The Bushman Heritage Museum

Client: Seven Media Group

Category: Product Design

Date: June 2019

Discover contemporary art created by indigenous artists at the Bethesda Arts Centre in the remote Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda. Since the project was established in 1999, Bushman descendants have been making giant tapestries and lino prints exploring the creation mythology of the |Xam – stories recorded in the 19th Century, just before the |Xam language became extinct. On 28 November 2018, the Bethesda Arts Centre officially became the Bushman Heritage Museum. It is now widely recognised as a world-class museum. 

The |Xam Bushmen lived in central South Africa for thousands of years before the coming of the European settlers. Their shamans travelled between planes of being. They were storytellers, cave painters and rain makers. They had a profound connection to nature, from which we can still learn what we are meant to be as human beings. The |Xam were relentlessly murdered by settlers and became extinct after a genocide lasting several hundred years.

Genocide left behind fragmented communities torn from their land, their history, and their language, like plants severed from their roots. The survivors became vulnerable to alcoholism, which has persisted for generations.

The artists at the Centre were the first in the village to be reconnected to their ancestral identity. They grew up in the township or on farms with the name “Bushman” as a pejorative term, and accepted their apartheid designation as “coloured”. Afrikaans, the language of the invaders, was the only language they knew. But through the museum, the wider community are finding and proudly identifying with their origins as Bushmen.

The creation of the sun, moon and stars, the origin of death, our relationship to the wind and rain, and our connectedness to all of nature are explored in the rich mythological stories of the |Xam. The wisdom of these stories sets them among the great mythologies of the world. These 10 primary creation myths can be found translated and explored in Creation of the World by Bushman Heritage Museum founder and Director, Jeni Couzyn.

In 2020 we released a 27-minute film about the museum, made by Nana Dankwa and Jeni Couzyn with the Bushman Heritage Museum’s First People Artists. The film is based on the indigenous people of South Africa, the |Xam Bushmen. A group of “coloured” people in the Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda, in the Eastern Cape, who were mixed-race descendants of the |Xam, had completely lost their culture, language and identity during the genocide of the Bushmen in the colonial invasion. Through making art and studying |Xam mythology at the Bushman Heritage Museum, they were able to reconnect with their ancestral roots and recover from loss of identity and social deprivation.