The Invisible Corner. Essays on Violence and Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa

These are a people who now have been drafted into the army of apartheid South Africa, and their culture has been irrevocably abused. But up until some twenty years ago, they had been well studied. We know something about them. They are hunter-gatherers, which mainly means that the men hunt and the women gather. There is a kind of sexual division of labor, but there is very little in the way of social hierarchy. There is not a significant male dominance of women. In fact, there's very little in the way of social hierarchy at all.There is specialization of labor. That's different from social hierarchy. Children are treated with tenderness and understanding. And there is very little in the way of warfare, although occasionally they run into difficulties because of misunderstandings. For example, there was a famous case, sometime ago, in which a hunting party came back and said that there was the most astonishing good fortune-a completely new creature had been discovered, and you could actually creep up to it with your bow and arrow and get within a meter of it, and it would not run away ...»