The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1980 comedy film written, produced, edited and directed by Jamie Uys. An international co-production of South Africa and Botswana, it is the first film in The Gods Must Be Crazy series.
Set in Southern Africa, the film stars Namibian San farmer Nǃxau ǂToma as Xi, a hunter-gatherer of the Kalahari Desert
whose tribe discovers a glass bottle dropped from an airplane, and
believe it to be a gift from their gods. When Xi sets out to return the
bottle to the gods, his journey becomes intertwined with that of a
biologist (played by Marius Weyers), a newly hired village school teacher (Sandra Prinsloo), and a band of guerrilla terrorists.
The Gods Must Be Crazy was released by Ster-Kinekor
in South Africa, where it broke box-office records, becoming the most
financially successful release in the history of South Africa's film
industry. The film was a commercial and critical success in other countries, including the United States, where it was distributed by 20th Century Fox, with the film's original Afrikaans dialogue being dubbed
in English. Despite its success, the film attracted criticism for its
depiction of race and perceived ignorance of discrimination and apartheid in South Africa.
Xi and his San tribe are living happily in the Kalahari Desert, away from industrial civilization. One day, a glass Coca-Cola
bottle is thrown out of an airplane by a pilot and falls to the ground
unbroken. Initially, Xi's people assume the bottle to be a gift from
their gods, just as they believe plants and animals are, and find many
uses for it. Unlike other bounties, however, there is only one glass
bottle, which causes unforeseen conflict within the tribe. As a result,
Xi, wearing only a loincloth, decides to make a pilgrimage to the edge
of the world and dispose of the divisive object.
Along the way, Xi encounters biologist Andrew Steyn, who is studying the manure of wildlife; Steyn's assistant and mechanic, M'pudi; Kate Thompson, a woman who quit her job as a journalist in Johannesburg
to become a village school teacher; and eventually a band of guerrillas
led by Sam Boga, who are being pursued by government troops after a
failed assassination attempt.
Steyn is tasked with bringing Kate to the village where she will teach, but he is awkward and clumsy around her. Their Land Rover
stalls while trying to ford a deep river; he hoists it out with a
winch, but it continues lifting the vehicle to a very high treetop level
while a forgetful Steyn is distracted extricating Kate from a briar
bush. She more than once mistakes his attempts to evade wild animals,
and putting out an evening campfire, as advances towards her.
Eventually, a snobbish safari tour guide named Jack Hind arrives, and takes Kate the rest of the way to the village.
One day, Xi happens upon a herd of goats, and shoots one with a tranquilizer arrow,
planning to eat it. He is arrested and sentenced to jail. M'pudi, who
once lived with the San and can speak the San language, is discontent
with the verdict. He and Steyn arrange to hire Xi as a tracker
for the remainder of his sentence in lieu of prison time, and teach Xi
how to drive Steyn's Land Rover. Meanwhile, the guerrillas invade Kate's
school, taking her and the students as hostages as they make their
escape to a neighbouring country.
Steyn, M'pudi and Xi, immersed in their fieldwork, find that they
are along the terrorists' and chlldrens' path, and observe their
movements with a telescope. They manage to immobilize six of the eight
guerrillas using makeshift tranquilizer darts launched by Xi with a
miniature bow, allowing Kate and the children to confiscate the
guerillas' firearms. Steyn and M'pudi apprehend the remaining two
guerrillas by frightening one with a snake and by shooting at a tree
above the other, causing latex
to drip from the tree and irritate his skin. Jack Hind arrives and
takes away Kate, taking credit for the rescue that Steyn, M'pudi and Xi
had actually planned and executed.
Later, with Xi's term over, Steyn pays his wages and sends him on
his way. Xi has never seen paper money (banknotes) before, and throws
them on the ground. Steyn and M'pudi then drive from their camp to visit
Kate. Steyn attempts to explain to Kate his tendency to be
uncoordinated in her presence, but accidentally and repeatedly knocks
over a number of objects in the process. Kate finds his efforts
endearing, and kisses Steyn.
Xi eventually arrives at God's Window,
the top of a cliff with a solid layer of low-lying clouds obscuring the
landscape below. Convinced that he has reached the edge of the world,
he throws the bottle off the cliff, and returns to his family.
Map
of modern distribution of "Khoisan languages" ; the languages shaded
blue and green are traditionally viewed as San languages.
The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa.
In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San people, which is
roughly 2.8% of the country's population, making it the country with
the highest population of San people.
Definition
The term "Sann" has a long vowel and is spelled Sān (in Khoekhoegowab orthography). It is a Khoekhoeexonym
with the meaning of "foragers" and was often used in a derogatory
manner to describe nomadic, foraging people. Based on observation of
lifestyle, this term has been applied to speakers of three distinct
language families living between the Okavango River in Botswana and Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, extending up into southern Angola; central peoples of most of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the southern people in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo River, who are the last remnant of the previously extensive indigenous "San" of South Africa.
History
Bush-Men Hottentots armed for an Expedition, 1804
The hunter-gatherer San are among the oldest cultures on Earth,
and are thought to be descended from the first inhabitants of what is
now Botswana and South Africa. The historical presence of the San in
Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. San were traditionally semi-nomadic, moving seasonally within certain defined areas based on the availability of resources such as water, game animals, and edible plants. Peoples related to or similar to the San occupied the southern shores throughout the eastern shrubland and may have formed a Sangoan continuum from the Red Sea to the Cape of Good Hope.
From the 1950s through to the 1990s, San communities switched to
farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs. Despite
the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropology and genetics. One broad study of African genetic diversity
completed in 2009 found that San people were among the five populations
with the highest measured levels of genetic diversity among the 121
distinct African populations sampled.
Certain San groups are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population
clusters"; that is, "groups of populations with common genetic ancestry,
who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the
properties of their languages".
Despite some positive aspects of government development programs reported by members of San and Bakgalagadi
communities in Botswana, many have spoken of a consistent sense of
exclusion from government decision-making processes, and many San and
Bakgalagadi have alleged experiencing ethnic discrimination on the part of the government. The United States Department of State described ongoing discrimination against San, or Basarwa, people in Botswana in 2013 as the "principal human rights concern" of that country.
Names
Portrait of a bushman. Alfred Duggan-Cronin. South Africa, early 20th century. The Wellcome Collection, London
Both designations "Bushmen" and "San" are exonyms in origin, but San had been widely adopted as an endonym by the late 1990s. "San" originates as a pejorative Khoekhoe appellation for foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiǁom dialect.
The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans, is still widely used by others and to self-identify, but in some instances the term has also been described as pejorative.
Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology
dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in
English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors have
later switched back to Bushmen.
The compound Khoisan,
used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi and the foraging San
collectively, was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and
popularised by Isaac Schapera in 1930, and anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan,
as it has been reported that the exonym San is perceived as a pejorative in parts of the central Kalahari. By the late 1990s, the term San was in general use by the people themselves.
The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in
the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term. These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organised by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993,
the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of
Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia, and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organised by the University of the Western Cape.
The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001.
"Bushmen" is now considered derogatory by many South Africans, to the point where, in 2008, use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burger newspaper was brought before the Equality Court,
which however ruled that the mere use of the term cannot be taken as
derogatory, after the San Council had testified that it had no objection
to its use in a positive context.
The term Basarwa (singular Mosarwa) is used for the San collectively in Botswana.
The term is a Bantu (Tswana) word meaning "those who do not rear cattle". Use of the mo/ba-noun class indicates "people who are accepted", as opposed to the use of Masarwa, an older variant which is now considered offensive.
In Angola they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas, or bosquímanos (a Portuguese adaptation of the Dutch term for "Bushmen").
The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe.
The San are also referred to as Batwa by Xhosa people and Baroa by Sotho people.
The Bantu term Batwa refers to any foraging tribesmen and as such overlaps with the terminology used for the "Pygmoid"Southern Twa of South-Central Africa.
The San kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small mobile foraging bands. San kinship is comparable to Eskimo kinship,
with the same set of terms as in European cultures, but also uses a
name rule and an age rule. The age rule resolves any confusion arising
from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to
call the younger. Relatively few names circulate (approximately 35 names
per sex), and each child is named after a grandparent or another
relative.
Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is
very important to San of all ages. Large amounts of time are spent in
conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances. Women have a high status
in San society, are greatly respected, and may be leaders of their own
family groups. They make important family and group decisions and claim
ownership of water holes and foraging areas. Women are mainly involved
in the gathering of food, but may also take part in hunting.
Water is important in San life. Droughts may last many months and
waterholes may dry up. When this happens, they use sip wells. To get
water this way, a San scrapes a deep hole where the sand is damp. Into
this hole is inserted a long hollow grass stem. An empty ostrich egg
is used to collect the water. Water is sucked into the straw from the
sand, into the mouth, and then travels down another straw into the
ostrich egg.
Traditionally, the San were an egalitarian society. Although they had hereditary chiefs, their authority was limited. The San made decisions among themselves by consensus, with women treated as relative equals. San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services.
Most San are monogamous, but if a hunter is skilled enough to get a lot of food, he can afford to have a second wife as well.
Subsistence
Villages
range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring (when
people move constantly in search of budding greens), to formalised
rings, wherein people congregate in the dry season around permanent
waterholes. Early spring is the hardest season: a hot dry period
following the cool, dry winter. Most plants still are dead or dormant,
and supplies of autumn nuts are exhausted. Meat is particularly
important in the dry months when wildlife can not range far from the
receding waters.
Women gather fruit, berries, tubers, bush onions, and other plant materials for the band's consumption. Ostrich
eggs are gathered, and the empty shells are used as water containers.
Insects provide perhaps 10% of animal proteins consumed, most often
during the dry season.
Depending on location, the San consume 18 to 104 species, including
grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites.
Women's traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: a hide sling, a blanket, a cloak called a kaross to carry foodstuffs, firewood, smaller bags, a digging stick, and perhaps, a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby.
Wandering hunters (Masarwa Bushmen), North Kalahari desert, published in 1892 (from H.A. Bryden photogr.)
A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BC was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012.
Historical evidence shows that certain San communities have
always lived in the desert regions of the Kalahari; however, eventually
nearly all other San communities in southern Africa were forced into
this region. The Kalahari San remained in poverty where their richer
neighbours denied them rights to the land. Before long, in both Botswana
and Namibia, they found their territory drastically reduced.
Genetics
Various Y chromosome studies show that the San carry some of the most divergent (oldest) human Y-chromosome haplogroups. These haplogroups are specific sub-groups of haplogroups A and B, the two earliest branches on the human Y-chromosome tree.
Mitochondrial DNA studies also provide evidence that the San carry high frequencies of the earliest haplogroup
branches in the human mitochondrial DNA tree. This DNA is inherited
only from one's mother. The most divergent (oldest) mitochondrial
haplogroup, L0d, has been identified at its highest frequencies in the southern African San groups.
In a study published in March 2011, Brenna Henn and colleagues found that the ǂKhomani San, as well as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, were the most genetically diverse of any living humans studied. This high degree of genetic diversity hints at the origin of anatomically modern humans.
A 2008 study suggested that the San may have been isolated from
other original ancestral groups for as much as 100,000 years and later
rejoined, re-integrating into the rest of the human gene pool.
A DNA study of fully sequenced genomes, published in September
2016, showed that the ancestors of today's San hunter-gatherers began to
diverge from other human populations in Africa about 200,000 years ago
and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago.
Much aboriginal people's land in Botswana, including land occupied by the San people (or Basarwa),
was conquered during colonisation, and the pattern of loss of land and
access to natural resources continued after Botswana's independence.
The San have been particularly affected by encroachment by majority
peoples and non-indigenous farmers onto land traditionally occupied by
San people. Government policies from the 1970s transferred a significant
area of traditionally San land to white settlers and majority agro-pastoralist tribes. Much of the government's policy regarding land tended to favor the dominant Tswana peoples over the minority San and Bakgalagadi.
Loss of land is a major contributor to the problems facing Botswana's
indigenous people, including especially the San's eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The government of Botswana decided to relocate all of those living
within the reserve to settlements outside it. Harassment of residents,
dismantling of infrastructure, and bans on hunting appear to have been
used to induce residents to leave. The government has denied that any of the relocation was forced. A legal battle followed. The relocation policy may have been intended to facilitate diamond mining by Gem Diamonds within the reserve.
Hoodia traditional knowledge agreement
Hoodia gordonii, used by the San, was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1998, for its presumed appetite suppressing quality. A licence was granted to Phytopharm, for development of the active ingredient in the Hoodia plant, p57 (glycoside),
to be used as a pharmaceutical drug for dieting. Once this patent was
brought to the attention of the San, a benefit-sharing agreement was
reached between them and the CSIR in 2003. This would award royalties to
the San for the benefits of their indigenous knowledge.
During the case, the San people were represented and assisted by the
Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the
South African San Council and the South African San Institute.
This benefit-sharing agreement is one of the first to give
royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge used for drug sales.
The terms of the agreement are contentious, because of their apparent
lack of adherence to the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources
and Benefit Sharing, as outlined in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The San have yet to profit from this agreement, as P57 has still not yet been legally developed and marketed.
The San of the Kalahari were first brought to the globalized world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post.
Van der Post grew up in South Africa, and had a respectful lifelong
fascination with native African cultures. In 1955, he was commissioned
by the BBC
to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the San. The
filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television
documentary a year later. Driven by a lifelong fascination with this
"vanished tribe", Van der Post published a 1958 book about this
expedition, entitled The Lost World of the Kalahari. It was to be his most famous book.
In 1961, he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative
which he admits in the introduction uses two previous works of stories
and mythology as "a sort of Stone Age Bible", namely Specimens of Bushman Folklore' (1911), collected by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend.
Van der Post's work brought indigenous African cultures to millions of
people around the world for the first time, but some people disparaged
it as part of the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 1960s,
stating that he branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even
"mystical ecologists".
In 1992 by John Perrot and team published the book "Bush for the Bushman" – a "desperate plea"
on behalf of the aboriginal San addressing the international community
and calling on the governments throughout Southern Africa to respect and
reconstitute the ancestral land-rights of all San.
Documentaries and non-fiction
John Marshall, the son of Harvard anthropologist Lorna Marshall, documented the lives of San in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over a more than 50-year period. His early film The Hunters, released in 1957, shows a giraffe hunt. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a vocal proponent of the San cause throughout his life. His sister Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
wrote several books and numerous articles about the San, based in part
on her experiences living with these people when their culture was still
intact. The Harmless People, published in 1959 (revised in 1989), and The Old Way: A Story of the First People,
published in 2006, are the two primary works. John Marshall and
Adrienne Miesmer documented the lives of the ǃKung San people between
the 1950s and 1978 in Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman.
This film, the account of a woman who grew up while the San lived as
autonomous hunter-gatherers, but who later was forced into a dependent
life in the government-created community at Tsumkwe, shows how the lives
of the ǃKung people,
who lived for millennia as hunter gatherers, were forever changed when
they were forced onto a reservation too small to support them.
South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number
of documentaries on San culture, history and present situation; these
include In God's Places / Iindawo ZikaThixo (1995) on the San cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of a Bushman (2002) on the murder of San tracker Optel Rooi by South African police; The Will To Survive (2009), which covers the history and situation of San communities in southern Africa today; and My Land is My Dignity (2009) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
A documentary on San hunting entitled, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000), directed by Damon and Craig Foster. This was reviewed by Lawrence Van Gelder for the New York Times, who said that the film "constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem".
The BBC's The Life of Mammals (2003) series includes video footage of an indigenous San of the Kalahari desert undertaking a persistence hunt of a kudu through harsh desert conditions. It provides an illustration of how early man may have pursued and captured prey with minimal weaponry.
The BBC series How Art Made the World (2005) compares San cave paintings from 200 years ago to Paleolithic European paintings that are 14,000 years old. Because of their similarities, the San works may illustrate the reasons for ancient cave paintings. The presenter Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams,
whose PhD was entitled "Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in
southern San rock paintings". Lewis-Williams draws parallels with
prehistoric art around the world, linking in shamanic ritual and trance
states.
Les Stroud devoted an episode of Beyond Survival (2011) to the San Bushman of the Kalahari.
Films and music
Rock painting of a man in Twyfelfontein valley
A 1969 film, Lost in the Desert,
features a small boy, stranded in the desert, who encounters a group of
wandering San. They help him and then abandon him as a result of a
misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture.
The film was directed by Jamie Uys, who returned to the San a decade later with The Gods Must Be Crazy, which proved to be an international hit. This comedy portrays a Kalahari San group's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola
bottle). By the time this movie was made, the ǃKung had recently been
forced into sedentary villages, and the San hired as actors were
confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of
their almost abandoned hunting and gathering life.
"Eh Hee" by Dave Matthews Band was written as an evocation of the music and culture of the San. In a story told to the Radio City audience (an edited version of which appears on the DVD version of Live at Radio City),
Matthews recalls hearing the music of the San and, upon asking his
guide what the words to their songs were, being told that "there are no
words to these songs, because these songs, we've been singing since
before people had words". He goes on to describe the song as his "homage
to meeting... the most advanced people on the planet".
Rock engraving of a giraffe in Twyfelfontein valley
Memoirs
In Peter Godwin's biography When A Crocodile Eats the Sun,
he mentions his time spent with the San for an assignment. His title
comes from the San's belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile
eats the sun.
Novels
Laurens van der Post's two novels, A Story Like The Wind (1972) and its sequel, A Far Off Place (1974), made into a 1993 film,
are about a white boy encountering a wandering San and his wife, and
how the San's life and survival skills save the white teenagers' lives
in a journey across the desert.
James A. Michener's The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fiction centered on South Africa. The first section of the book concerns a San community's journey set roughly in 13,000 BC.
In Wilbur Smith's novel The Burning Shore (an instalment in the Courtneys of Africa book series),
the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and
H'ani; Smith describes the San's struggles, history, and beliefs in
great detail.
Norman Rush's 1991 novel Mating features an encampment of Basarwa near the (imaginary) Botswana town where the main action is set.
Tad Williams's epic Otherland
series of novels features a South African San named ǃXabbu, whom
Williams confesses to be highly fictionalised, and not necessarily an
accurate representation. In the novel, Williams invokes aspects of San
mythology and culture.
In 2007, David Gilman published The Devil's Breath.
One of the main characters, a small San boy named ǃKoga, uses
traditional methods to help the character Max Gordon travel across
Namibia.
The San feature in several of the novels by Michael Stanley (the nom de plume of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip), particularly in Death of the Mantis.
Bushmeat is meat from wildlife species that are hunted for human consumption. Bushmeat represents
a primary source of animal protein and a cash-earning commodity for inhabitants of humid tropical forest regions in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Bushmeat is an important food resource for poor people, particularly in rural areas.
Bushmeat provides increased opportunity for transmission of several zoonoticviruses from animal hosts to humans, such as Ebolavirus and HIV.
Nomenclature
The term 'bushmeat' is originally an African term for wildlife species that are hunted for human consumption.
In October 2000, the IUCN World Conservation Congress passed a resolution on the unsustainable commercial trade in wild meat.
Affected countries were urged to recognize the increasing impact of the
bushmeat trade, to strengthen and enforce legislation, and to develop
action programmes to mitigate the impact of the trade. Donor
organisations were requested to provide funding for the implementation
of such programmes.
Wildlife hunting for food is important for the livelihood security of and supply of dietary protein for poor people. It can be sustainable when carried out by traditional hunter-gatherers in large landscapes for their own consumption. Due to the extent of bushmeat hunting for trade in markets, the survival of those species that are large-bodied and reproduce slowly is threatened. The term bushmeat crisis was coined in 2007 and refers to this dual threat of depleting food resources and wildlife extinctions, both entailed by the bushmeat trade.
Affected wildlife species
Globally, more than 1,000 animal species are estimated to be affected by hunting for bushmeat.
Bushmeat hunters use mostly leg-hold snare traps to catch any wildlife, but prefer to kill large species, as these provide a greater amount of meat than small species.
Africa
Pangolin in Cameroon
Gambian pouched rat in Cameroon
Bushmeat in Gabon
The volume of the bushmeat trade in West and Central Africa was estimated at 1-5 million tonnes per year at the turn of the 21st century. In 2002, it was estimated that 24 species weighing more than 10 kg (22 lb) contribute 177.7 kg/km2 (1,015 lb/sq mi) of meat per year to the bushmeat extracted in the Congo Basin. Species weighing more than 10 kg (22 lb) were estimated to contribute 35.4 kg/km2 (202 lb/sq mi). Bushmeat extraction in the Amazon rainforest was estimated to be much lower, at 3.6 kg/km2 (21 lb/sq mi) in the case of species weighing more than 10 kg and 0.6 kg/km2 (3.4 lb/sq mi) in the case of species weighing less than 10 kg.
Based on these estimates, a total of 2,200,000 t (2,200,000 long tons;
2,400,000 short tons) bushmeat is extracted in the Congo Basin per year,
ranging from 12,938 t (12,734 long tons; 14,262 short tons) in Equatorial Guinea to 1,665,972 t (1,639,661 long tons; 1,836,420 short tons) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The 301 mammal species threatened by hunting for bushmeat
comprise 126 primates, 65 even-toed ungulates, 27 bats, 26 diprotodont
marsupials, 21 rodents, 12 carnivores and all pangolin species.
A gorilla in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2008
Between 1983 and 2002, the Gabon populations of western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)
were estimated to have declined by 56%. This decline was primarily
caused by the commercial hunting, which was facilitated by the extended
infrastructure for logging purposes.
Marsh mongoose (Atilax paludinosus) and long-nosed mongoose (Herpestes naso) are the most numerous small carnivores offered in rural bushmeat markets in the country.
Logging
concessions operated by companies in African forests have been closely
linked to the bushmeat trade. Because they provide roads, trucks and
other access to remote forests, they are the primary means for the
transportation of hunters and meat between forests and urban centres.
Some, including the Congolaise Industrielle du Bois (CIB) in the Republic of Congo,
partnered with governments and international conservation organizations
to regulate the bushmeat trade within the concessions where they
operate. Numerous solutions are needed; because each country has
different circumstances, traditions and laws, no one solution will work
in every location.
Nutrition
Bushmeat can be an important source of micronutrients and macronutrients. A study of South Americans in the Tres Fronteras
region found that those who consumed bushmeat were at a lower risk of
anemia and chronic health conditions, as their diets included more iron, zinc, and vitamin C than those who did not eat bushmeat.
Overfishing
In Ghana, international illegal over-exploitation of African fishing grounds has increased demand for bushmeat. Both European Union-subsidized
fleets and local commercial fleets have depleted fish stocks, leaving
local people to supplement their diets with animals hunted from nature
reserves. Over 30 years of data link sharp declines in both mammal
populations and the biomass of 41 wildlife species with a decreased
supply of fish.
Consumption of fish and of bushmeat is correlated: the decline of one resource drives up the demand and price for the other.
Outbreaks of the Ebola virus in the Congo Basin and in Gabon in the 1990s have been associated with the butchering and consumption of chimpanzees and bonobos. Bushmeat hunters in Central Africa infected with the human T-lymphotropic virus were closely exposed to wild primates.
Anthrax can be transmitted when butchering and eating ungulates. The risk of bloodborne diseases to be transmitted is higher when butchering a carcass than when transporting, cooking and eating it.
Many hunters and traders are not aware of zoonosis and the risks of disease transmissions.
An interview survey in rural communities in Nigeria revealed that 55% of
the respondents knew of zoonoses, but their education and cultural
traditions are important drivers for hunting and eating bushmeat despite
the risks involved.
HIV
Results of research on wild chimpanzees in Cameroon indicate that they are naturally infected with the simian foamy virus and constitute a reservoir of HIV-1, a precursor of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in humans. There are several distinct strains of HIV, indicating that this cross-species transfer has occurred several times. Simian immunodeficiency virus present in chimpanzees is reportedly derived from older strains of the virus present in the collared mangabey (Cercocebus torquatus)
and the putty-nosed monkey. It is likely that HIV was initially
transferred to humans after having come into contact with infected
bushmeat.
Ebola
The natural reservoirs of ebolaviruses are unknown. Possible reservoirs include non-human primates, megabats, rodents, shrews, carnivores, and ungulates.
Between October 2001 and December 2003, five Ebola virus outbreaks
occurred in the border area between Gabon and Republic of Congo.
Autopsies of wildlife carcasses showed that chimpanzees, gorillas and
bay duikers were infected with the virus.
The Ebola virus has been linked to bushmeat, with some researchers
hypothesizing that megabats are a primary host of at least some variants
of Ebola virus. Between the first recorded outbreak in 1976 and the
largest in 2014, the virus has transferred from animals to humans
only 30 times, despite large numbers of bats being killed and sold each
year. Bats drop partially eaten fruits and pulp, then terrestrial
mammals such as gorillas and duikers feed on these fruits. This chain of
events forms a possible indirect means of transmission from the natural
host to animal populations.
The suspected index case for the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa in 2014 was a two-year-old boy in Meliandou in south-eastern Guinea, who played in a hollow tree harbouring a colony of Angolan free-tailed bats (Mops condylurus).
Results of a study conducted during the Ebola crisis in Liberia
showed that socio-economic conditions impacted bushmeat consumption.
During the crisis, there was a decrease in bushmeat consumption and
daily meal frequency. In addition, preferences for bushmeat species
stayed the same.
Suggestions for reducing or halting bushmeat harvest and trade include:
increase access of consumers to affordable and reliable alternative sources of animal protein such as chicken, small livestock and farmed fish raised at family level;
devolve rights and authority over wildlife to local communities;
As an alternative to bushmeat, captive breeding
of species traditionally harvested from the wild is sometimes feasible.
Captive breeding efforts must be closely monitored, as there is risk
they can be used to launder and legitimize individuals captured from the wild, similar to the laundering of wild green tree pythons in Indonesia for the pet trade.
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