San

San is the collective name for a number of distinct Khoisan speaking peoples of southern Africa, among them the Ju/'hoansi and other !Kung speaking communities of the Kalahari, whose forebears Mathias Guenther's ethnography places among the longest continuous inhabitants of the subcontinent, hunting and gathering across Namibia, Botswana and South Africa long before Bantu speaking and later European settlement.

The /Xam of the southern and eastern Cape, whose language and testimony Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded between 1870 and 1884, no longer exist as a distinct community; their descendants were absorbed into other populations under colonial era violence and dispossession, and no fluent speaker of /Xam has lived for decades. Surviving San communities were pushed into marginal land through the twentieth century, and the Botswana government's relocation of Ju/'hoansi and other residents out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, beginning in the 1990s and contested in court through the 2000s, remains a live land rights dispute; Botswana's High Court ruled the removals unlawful in 2006, though access to the reserve continues to be contested. San organizations across Namibia, Botswana and South Africa now advocate for land, language and heritage rights, and San trackers and healers work increasingly with researchers and conservation bodies who once treated their knowledge as folklore rather than expertise.

San religious life varies by community rather than following one fixed theology: Lorna Marshall's fieldwork among the Nyae Nyae Ju/'hoansi records a greater god, Gao Na, and a lesser, more dangerous being, //Gauwa, while the /Xam testimony Bleek and Lloyd recorded centers instead on /Kaggen, a trickster and creator most often taking the form of a mantis, whose unpredictable acts explain both the order and the disorder of the world.

What recurs across San communities, in Mathias Guenther's comparative account, is the central place of the trance dance, in which healers, both men and women depending on the community, dance around a fire while women clap and sing until n|om, a potency understood to reside in the healer's body, is activated and rises, allowing the healer to draw sickness out of the sick and to travel in spirit to negotiate with the dead and with the beings responsible for illness.

Rock art across the Kalahari and the Drakensberg, much of it centuries old, is now widely read by researchers as a record of trance experience rather than simple hunting scenes, though how far that reading applies to any single painted site remains a matter of ongoing interpretation. Christianity has spread among many San communities, held alongside rather than replacing the trance dance and its healers in most of the communities where both are practiced.