A shaman’s journey, the last elders

Kgonta Bo, 79, is one of the last shamans of the Kalahari San Bushmen from North‐East Namibia. In turn village healer, soothsayer and storyteller, this delightful soon‐to-be greatgrandfather takes us on a unique adventure. For the first time in his life, he is to leave his traditional village to “fly through the clouds into the unknown, to the big city of Johannesburg”.

Ironically, it is in this modern and vibrant metropolis that Kgonta Bo, whose huntergatherer community is struggling in a difficult time of diminishing culture, comes face to face with his roots. Invited to Museum Africa by his friend Lucinda Backwell, a South African paleoanthropologist, to help identify and describe in click language an incomparable collection of 3,500 San artefacts, the shaman’s ancestral knowledge also sheds a new light on a 40,000 year‐old mystery and our common human past.

Narrated by Kgonta Bo himself, A Shaman’s Journey – The Last Elders is both a road movie and a family chronicle that offers an insider’s perspective on the anxious yet joyful entry into the 21st century of an endearing bushman family.