After many months of planning and meetings with architects and builders, exciting news of our newest (and most ambitious) project that will secure accommodation for several of our residents…
Life in the township is fraught with difficulty. Now at last we are creating a home where our artists can live in peace and dignity, in a supportive community in harmony with the earth and each other, growing vegetables, drinking from our waterhole, listening to the stars.
We began with an acre of land, a sketch plan, and the gathering of stones. Local farmers agreed to allow us to gather stones from their farms, builders from our community who normally work for white contractors agreed to help us. We found Isak, a Bushman who had built stone walls in the valley for the white villagers and farmers all his life, and invited him to build Bushhome for us.
Isak said: “I love working with stone. My father was a builder with stone and I grew up working with him. I didn’t go to school at all. We travelled from farm to farm. I built the stonework at the Arts Centre in 1999. When I look at my stones, then I see this is a beautiful stone, then you put it aside. Then you see this stone and that stone will fit beautifully together. This is how I feel about it, you see. My body is not tired. I wake up at 4 in the morning and my body feels good. I have never been to a clinic. I know a lot of herbs.”
Being Bushmen does not mean we wear animal skins and carry bows and arrows. We are citizens of our contemporary, heart-broken earth. Like the rest of humanity, we have lost our way, and are seeking all the contemporary wisdom we can find to build sustainable, eco-friendly homes using a collection of sunlight, rain and underground water, wind, and re-using human waste to enrich the earth in every way we can.
Bushhome is envisioned as a seed development and flagship project to create a model of better living for our local community of Bushman descendants. Perhaps in years to come, modern Bushmen will slowly re-settle on the land that was once their own, living in dignity and harmony with the earth, a restoration humanity is striving for all over the world.
Each stone feels like a precious gift to us from the earth. As we gather them, we think about the homes we will build, and the way our families within our community will live. Our children will be close to nature, with space to play and be free. We’ll drink from our borehole and sit quietly in the sunshine, listening to the bush and thinking about our stories as our ancestors did.
Our houses will be built in terraces around the edge of our land, and in a communal space in the middle we’ll continue to grow vegetables, for our guests at the museum, for our soup kitchen that feeds about 180 children every day, and for ourselves. As all the land around us is privately owned by farmers, we are no longer able to eat wild meat. Instead we are learning to grow food and tend the land, making compost, glasshouses in the winter and shade tunnels in the summer.
The gathering of stones has begun. To build our first four houses we need 16,000 stones. Each day the mountain of stones gets bigger. We have drawn up plans and will soon apply for planning permission.
Support our building goal here.
