was born here. And for the Haikung. And God put me here, and this is my land.
[00:45:41.43] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
[00:47:01.15] [END PLAYBACK]
[00:47:02.64] So as I journeyed with the San, I reflected on the experience. And in the last chapter of the book, it's called "Closing the Circle." And I'd just like to share that with you.
[00:47:23.99] In Andriesvale, I met Belinda Kruiper for the first time, a slight woman with an outback leather hat. She was intense, energetic, and passionate. She had deeply immersed herself in the lives of the San and was married to fit Vet Piet, the artist. I need to help my people spiritually, she told me.
[00:47:46.41] She talked about the importance for the San to return to a holistic way of being. In mystical esoteric language, she could be referring to what is often described as ascent energy-- energy that is aligned with a spiritual force that draws its strength from the natural environment with which it shares a symbolic, symbiotic relationship. In its absence is a deep wound that many encounter when dealing with the San of today, a kind of self-destruct button, a loss of self-worth, and a deep erosion of core values. Belinda's cry for help is since resolved.
[00:48:29.61] In the years that I've been on this journey, this cry has been amplified by the San themselves, their representative groups, human rights activists, diplomats, concerned anthropologists, committed lawyers, and caring celebrities. It's a cry that is seldom heard and seldom dealt with by those in and with power. About 10 years ago, I was privileged to be part of a traveling troupe of musicians. My contribution was to accompany the song with slides.
[00:49:03.93] One of the musicians participating, Neill Solomon, sang a song dedicated to the San. His interaction with the San was not academic. He used his intuitive artistic sensibilities to interpret creatively what he felt was happening to the first people on this planet. It is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. I sing it to myself regularly.
[00:49:28.60] This is a metaphor for Belinda's cry for the San and my journey. It's called "Can You Hear My Call." Thank you very much for sharing this journey, and I'm very happy to answer questions.
[00:49:47.49] [APPLAUSE]