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Andre Croucamp

 

Who are the people we call “San” or “Bushmen”? For decades we have used the rock art of their ancestors to decorate brochures, tourist trinkets and the walls of exclusive game lodges. Along with Ndebele borders and stereotyped African masks, the painted figures of hunter-gatherers chasing eland have become standardised African kitsch. Coffee table book photographs and documentary film footage often represent the hunter-gatherers of southern Africa as isolated, autonomous, and affluent in the riches of nature, but their communities have been oppressed, exploited and even hunted for hundreds of years. Tourists can buy factory produced versions of their decorated ostrich egg shells, traditionally used to carry water, while they themselves fight for basic services like water to be made available in the barren places they have been forcibly removed to. Their laughing wrinkled faces appear on television, selling consumer goods they themselves cannot afford. New Age eclecticism appropriates the icons of their spirituality with a consumer zeal that mirrors colonial plunder. Their artefacts, once the prestigious collection of museum monuments to Imperialism, can now be bought as trendy up-market interior decorating curiosities. Popular New Age psychology books offer overly-simplistic models of their lives as routes to personal transformation – bringing their profound perspectives on life into your home and office so you can heal yourself and deal with the stress of being faced with so many confusing consumer choices. We even sample their exotic rhythms and chants, and then mix them into ambient dance tracks calling it World Music – promoting globalisation and the blurring of boundaries where all voices are valid. But how do we hear their voices? How do we separate them out from the heady drone of that post-modern-all-is-valid ambient noise?

 

Contemporary southern African hunter-gatherer communities rarely benefit from the marketing of their images, artefacts, metaphors and sounds. For the most part, they have been left out of the democratic processes that are empowering other previously disadvantaged groups. The threat of their “extinction” has ironically added market value to their exotic “culture.” Contrary to TV ads, coffee table books and do-it-yourself New Age shamanism, the people we call “San” and “Bushmen” do not live in some idyllic past. They are contemporary people battling with extreme forms of social deterioration and economic devastation. We frame them as pristine hunter-gatherers, representatives of some previous human utopia, living close to nature, rejecting the concept of ownership, and needing nothing more than the land. In so doing we effectively remove them, and their issues, from the economics and the politics of the present. The names we use to refer to them are not even names they themselves have chosen, but are the derogatory terms Bantu herders and white colonialists used to describe the people they cruelly marginalized. To this day their communities fight to be treated with respect and dignity, and to participate in the economic and political processes that will determine their future.

 

Their place in southern Africa’s past is acknowledged in the motto on the South African coat of arms. It is written in language of the /Xam people and declares: !ke e: /xarra //ke, or “unity in diversity.” But, when will the speakers of this language and the other so-called Khoisan languages find their place in the unity of the present?

 

We need to challenge the images and myths we so readily consume and move beyond our own sentimentality. As we move to the stolen rhythms of our decadent urban trance dance culture, let us reflect on what we are really doing. In the process of trying to revive the humanity of our spiritually bankrupt consumer society, let us allow the trance to extend our awareness beyond the dance floor, beyond our designer drugs and fashion statements, beyond a weekend of escapism, beyond our privileged consumer choices … and let us become truly vulnerable to those voices and rhythms that cry out for the healing of our world.


14 August 2002

Dear Samten

I was asked to create an article for a flyer that is advertising a New Age exhibition/trance party whose purpose is to promote an awareness of the plight of the San Bushmen - a  kind of but-we-share-trance-in-common! party.
I thought you may find it interesting.

Regards
Andre


Dear Samten

Have you seen the latest Economist? It carries a real scare article warning people about the dangers of neuroscience. Forget about genetics and cloning, it says, the real threat to human nature comes from neuroscience which will once and for all dispel our myths of the soul, will release criminals from the notion of free will by showing biological forces beyond their control, and will increase the degrees of freedom of consumers enabling them to enhance their brains using chemistry and technology, creating a new technologically enhanced class of human beings who will oppress everyone else. It was disturbing for me to read how one of the world's leading informers of business opinion, framed "understanding the brain" and "choosing to make changes to the brain" so negatively. They of course do not appreciate that we have been tinkering with our brains for millennia. The rationalism of the 17th century has wiped out our society's memories of the socially endorsed use of hallucinogens to deliberately alter our states of consciousness. But post-17th century attempts to frame the use of mind altering substances as criminal, ill and mentally dysfunctional are beginning to erode. The tides are turning. Europe is decriminalizing substances in spite of American objections, and is already seeing the social and health benefits. America's own Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is acting contrary to their Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and is challenging what is increasingly being understood as the DEA's propaganda in the disguise of science. The FDA has given the go ahead for a study into the possible uses of Ecstasy in treating post traumatic stress disorders. Popular legal mood-altering and performance-enhancing drugs like Prozac, Ritalin, Viagra, "smart drugs" and all their cousins have changed the way ordinary people view their own conscious states. You can now make real consumer choices with regards to how you feel. You can also attend expensive courses on creative thinking and how to animate yourself in a meaningless universe through things like Neuro Linguistic Planning - which incidentally was inspired by computer technology metaphors. Preparing us for the dawn of the cyborg? It is unlikely that brain augmentation will be censored when the pharmaceutical industry has so much to gain, and consumers can claim what is increasingly being seen as their democratic right to feel good and choose the treatment of their choice. It is interesting that the Economist article framed intelligence enhancing technologies as "cosmetic surgery" and implied that feeling even better is not the same as recovering from an illness. Only in western orthodox medicine is the work of doctors seen as treating illness. This is another product of western reductionism, which began in the 17th century. In most other cultural traditions the work of a "physician" is maintaining and improving wellness. Illness is seen as the physician's failure, not an opportunity to extort patients. The New Age has popularized many non-western techniques for engineering brain states. The growing interest in Shamanism and the use of hallucinogens has grown so rapidly over the last few years that it has spawned a lucrative shamanic tourist industry in South America. Many South American countries are now rediscovering and legalizing their ancient heritage of hallucinogenic plant brews. Western science's own chemistry and microbiology has spawned the science of Psychoneuroimmunology, which maps the ways in which the mind can be manipulated to trick the body into health. "Psychosomatic" is used less and less as a derogatory term and is being studied as a valid and powerful phenomenon in the healing process. On the basis of all this evidence I would like to think that brain implants and more sophisticated brain enhancing chemistry will happen in spite of the fears of conservatives. I would like to think that we are on a runaway system of evolving our bodies epigenetically. I think their fears of a technologically enhanced class of human beings who will oppress everyone else is a little hypocritical since their audience is a small percentage of the planet who is already oppressing everyone else. I think they fear something else - the true empowerment of the individual. Consumerism has unleashed a demon and that demon is: the right to shop. There is no stopping us now. Or is there? The one thing we can be sure of is that if there is a new technology for enhancing the brain it is unlikely that most people will use it to become more intelligent. People are more likely to use it to improve their sex lives and add novelty to escapist entertainment. I think the number of people capable of initiating political revolution will always be the same regardless of the tech. 80% of the information that flows through Internet connections is porn, 10% is gossip, less than 10% is advertising and the small percentage that is left over is research and other information. Can we assume that these ratios represent the interests of consumers no matter what the tech. In my experience of psychedelics this is definitely true. I know very few people who actually generate useful information while tripping. The article did scare me though.

Regards - Andre