The Path That Ju/’hoansi Bushmen Follow to Connect With God

The Movie posters of 'The Gods Must Be Crazy'

A Movie about The Bushmen: ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’

As many of us know, there is a movie, ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy,’ that popularised the African tribe of Bushmen/San people to the mainstream world. Movie buffs all around the planet came to know that this tribe is our planet's first people, meaning theirs is the oldest DNA ever traced among us. And we knew that they were oblivious to anything outside the forests they lived in. Things have changed a lot since 1980 when the movie was released. Yet, let me briefly tell you the story of this movie first.

The film’s theme is set in South Africa, its hero, a hunter-gatherer, belonging to the Bushmen tribe of the Kalahari desert, and, it tells the story of our hero, the Bushman, discovering a Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an aeroplane. Believing it to be a gift from Gods, a conclusion all his fellow tribespeople shared, he sets out on a journey to return it. The film is quite a hilarious and liberating experience- it gives you a different perspective to look at the world, a far less complex, endearing, and introspectively rich viewpoint.

The Bushman journeys to ‘the edge of the world’, as his tribe believes that the world is flat, and he encounters several groups of humans from civilisations outside his own. After reaching a high cliff in the end, he regards it as the world's edge and throws the bottle into the deep abyss below. And he returns to his family and tribe.

Shot in Namibia and Botswana, the movie won critical acclaim and broke box office records globally. Why? It imparted the viewers with a nostalgia for their lost innocence and it made them rethink the rush, clutter and chaos in which they all live, and call modernity.

Such movies will always happen, and when they do, nature and our pristine past hold us in a quite momentary and tight embrace so that longing for all of it comes back to us. The next moment, we forget the feeling and move on with our personal chaos and a speeding world. The Bushman hero’s perspective is locked away in a fading memory vault. However, the Bushmen continue to exist, always struggling to survive our modernity and trying to adapt. Their culture and beliefs gradually fade into oblivion as they merge with our civilisation.

The God and Religion of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

The Bushmen, the indigenous people of southern Africa, have been at a crossroads, for a long time now. Their Gods must have really gone crazy witnessing the social decline that this tribe faces on a day-to-day basis. They are adapting and forgetting their past so that they can at least survive the onslaught of the 21st-century human progress bandwagon.

However, humanity was fortunate that a few people cared. One man who wanted to preserve the Bushmen culture was Bradford Keeney, an amazing individual who wears many hats: a therapist, an anthropologist of different healing traditions, and a cybernetician. He lived with the Kalahari Bushmen for many years and studied their healing rituals in depth. Through all the years he spent with them, his respect and awe for their magical engagement with God grew. He testifies to the authenticity of their spiritual experience as he was the first modern human who experienced it first-hand.

The Changing Lives of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Before I delve deeper into the spiritual experience of the Kalahari desert’s Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, let us understand how this tribal group is faring in the modern world. A 2017 Guardian article written by James Suzman, a renowned anthropologist who studied the Bushmen since 1992, cites another anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, calling them the “original affluent society”. The reason is this- he found them to have access to a 'rich' life in terms of fulfilling their needs.

The modern mind would imagine them struggling to find food in the desert as hunter-gatherers. Sahlins pointed out that this notion is far from the truth. He saw them filling their sacks with fruits, tubers, and edible caterpillars just by searching and gathering for a few hours in their desert and jungles. James Suzman cites this observation of Sahlins to prove that the Bushmen could be considered affluent.

Indeed, the natural circumstances, including the right climate are prerequisites for the Bushmen to have such a good food reserve over the year.

We all know that we, the rest of humans, have been destroying these ‘natural circumstances’ for a long time. The consequence is that the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen are compelled to live in dilapidated shanties in the backyards of villages and slums. They are pushed to do manual labour, the kind that is lowest-paying and most menial, to make a living. Despite having a richer and superior spiritual culture than us, they are being quickly converted to Christianity, observes Suzman.

As early as the 1980s, the Bushmen began to be pushed out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve by the respective governments of southern Africa because it was discovered that the land had diamonds. Survival International records say that in 1997, 2002, and 2005, the governments evacuated thousands of Bushmen and destroyed their dwellings, schools, health clinics, and even water supply so that they would not return. The organisation also says that the Bushmen are not allowed to hunt, though they used to keep a fine balance between their needs and the protection of the environment, and they are arrested if found hunting. Sadly, the first people on earth are also reportedly battling alcoholism, depression, and diseases such as TB and HIV/AIDS.

Ju/’hoansi Bushmen: The Keepers of Our Ancient Spiritual Wisdom

They have the most ancient genetic lineage, making them the ancestor tribe of all existing people on this planet. Studies have proven that the first human migration began from their homeland in the Kalahari desert. Bradford Keeney argues that they are the original keepers of our spiritual truths; they are among the few people who know how to cross over to a divine realm of experience.

The Spiritual World of Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Bradford Keeney felt that the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen are capable of tracking God just like they can track lost animals and people. According to him, they connect with God by being “outrageously happy.” Keeney realised that the Bushmen did not impart any value to words in their ventures to connect with God. The reason is that “words are simply not trusted to hold the most important wisdom”. This was quite puzzling for the Christian missionaries who wanted to spread the ‘word of God’ among people outside Christianity.

The Bushmen see words as something useful only for teasing each other. Keeney attributes an entire stream of philosophy to the Bushmen as a source of their attitude towards words. His explanation, in a nutshell, is this- when you are teasing each other, it becomes difficult for you to stick to one dogma or a single “form of knowing”. Keeney notes that for the Christian missionaries who visited the Bushmen and tried to convert them, it was nearly impossible to put the idea of the ‘word of God’ into their minds. Still, many missionaries intuitively realised that the Bushmen were the real children of God.

Keeney reports that the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen possess “ropes to God”, heart/soul strands that connect them to the divine. Interestingly, when Keeney cites an example of how a Bushman elder thinks, it borders poetry- “There is a river, and it is everywhere. There is a wind, and it is everywhere. They are the same except when they are different. There is a god in the sky and a god on earth that keeps changing. They are the same except when they are different.” (Keeney, p.3).

This is a way to see the world, based on knowing that everything is real and not real too. This is the truth of life that we often forget; it reminds us that everything changes, and yet there is a static quality to the truths of life. When such a profound life lesson becomes ingrained in every breath, every moment of living, one begins to tread the realm of infinite possibilities.

Love and Laughter: The Philosophy of Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Keeney testifies that love and laughter are the two mediums by which the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen seek the presence of God, to be more precise, “extreme love and wild laughter”. He says that “it is more about getting knocked out by your heightened feelings.” (p.20 of Introduction). Keeney warns you not to be disillusioned by the extreme simplicity of this method.

Extreme love and wild laughter are the tools to activate the “non-subtle universal life force”. The Bushmen have a name for it- n/om. N!yae is a word that represents the notion of a spiritual river which we have to enter to experience the divine. It is not apart or away from us; we just need to be in a special state of consciousness to step into it.

Using n/om, you step into N!yae. The body of someone who wants to experience spiritual bliss must “shiver with strong emotion” to get into the n/om. It has to shiver like the wind, the sand, the river, and the leaves, which move without any effort and are not limited or constrained by any artificial ways of moving. This is what Keeney calls the ‘Kalahari movement’. It is a beautiful and spontaneous movement that is full of life force. Here, the focus is entirely on your emotions and not on your thoughts. You must leave your thoughts behind, let go of the lessons of approved behaviour taught by your civilisation, and immerse yourself in the moment and its surprises.

Keeney met the high priestess of a Kalahari Bushmen community, and her name is also N!yae. By then, he had been accepted by the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen as one among them capable of understanding their spiritual world. Keeney shivers with N!yae holding her, and the others, too, join them. There is clapping and singing to accompany the trembling togetherness. Keeney reminisces- “We are in a huddle that pulses, breathes, and shakes away our physical boundaries. We are on a Kalahari ship that is headed for the glory of sanctified n/om and spirit that the greatest of our great-grandparents once embraced.” (p.7).

Overwhelming waves of joy rise in them, and this trembling embodies the life force in them. This life force “fosters healing, well-being, productivity, and creativity.” (p.10). For this to happen, the trembling has to become non-purposeful. Often, people fear such extreme spiritual experiences and are not capable of letting go. However, if you can let go, a new and exhilarating spiritual world opens for you. It is the unfurling of a new way of looking at life. Your heart and soul are thrown open to receive the eternal wisdom and bliss that flows into them effortlessly. You come to experience a joy that has never been comprehended before. This is what Keeney reported after doing the trance dance with the Bushmen.

The Science of Bushmen Spiritualism

The website, Psychology Today, cites Keeney describing the psychological and, “I think it is likely that we are all whole synesthetes (...) This orientation assumes that the senses are not mutually exclusive but interwoven in constant interaction. In this regard, we can also say there is one sense, though we have found a way to differentiate its variant forms of coordination and interplay as separate sense making.”

What Keeney suggests is that you can not only listen to a song but also see or smell it. Likewise, you have the capability of listening to a taste as much as tasting it or smelling it. In a sense, this is what artists do. And this is how poetry and art are born. We can understand that, but we turn doubtful when we are told to stop compartmentalising our senses and let them be one whole single sense. The spirituality of Bushmen, their trance dance, and their love-laughter, perhaps, will lead you towards this oneness of your senses. Thinking of that, one begins to wonder, what different experiences and knowledge oneness will bring.

The ancient path to divine bliss seems to be hidden in the simple ways of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Whether we call that God or by some other name does not matter. This ancestral tribe of ours certainly knows how to live in a higher state of peacefulness and harmony with life.

References

Bradford Keeney, The Bushman Way of Tracking God: The Original Spirituality of the Kalahari People, 2010, Atria Books/Beyond Words.

James Suzman, The Changing World of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen- In Pictures, Oct 2, 2017, The Guardian.

The Shamanic Synesthesia of the Kalahari Bushmen, Maureen Seaberg, February 15, 2012, Psychology Today.

The Bushmen, survivalinternational.org