People of the Great Sandface

Abstract

“The final year in the traditional life of the last free‐living !Gwikwe Bushmen of the central Kalahari Desert of Botswana, before they followed others to a government settlement, becomes a moving and sensitive celebration of their struggle for survival. Having learnt the techniques needed to make the film single‐handedly Paul Myburgh went to extraordinary lengths of physical endurance and deprivation to put on record the last group of bushmen living in the old nomadic way. An anthropologist, he lived for 22 months in the bush. To him it represents their final exodus, and is an informative portrayal of life in a band of people whose way of life represents a vanishing link with our past. Myburgh's photography is superb: sweeping shots setting the scene of the endless desert contrasted with the frenzy of the hunt and the gnarled, wizened face of the oldest woman, the wiggly walk of the youngest child. Myburgh's familiarity with the !Gwikwe allowed him to shoot intimate scenes in which the subjects seem totally unaware of the camera, allowing the viewer a unique experience of their exodus: for instance, the tribal puberty dance, an event which men are prohibited from watching. In the end it is sensible, but immeasurably sad, that the !Gwikwe, for their survival, must concede that the desert has defeated them. The film becomes an uncanny time capsule of man's earlier days and one is left with the feeling that through the ages we've lost something: a spirit of community, perhaps. This film is the final record of these ancient people—the hunters with the poison arrows, the people of the healing dance, the painters of Southern Africa's rock art treasures who speak with a strange clicking tongue—a vanishing phase of human culture. In the closing scene a bush‐man gazes in incomprehension at water splashing from a tap; ironically, beyond contemporary Western understanding too” [Cinema Under Siege, 1990:50].

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