Khoisan - Some information
Love is as old as man itself and it has come in many forms through the ages. If you look back over time you will see there were so many ways how love were expressed or how a man tried to impress and woo a woman.
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If you go back to the cave man era you will find that there were no romance involved. The man would wake up tone morning and decide it is time for him to go out and find a wife. He just went out his cave, grabbed the first woman he saw and dragged her back to his cave. No romance, no marriage ...
There is a lot of speculation how the cave man found a wife and why he wanted a woman in his life, but most people think that they were just too lazy to do their own skin tanning and wanted someone to make their clothes and clean their caves and raise their children - certainly not a lot of romance involved, more a matter of instinct.
The Khoisan is a tribe that use to live in the Kalahari. They had their own rituals that they would follow when it was time for a young girl to find a husband (there are very few left of the Khoisan and only some of them still practice these traditions.)
The young Khoisan woman had more say in who she would like to be with and the man she would want to be the father of her children, but relationships like we know today did not exist. The Khoisan man and woman could not just go on a date to get to know each other better whenever they wanted, there was a certain time for this and it took place in a certain way.
They had to wait for the one time during the year, just after the winter was gone and it was full moon and this time was called the "time of the women".
That specific evening all the eligible young men and women would join the elders around the fire and watch how the elders did a special dance for the young people.
After the dance, the young men - the ones that have proven themselves as good hunter already- and the young girls would be send into the veld. The young girls would wear masks made of grass and they would stay together in a group. The men would each go in a different direction.
Each young hunter had to make sure that he brought meat to the girls, everyday for a month. The meat had to be fresh and he had to hang it on a tree so that the girls could find it.
The catch was that the girls were not suppose to see him. He had to move quietly and without detection because if the girls saw him they would shout and start hitting him with a stick. The poor young man just had to stand still and take the beating, because they believed that would teach him to become a better hunter and he would know in future how to become 'invisible' so that the prey he had to hunt would not see him.
If a hunter did not succeed in bringing meat to the girls for 3 days, he was a disgrace to his family and could not return to his tribe.
When the month had passed, all the young people went back home and then each woman had a chance to choose the hunter that she wanted to be her husband and the father of her children.
