The few thousand Khwe are one of the hunter-gatherer communities who until very recently lived by foraging in their ancestral hunting grounds in the north-eastern part of present-day Namibia. Some decades ago, these areas were declared a game reserve and since then the Khwe are no longer allowed to hunt; even the traditional gathering of bush food has been severely restricted. At the same time, farmers enter the former hunting-grounds of the Khwe with their cattle and destroy the natural resources – the water pans and the trees – both key to the livelihood of the Khwe community and the wild animals.
In the semi-arid land of the Khwe, tuuca orodji ‘rainwater pans’ are the most important water resources in the bush. Members of the Khwe community share their insights and worldviews on them in Khwedam with Living-Language-Land. In the video, a Khwe elder talks about these pans and their significance for the lives of the community. He also describes the threats to the existence of these pans by massive in-migration of farmers and their cattle, who destroy many of these water resources, which were essential for the traditional livelihood of the Khwe and which are still vital for the survival of the elephants and other wild animals in this area.
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