My Eland's Heart: A Collection of Stories and Art

These seventeen contemporary San artists seek to keep the tradition and oral history of the San alive in modern South Africa. A monograph with a difference.

In the last 100 years the San hunter-gather way of life in Southern Africa has all but disappeared due to increasing pressure for land, the struggle for independence, and the San's co-opted involvement in the Angolan and Namibian wars. The !Xan and Khwe Art and Culture Project was founded in 1990 for the de-commissioned members of the South African Defence Force 'Bushman Battalion', and has moved with them to their new home near Kimberley. Seventeen !Xan an Khwe artists express their oral history, and the way in which their lives have been altered by the onslaught of western culture, through their paintings – developed from the world's oldest 'school' of art.