Who Are the Indigenous People of Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert?

The Kalahari Desert stretches across a large portion of southern Africa. In this region, the indigenous people are known by a variety of names, including the San, the Sho, the Bushmen, the Kung, and others. These are all indigenous people of South Africa's Kalahari Desert. 

Natives to the Kalahari as well as to surrounding areas like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, and Angola, the group of indigenous people in the Kalahari Desert is part of the local ethnicity known as the Khoisan. They have been native inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert and surrounding territory for tens of thousands of years.

Naming the Indigenous People

The indigenous people of South Africa's Kalahari Desert has many different names. The multiple names used to refer to these people are actually related to a complex social situation.

• The issue is that many of the names they have been given to these indigenous people including “bushmen,” which is widely used, have been given in a derogatory sense by outsiders.
• There have been some conflicts in terms of how to respectfully refer to the indigenous people.
• An official meeting was held in 1996 in Nambia by various members of different cultures within the group, and they agreed on the term San for general use by outsiders, although they prefer to be referred to by their specific ethnic groups among one another.

San Indigenous People

The San were the original inhabitants of the Kalahari region, before various migrations from upper locations in Africa joined them. In modern days, the San are no longer the majority of the population in the southern territory; they have been largely overtaken by those migrations, which include members of the Bantu ethnicity.

Life as a San

The San, those who were indigenous in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, have some characteristics unique to their culture:

• The San were hunter-gatherers in past times, largely because of the incredible dryness of the Kalahari region, which wasn’t conducive to cultivation.
• Beginning in the 1950s, however, they began to set up reserves in which they tried their hands at farming, fighting against the natural inclination of the land in an effort to raise crops and animals in order to provide for themselves. 
• However, in 1961 a large part of the Kalahari Desert was set aside as a national game reserve. Beginning in the 1990s, the government has attempted to get the San people to move away from the area, stating that their farming attempts were damaging to the natural environment.
• The attempted relocation was declared unconstitutional. In 2006 the court ruled that the San could not be kept out of the land, which was their home area and not the government’s to take from them.
• As of 2008, the government was still being cited for not allowing the San full access to the area as they had been ordered to do.

So, now you know about the indigenous people of South Africa's Kalahari Desert as well as more facts about these people and their lives.