There’s something arrogant about those of us who live in the so-called developed West; we tend to view other contemporary cultures as primitive.  The missionaries to Africa in the last century, well intentioned maybe, were among the worst offenders. The problem never was their passion to introduce the ‘natives’ to Jesus, it was the fact that with their message of good news they imposed their British culture on their converts making them ‘little Englanders.’ Mission in those days was an exercise in imperialism, and almost inevitably the African people came to believe that to be civilised, they had to be like the white man.

I watched as a friend of mine took his place in front of a group of about fifty Ugandans standing patiently under a Jacaranda tree. He preached a simple sermon, and when he asked those who wanted to turn away from their traditional religion and become Christians to take a step forward, all fifty of them did so.

He assumed they had misunderstood so he asked them to take a step back, repeated the procedure, and again all fifty of them stepped forward. This could have gone on all day if a more experienced visitor to that part of Africa hadn’t taken him to the side and explained that their culture calls for deep respect for visitors, in particular Western visitors, and it would have been considered an insult not to respond in the way they did.

African culture can be rich and sophisticated, often comparing favourably with ours, and the great sadness is that down through the generations they have been encouraged to reject their culture and adopt the more dubious version of the white man.

There’s an ancient tribe that has populated the south west regions of Africa for over twenty thousand years. They are the Kalahari Bushmen. It is thought that only 90,000 remain, and that this present generation will be the last. And yet they have so much to teach us; the collapse of the banking system and the extravagance of Capitalism  that we’ve seen in the last couple of years point to a fundamental flaw in our culture that the Kalahari tribesmen know nothing about – naked greed.

They are hunter-gatherers; the men hunt animals for food and the women grow crops. Typically, the men leave their camp in search of food, preferably an Eland, the world’s biggest antelope, and when they return with their kill there follows a festival that goes on for over a week. They spend time with their family and friends, building and repairing relationships, talking and singing together long into the night; their norm is what we call ‘quality time.’

I mentioned greed; how would we differ? We would be unlikely to bring home one antelope, we’d bring home three or four, far in excess of our needs, and we’d probably trade our unwanted antelopes to those who don’t want to hunt, for trinkets that we don’t  need. We’d find a way to store our surpluses so that at some point in the future we wouldn’t have to go hunting any longer – we could retire and live on our spoils. But we would lose the key ingredient of the Kalahari lifestyle; time for each other, for we would go hunting every day whether we needed to or not and leave the youngsters bewildered and without role models. We’d build up our reserves, we’d pull down our barns and build bigger. The animals that we share territory with would become commodities and we’d hunt them to extinction and then look for other victims.

An elder of the Kalahari Bushmen recently said this; ‘A long, long time ago, we, the Bushmen, roamed these mountains, masters of the unpredictable ways of nature. We were nomads then, moving with the great herds of game and the changing of seasons. When the animals migrated we followed, leaving no houses or roads to mark our presence here. All we left behind was our story painted in the rock...

What story are we painting in our rock? It’s wanton destruction of our environment, trillions of pounds of debts for future generations to bear, polluted rivers, seas and the atmosphere, and a world of extremes: a generation of morbidly obese teenagers while half the world starves – and we call ourselves advanced?

 You can contact Adam online: adam@adamharbinson.com