A BUSHMAN ODYSSEY

By Richard WICKSTEED

NATIONAL FILM & VIDEO FOUNDATION OF SOUTH AFRICA (NFVF) - as FIN

Documentary - Completed 2012

A BUSHMAN ODYSSEY is the epic story of one Bushman family’s struggle to reclaim their ancestral land and spiritual
essence in the Kgalagadi wilderness, after surviving four generations of colonial genocide, apartheid dispossession, and post-apartheid social reorganization.

    • Year of production
    • 2012
    • Genres
    • Documentary
    • Countries
    • SOUTH AFRICA
    • Languages
    • ENGLISH
    • Director(s)
    • Richard WICKSTEED
    • Writer(s)
    • David KRUIPER, Richard WICKSTEED
    • Producer(s)
    • Patricia Glyn GLYN, Karl SYMONS, Richard WICKSTEED
    • Synopsis
    • DAWID KRUIPER, 76, and his extended family are one of South Africa’s only Bushman families to survive genocide and dispossession with unbroken links to their ancestral past.
      A Bushman Odyssey follows the Kruipers’ poignant and at times heartbreaking return to their ancestors’ hunting and gathering grounds in their Kgalagadi heartland. Our journey takes place 100 years after Dawid’s grandfather, the legendary Bushman hunter Ou Makai and his people were driven from the wilderness by German colonial forces and ‘tamed’ by Boer settlers. Deep in the Kalahari, the Kruipers retrace Ou Makai’s journey and rekindle their ancestral culture by hunting, gathering medicinal and food plants, and storytelling. As we proceed on this therapeutic journey, the Kruipers reveal, for the first time, terrible secrets of a past steeped in war, enslavement,
      dispossession and murder ...