Is there a better way of embarking on another exciting activity such as the !Khwa ttu Newsletter than by writing about the official opening of the centre on 8 March 2006? We thought to report on this would be an appropriate entry point for the first edition of the newsletter, which we plan to publish at a quarterly interval.

This newsletter is meant to inform the San communities of southern Africa, the local and international public, donors and government departments about the current affairs of the !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre.

The Newsletter will refer to what !Khwa ttu stands for: promoting the San heritage, training and educating the San, interacting with tourists and exchanging experiences with other indigenous people. All articles in the Newsletter are completely authentic as they are based on either interviews with the people directly involved in the activities or on written contributions and testimonies that are central to the described events.

Any feedback, constructive criticism and suggestions are most welcome.

We hope that you will enjoy reading the Newsletter and feel encouraged to visit us very soon.

The !Khwa ttu team

www.khwattu.org

The highlight of the year: !Khwa ttu’s official launch

‘I was so happy that almost all of the 200 invited guests came to witness the opening, this shows how important San culture is to many people’, was the comment from one of the San guides when asked what he liked most about the opening of !Khwa ttu. Indeed, a wide range of people, including representatives of San organisations, of the South African government, of donor agencies, of the media and of universities; diplomats, artists, farmers and local dignitaries had traveled from far and near to participate in the official opening of !Khwa ttu on 8 March 2006.

Before the official programme began small groups of guests were directed by some of the !Khwa ttu team members to the photo gallery, the school and the craft shop. The visitors were immensely impressed by the display of the huge and artistic photographs of rock art drawn by the San ancestors. In the audio-visual theatre they watched and listened attentively to the San’s stories about their past.The guests were equally enchanted by the never-ending enthusiasm with which the school children presented their songs and sketches. As a whole, the visitors were captivated by the serene atmosphere of the centre, the stunning views and the beautifully restored buildings which now house training facilities, accommodation for both tourists and staff, a conference room, a craft shop and restaurant.

At the latter venue Kondino Samba, the master of ceremonies set in motion the official programme which began with speeches by Joram /Useb, WIMSA Co-ordinator; Irene Staehelin, President of UBUNTU Foundation and Lynne Brown, the Western Cape Minister of Finance and Economics. Again, the explanatory, critical and encouraging words of the speakers caught the full attention of the audience, made them smile and gave them food for thought. Joram /Useb underlined the importance of tourism by saying ‘Tourism provides the San with a welcome window of opportunity. We wish to reclaim some of the business that is made using our faces, our bodies, our history and our art. Here at !Khwa ttu we can get the skills to be part of this big market’. And Irene Staehelin elaborated further ‘… education stands at the heart of !Khwa ttu: education of the San and the education of our visitors’. She concluded her speech by emphasising ‘I said that a dream has come true. While we are filled with gratitude, we do what all humans do: when one dream has become true we look ahead and get caught in a new dream. Let me dream aloud: in 10 years from now, we will have a number of San teachers, journalists, photographers and video artists, entrepreneurs, historians, rock art experts, lawyers, writers, project managers, maybe even anthropologists. Thank you for sharing the next dream’. The Minister Lynne Brown expressed her wholehearted support and said that !Khwa ttu would be a benchmark for all future heritage projects in the Western Cape.

The programme reached its climax when Ouma !Kuna of the ‡Khomani community gave her blessing and unveiled together with Irene Staehelin the plaque which was underlined by the San’s dancing and drumming and ended with the national anthem played on the saxophone by Francois Lambrechts.

Informal networking, information exchanges, chats, catching up with old friends and the enjoyment of delicious snacks and wine rounded up this perfect event (photo). Numerous guests contentedly recall the opening day of !Khwa ttu to this day and sincerely wish that all future plans may materialise in the same successful fashion as the very first official day at !Khwa ttu. The development of !Khwa ttu would not have been possible without the initial input by UBUNTU Foundation and WIMSA, as well as with the generous support of Department of Art s and Culture, Department of Tourism, Department of Agriculture, Canada Fund, Breadline Africa, Norwegian Church Aid, SASI, Swiss Development Corporation, SCAT, Potlashuc, Minnex, National Lotteries and many private donors and supporters. Our heartfelt thanks go to all!

Even before the interview begins, Ms Leandra Eiman, the young ‡Khomani woman, who has a few months ago been appointed manager of the !Khwa ttu Craft Shop mentions with a big smile on her pretty face that she sometimes earns generous tips from pleased tourists. ”When I tell them a lot about the San they are very happy. It really pays off what I have learned as a trainee at WIMSA . Now it comes in handy that I know a lot about the San communities in Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa”, she points out. When it seems appropriate she adds to her conversations with the visitors both a computer slide show on craft production and the language map and photos in her favourite book titled ‘The Voices of the San’.

Leandra explains proudly how the launch of the ‘Voices’ in London in 2004 and the participation in the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York two years ago has helped her to interact easily with visitors from the UK and the USA. ”A lively chat with the tourists is what I like most about my job”, she mentions. ”Of course, it is easier to engage with individuals than with groups”, she adds. Leandra has noticed that young visitors ask more questions than older guests. She thinks that this can be ascribed to the fact that elderly people have already read a lot about the San. Nonetheless, old and young have usually very similar queries. They relate to the San’s past, the countries they reside in and the languages they speak. Most tourists have a particular interest in rock art and are somewhat disappointed that they do not find examples of the art of the San’s ancestors right at !Khwa ttu.

Leandra prefers the busy times at the shop, which generally commence by mid-week and cumulate at the weekends. Therefore she has time at the beginning of the week to check the stock, order new supplies and get in contact with publishers. When asked about the tourists’ comments about the craft shop, Leandra points out that they are delighted about the ’natural look’ of the place. Some visitors have emphasised how pleased they are that they can even smell the wood and leather of the items displayed there.

According to Leandra’s observations the tourists are extremely interested in the traditional and contemporary San jewellery made out of ostrich eggshells. She believes that the interest has been stimulated by both the San woman, who works with the eggshells at the entrance to the photo gallery and by the computer slide show, which screens each single step of the very laborious jewellery production. San music instruments, music CDs and books on San and their history are the tourists’ second favourite items. The lino prints drawn by San artists arouse a lot of attention and some visitors have told Leandra “we can see a whole story line in some of the pictures”. However, the majority of tourists consider the prints unaffordable. ”Nonetheless”, Leandra underlines, “most visitors leave the shop with a very good feeling as they have learned that their buys do not only support the !Khwa ttu Centre but also all the San communities, where all the things have been produced”.

Leandra is obviously fulfilled in her job. She considers her work as a wonderful learning experience, which inspired her to enhance her knowledge of tourism management and accounting. ”This job has certainly opened new avenues for me. At the moment I am looking for distance learning courses in tourism and accounting which I can study in my leisure time”, she concludes the interview.

“When I was ten years old and we still lived in Namibia, my father taught me a lot about the animals in the bush. He and my uncle showed me how the wind, sun and rain change the spoors. They also explained to me how I can differentiate between spoors of a male and female animal. I also learned to recognize from the spoor if an animal had grazed, relaxed, hunted or fought. My father always said ‘in the bush your mouth must be zipped, your eyes must be opened and your fingers must talk. Never step onto a spoor’! My traditional education of tracking could not continue here in South Africa, because we lived then in a fenced-in area in Schmidtsdrift and there was not even small game. When I moved to !Khwa ttu I saw yet another vegetation, which is called fynbos. To learn more about spoors in the fynbos vegetation I attended courses at the Nature College in the Klein Karoo”. This was Roman’s logic explanation why he and some of his colleagues attended Nature Guide and Tracker level 1 and 2 courses in order to receive a national qualification certificate and thus becoming professional guides.

He further explained that the various, rather intense one-week training modules took place under different weather conditions so that the trainees experienced hands-on the influence of the climate on the appearance of the game tracks. The modules ended with practical examinations which included tasks such as identifying spoors within a certain time limit.

The combination of traditional and formal tracking training has helped Roman, Johan and Kondino to become knowledgeable and confident guides who now share their knowledge with the tourists visiting !Khwa ttu. Not only the tourists learn a great deal from the three young men but also their colleagues at !Khwa ttu, and, when they are on leave, their fellow !Xun, Khwe and ‡Khomani in their home communities.

On a more personal note, Roman reveals that after his arrival at the secluded !Khwa ttu Centre, he felt quite isolated from what young people enjoy. However, ”after a short while only I realized that on the one hand I can totally relax here and on the other I can think about all the new things I have learned since I came here. On Mondays during our management meetings I have always a lot of ideas. Because of my many ideas I am actually called Mr Plan B”, he adds.

At the end of the second school term, two learners from each grade of the !Khwa ttu Community School are eagerly awaiting to be interviewed. The young grade one kids are a bit shy but the eight to fourteen year old children of grades two to four obviously enjoy the chat about what has been happening at school during the last few months. One of the grade two learners tells me how deeply impressed she was by what the medical doctor told the school children about snake bites and Rocco, an eight-year old boy, beams all over his face when he reports on the vegetable garden which he helped to create. Both of them never miss their singing classes, where San mothers teach them songs in Khwe and !Xun. After they thought hard if they dislike any activities at school the resolute reply is “we like everything what we are doing here”, and spirited Saartjie adds “school makes us clever”. Daily they report to their parents what they have accomplished at school and their parents encourage them to ‘work hard’.

The grade three and four learners also describe their school days at home and especially their mothers are keen to get hold of all the details. The older children do not hesitate a minute when they choose their favourite activities. They like maths ‘because I am interested in finances’; English as ‘this is a language many, many people understand’; Afrikaans ‘ because I feel comfortable with it’; and biology ‘ because I learn about so many different things like animals, plants, weather, water and so on’. When asked what they dislike at their school they point out fights between each other and a few find the cleaning of school facilities quite boring.

Since they have experienced other schools before their families moved to !Khwa ttu, they state that they truly like to attend the !Khwa ttu Community School. They prefer their current school because ”corporal punishment does not exist as it did at our old place”, ”we do so many different things”, ”we meet visitors from other countries”, ”the school fees are not so high” and “I can see animals every day”. No wonder that all children want to finish the twelve years of schooling at !Khwa ttu.

For the future their wish list is rather short, as the older children would just like more San children to join them ”so that we have a bigger school” and others would like to have ”computers to work on”. Their immediate future has some exciting weeks in store for them. They all look forward to the end-of-term school get-together with their parents and they are very excited that in a few days they will drive home to meet their extended families at Platfontein and in the Kalahari respectively. No doubt, they will have a lot to tell about !Khwa ttu and their school.

Another highlight after the official opening of !Khwa ttu was the visit in April 2006 of a group of 23 Inuit students from Nunavut, Canada’s youngest Territory in the Arctic. They had read the information on !Khwa ttu’s website and were keen as Indigenous People of the Arctic to exchange their experiences with San representatives during their visit to South Africa. The Inuit students could inform the San very well as they have studied their own history, land claim issues and the work of Inuit political organizations at Nunavut Sivuniksavut College in Ottawa.

The exchange was proclaimed a striking success by all parties involved. Particularly the San tour guides, who had been crucial in drawing up the programme for the visitors, and the students were impressed with both the meaningful but easy-going interaction and the wealth of information which flowed through the entire two-day visit. Although the Inuit live in a totally different climatic environment than the San, both groups realized that they share many similarities when it comes to land rights, social marginalisation and the traditional role of men, women and elders. However, the San thought that the Inuit were quite a few steps ahead of them as many more Inuit than San have obtained degrees at tertiary education institutions and most of those graduates found employment. They also admired the students for their ability to write their language Inuktitut in two systems, namely syllabic and in the Roman orthography

Other abilities and skills of the Inuit students stunned not only the adult !Khwa ttu employees but also the school children. The throat singing and numerous jumping, throwing and wrestling games brought about a very relaxed atmosphere which was conducive for even the shyest of the children to try out the games. The Inuit students on the other hand were amazed by the tracking skills of the San and the ability of some San communities to survive with little water only.

Kondino and Roman, who took on the role of hosts, thought the most important insight they gained from the exchange visit were information such as the importance of trained dogs for the Inuit; the way, in which the Inuit from four provinces had joined together under the umbrella of their own political organisation; the strategy with which they negotiated land rights and the fact that Inuit girls could be trained and respected as hunters if there are no boys in the family. They also pointed out that they in their role as tour guides had not entertained their fellow indigenous people alone but had had assistance from the entire !Khwa ttu team. Kondino and Roman would like to visit the Inuit in Nunavut because they then could experience the Inuit’s reality, i.e. how their igluit are constructed and in which activities the youth is involved. Their expressions on their faces turned rather sad when they added ”We know, it’s a dream and we don’t think it will come true as we don’t have money to fly to Canada and visit members of our new family”. Well, maybe one day their dream will come true.