History of the San de Angola presented in South Africa

Lubango - The linguistic, cultural and anthropological history of the San peoples of the provinces of Huíla and Cunene will be presented in an exhibition on minorities in November of this year at the Heritage Centre of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in South Africa.

To better prepare the exhibition, a group of Angolan and South African anthropologists, led by academic Madalena Lucas, is working in Huíla where they are gathering more information about this ethnic minority originating from the region.
Speaking to ANGOP today, Wednesday, Angolan historian Madalena Lucas said that this is a work that is being carried out by the Christian Organization for Support of Community Development (OCADEC), which has been working directly for over 20 years to collect information from these communities located in the municipalities of Cacula, Quipungo and Matala (Huíla).

She added that the objective is to collect data and produce a narrative that will be exhibited at the Museum of Minorities in South Africa, given that it is felt that there is still little information on the subject in the cultural collection in the southern region of Africa.
She stated that this is an action of “extreme” importance, as it contributes to enriching the exhibition and history, in addition to being an educational and technical and professional training center.
Madalena Lucas praised the initiative of scholars to learn about the cultural and historical potential of the linguistic heritage and existing cultural infrastructures from an intangible and tangible point of view.

She emphasized that this South African museum transforms written information on the linguistic, cultural and anthropological history of the San Community of the provinces of Huíla and Cunene into narratives that help to understand the odyssey of this minority.
She said that specialists are collecting information in the localities of Upa and Mupembati, in Huíla, as well as Nehone and Okafima in Cunene.

For many years wrongly called “Bushmen” or “Khoisan”, the San are members of several indigenous hunter-gatherer ethnic groups in Southern Africa, whose territories include Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. They are one of the 14 peoples of the so-called ancestral population, from which the current population descends.
They are characterized by shared families, live in small nomadic family groups, where there is no leader, and yet are considered the guardians of the ancestral memory of humanity. JT/MS