At first glance, the dry plains of Southern Africa can seem almost empty: sand, scrub, heat, and a horizon that refuses to end.
Spend time with a San guide, however, and that impression begins to fall away; tracks become stories, plants become food, medicine or water.
This is what has always fascinated me about the San people. Their knowledge is not theoretical; it is practical, inherited and passed down through generations of experience, observation and memory.
The San are among the oldest continuous inhabitants of Southern Africa, with deep roots across parts of Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. They are not one single people, but many related groups.
Traditionally hunter-gatherers, they lived in small, mobile communities, following seasons, water, game and the plants that sustained them.
Their languages, with their distinctive click consonants, and their rock art – animals, ritual, movement – open another window onto a rich spiritual and cultural world.
What stays with me most is how fully the land can be read. A line in the sand can tell you where an animal passed, how long ago, and what it might do next. Water may come from morning dew, from ostrich eggshells they have stored for the dry weeks, or from roots hidden beneath the surface.
On a trip to Botswana I remember walking with a San in the Makgadikgadi – simply moving together through the scrub.
We dug out a scorpion and I held it on my hand, still and alert. Further on we came upon roots and plants they knew at a glance: the bi bulb, or milk root, holding water in its tuber when the pans run dry; hoodia, chewed on long hunts to ease hunger and thirst; devil’s claw, dug for pain. We found them as we walked.
Everything about the experience had a quiet physical presence: the heat, the dust, the patience of people who still know how to listen to this country.
This is also why the San have drawn such careful interest from anthropologists and geneticists. Their populations carry some of the deepest lineages in our species – a long continuity in Southern Africa, historically within communities who married largely among themselves. It is a picture of deep human continuity, and it extends even to how they rest.
In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker turns to the San of the Kalahari as a window onto how our species may once have rested.
What researchers found there is quieter, and more exacting, than the eight-hour night we assume is natural. People did not lie down at sunset. They stayed up for some hours after dark – talking, watching the fire – and slept as the air cooled, waking as the night’s temperature reached its lowest point, often around dawn.
Insomnia, so ordinary in industrial life, was rare enough that there is no word for it in their language.
Though outsiders to their world, time spent walking with the San feels immersive and affecting: a reminder of how culture and environment shape one another over time, and of how many different kinds of lives still exist alongside our own.