Legacy (San Bushmen)
The Quiver Tree Forest is a forest of southern Namibia comprising about 250 specimens of Aloe dichotoma, a species of aloe that is also locally known as “quiver tree” because bushmen use its branches to make quivers. The San people, also known as Bushmen are members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of Southern Africa, whose territory spans Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. They have provided a wealth of information for the fields of anthropology and genetics and are one of fourteen known extant “ancestral population clusters” from which all known modern humans descend.
The direct relationship between the Bushmen and the quiver tree interested Legassick and an idea formed for the Legacy series. He travelled to the quiver tree forest in Namibia and shot a background plate that brought together natures elements; rain, sunshine, a rainbow and lightning, which all played a part in bushman lore. The Bushmen had their homelands invaded by cattle herding Bantu tribes from around 1,500 years ago, and by white colonists over the last few hundred years. From that time they faced discrimination, eviction from their ancestral lands, murder and oppression amounting to a massive though unspoken genocide, which reduced them in numbers from several million to 100,000. The ghostly portraits of the Bushmen in this piece portrays their very fragile existence in the modern world, from the remnants of Africa’s oldest cultural group, genetically the closest surviving people to the original Homo sapiens “core”, to an uncertain future in progressive society where hunter gatherer ways are being replaced by high street chain stores.
The direct relationship between the Bushmen and the quiver tree interested Legassick and an idea formed for the Legacy series. He travelled to the quiver tree forest in Namibia and shot a background plate that brought together natures elements; rain, sunshine, a rainbow and lightning, which all played a part in bushman lore. The Bushmen had their homelands invaded by cattle herding Bantu tribes from around 1,500 years ago, and by white colonists over the last few hundred years. From that time they faced discrimination, eviction from their ancestral lands, murder and oppression amounting to a massive though unspoken genocide, which reduced them in numbers from several million to 100,000. The ghostly portraits of the Bushmen in this piece portrays their very fragile existence in the modern world, from the remnants of Africa’s oldest cultural group, genetically the closest surviving people to the original Homo sapiens “core”, to an uncertain future in progressive society where hunter gatherer ways are being replaced by high street chain stores.
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