The Harmless People
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 067972446X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A study of primitive people which, for beauty of...style and concept, would be hard to match." -- The New York Times Book Review
In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization -- with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol -- swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own.
"The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own....The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing."
-- The Atlantic
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blossom and bear white or red or violet flowers. But the season is short, and the plants bud, flower, and fruit very quickly; in March the drought creeps in, just as the veld fruits ripen and scatter their seeds. When the rains stop, the open water is the first to dry, making slippery mud and then caked white earth. By June only little soaks of waterholes remain, hidden deep in the earth, covered with long grass. These, which are miles apart, dry up by August, and then travel in the veld is
with green leaves of the kind that “make your gums numb,” say the Bushmen, added for flavor, I believe. The tortoise at this retreated far into its shell with its legs pulled in tightly, and Gai heated the doors again to curl them down. Then he packed the opening with grass and the tortoise’s dung, capped it with a tsama-melon cap, and put the tortoise into the oven that was prepared for it like a shallow little grave which the tortoise just fitted, a final agony, for the tortoise once more
with green leaves of the kind that “make your gums numb,” say the Bushmen, added for flavor, I believe. The tortoise at this retreated far into its shell with its legs pulled in tightly, and Gai heated the doors again to curl them down. Then he packed the opening with grass and the tortoise’s dung, capped it with a tsama-melon cap, and put the tortoise into the oven that was prepared for it like a shallow little grave which the tortoise just fitted, a final agony, for the tortoise once more
although they are quite welcome to, but least of all Tsetchwe, a very conscientious mother and wife. Tsetchwe’s dance was extremely lively and extremely gay, and everyone except Nhwakwe looked up at her happily. She sang and waved her arms with great abandon, and danced her gay dance right behind the men, just for once flinging motherhood to the four winds and dancing right over her baby, who came trotting sadly after her, holding up his arms to be carried. In a moment the baby gave up and went
Nurigaas, at the edge of the police zone. I am a young person still, but I remember that Nurigaas was all wild then. We always lived there.” “With your parents?” “Yes, until the police boys took the old man my father.” I asked him what had happened, and he said: “We lived at the edge of the police zone, you know. We lived with other Bushmen there, and my sister, she was there. My mother’s father was still alive then, but he was too old, he couldn’t even carry water, and my mother had to do