Wilson Ngoni, 2025
45х60, oil on canvas
Gaborone, Botswana
How does the traveller see it?
(Fragment of a post from a Facebook page)
This bushman from Botswana could be aiming at an enormous giraffe or a little duiker antelope, a prickly porcupine or an eland––the largest antelope in the world. The warrior’s arrows are laced with poison whose effect is not immediate; bushmen sometimes take multiple days hunting down a wounded giraffe. The poison, placed at the front end of the arrow, is a nerve agent and leaves the animal’s flesh in an edible state. The San peoples (Bushmen) don’t have the concept of personal property, which has led to numerous conflicts between neighbors. The amount of these desert hunter-gatherers has been on a steady decline; they get killed off. In Zimbabwe they’ve fallen completely off the map, and all that remains is their cave paintings. Bushmen today are some of the most ancient people living on Earth, and on this canvas you can feel the energy of millenia gone by.
And what do you think?