Cultural tours & safaris in Botswana, Afrika Calls, Bushmen, Wilderness, People

Africa Safaris - Botswana - Wildlife Safaris & Cultural Tours

Kuru San Dance Festival - Bushmen of the Kalahari

The San women from New Xade - sing and dance around the fire the traditional healing dances - the core of the Bushmen culture.

Photo by Mareko Marciniak, svd

Kuru San Dance Festival - an annual (from 2008 every socond year) 3-days celebration of Bushmen (San) culture. They come from the whole Kalahari (from Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and sometimes other countries) to a small village of D'Kar to dance, sing, play, talk and make traditional music around the fire.

Kuru San Dance Festival

August 2012

It is a unique experience and a privilege to witness the thousand-years-old culture still alive in dance and song, especially in the healing dance.

The "melon dance" with a small desert melon, so important for the people and the animals of the desert - sometimes the only source of water to survive.

Photos by Mareko Marciniak, svd

Dance with the tail of the wildebeest, once abundant migratory antelope hunted for meat.

Animals are an important theme for the San.

Photos by Mareko Marciniak, svd

Copyrights: author

Hope for the future. The children of the San are still interested to learn the ancient art of community dancing and singing. It is a way of life fast disappearing from the modern world. We might be the last generation to see this fascinating culture.

Perhaps it is also our collective responsibility to help it to survive, to adapt and to find its place in the global village which is slowly losing its wonderful cultural pluralism.

Photo by Mareko Marciniak, svd

Hunters dance the animal stories; for a while they are happy to enter a reality of the good olden days, when the world was still big, so big that there was plenty of space for the immense herds of animals searching for water and grass and providing food for the people. To a great extend this world is gone. What remains are the stories - in dances and songs. As long as they are danced and sung the Busmen soul is kept alive.

Photos by Mareko Marciniak, svd

Afrika Calls can arrange the transport, accommodation (tented), food and other necessary things for the duration of the festival.

The festival is held on a bush game farm near D'Kar village.