At !Khwa Ttu on the West Coast the spirit of the ‘First People’, the San, is being restored and displayed.

Baby Rose Vilander has huge round eyes and a shy smile, Kerson Jackson is a deep thinker, and elegant Johan Vaalbooi – or Johnny Depp as he calls himself – has the assurance of his Hollywood namesake. Carlos Munawgo, veteran of the team, seems to carry the ancient knowledge in his bones, Baba Festus is especially chatty, well travelled and bright, and the lovely Donika Dala – well she’s the one with lots of stories. These are just some of the folk we met at !Khwa Ttu who can claim to be descendants of the ‘First People’ – the San.

Think San and usually the Kalahari, Angola, Botswana or Namibia pop up – so it was kind of a surprise to see a notice saying ‘San Culture and Education Centre’ on the R27 about 40 minutes out of Cape Town, up the West Coast near Yzerfontein. And kind of irresistible, so we drove in.

Andre Antonio greeted us at the gate with a massive smile and quick personal history. He handed us a brochure and directed us to the buildings at the top of a rise where the breathtaking view stretches south to Table Mountain and ahead to Dassen Island glittering in the Atlantic. Once this place was a farm but now, with its cowsheds converted into workshops and a gallery, the original farmhouse turned into an old stone restaurant, a loft style conference room, offices and a craft shop all set around a central square, it’s more of a business community inside an 850ha nature reserve, with the residents’ village back down the hill.

Our ulterior motive for the visit was lunch.We’d seen the notice saying restaurant and taken the chance of a table being available. Appropriately, !Khwa Ttu means ‘watering hole’ in the extinct /Xam language. The restaurant’s menu includes Springbok Carpaccio on Garden Greens with Pine Nuts, Olive Oil and Balsamic Syrup; and Roasted Veg on African Spiced Couscous, Feta and Sunflower Seeds.

After lunch we squeezed in a shortened version of the tour to the replica cultural village. Johnny and Kerson bundled us into the tractor trailer with a group of resident trainees and, in the space of less than an hour, we saw the intricacies of making beads from ostrich eggshells, witnessed San pipe smoking and the art of making a fire using a rotating stick, saw a tiny arrow with a detachable head fly from a bow, and shared a lot of stories.

But for some time afterwards the experience stayed with me as unfinished business. Really, you can’t get to know much about a people with a 25 000-year history of whom only 100 000 are left in the world in the space of a couple of hours. So we made a plan to go back and stay over. Options were the Guest House, Tented Camp or rustic Bush House in an ‘isolated setting with a large open fireplace’. The latter won the day – and was absolute bliss.

The second time around then, we head straight for the studio Photo Gallery because there, I hope, we’ll find the bigger picture.

We’re busy immersing ourselves in all the words, paintings, quotes, silvered and sepia panels when in strides Michael Diaber, preceded by an enthusiastic Jack Russell. Anyone less San-like you couldn’t imagine. Tall and broad with a thatch of tousled blond hair, Michael is the CEO. He volunteers to show us a short film, The Making of !Khwa Ttu Photo Exhibition, and the still unedited version of a longer film about the centre, titled Wild Walk, that had been made recently by Craig Foster, who also made The Great Dance – an international award-winning film about the !Xo people.

What emerges as we sit watching, Jack Russell on my lap and Michael filling in behind-the-scenes details, is an understanding not just of the San people’s history, charged as it’s been with politics and power play, but of the scale of what they’re trying to do here at !Khwa Ttu – to ‘restore and display San heritage, culture, arts, language and cosmology; educate the public about the world of the San; and provide training for San descendants in, among other things, tourism’.

The project officially opened its doors in 2006 and is a joint venture between the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and Ubuntu, a Swiss philanthropic foundation headed by anthropologist Irene Staehelin.

Staehelin says, “Throughout history people have found their identity through selective remembering and forgetting. The San have a right to make their choices.” So democracy is a key tenet. The gallery exhibition, for instance, although put together by outside professionals, involved all of the core trainees every step of the way. This made for some heated discussion, Michael reveals, but it was vital, he adds, that everyone knew where everyone else was coming from.

Research for the exhibition included a trip to the Iziko SA Museum to see the controversial diorama of plaster ‘Bushmen’ cast back in the 1900s. Appalled by the whole idea, the trainees asked to experience the process themselves to know how it felt, and bits of cast body parts now hang in the gallery as a painful reminder.

Language is probably the biggest issue in culture – and it’s no exception here. Up at the reeded boma (where it’s especially hard not be distracted by the view, peppered as it is with eland, zebra and springbok), Kerson gives a synthesised sound lesson on all 13 of the San languages while Carlos, once a member of the SANDF’s 201 Battalion back in his native Angola, tells his stories in Khwedam. Kerson listens and translates them into English for us.

Maybe it’s got something to do with the heady West Coast air, but I have to say that listening to all of this gives me a sense of being halfway through a living epic poem and knowing that, while a lot of it is past, there’s still a lot more to come. 

!Khwa Ttu 022 492 2998, www.khwattu.org

FOOTNOTES

• San means ‘all the people gathering’ in the Khoi language. San people prefer, however, to be referred to by the names of their individual languages – Khwe, !Xun, Nu etc.

• The San’s origins in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Kalahari go back a million years. For the most recent 25 000 years they lived on the land in such a way that they neither had to cultivate it nor change the environment. Their culture was semi-nomadic, egalitarian and hunter-gatherer, distinct from the Khoi people who were pastoralists. ‘Khoisan’, a combined term of convenience, and ‘Bushman’ were names coined by colonists.

• There are four different San language groups: Ju, Khoe, Taa and Ui, and 13 different languages – of which only a handful are still spoken.

• San art and lifestyle have caught the imagination of many writers over time and been included in many books, plays and films.
   
• WIMSA estimate that there are around 100 000 San in Southern Africa.