HED4805
ASSIGNMENT 1 2024
, South African History of Education
HED4805
Assignment 1
Unique Number: 149215
DUE 17 May 2024
Extract from the text:
Education through practice Indigenous people of southern Africa developed their own methods of
sharing knowledge through teaching practical skills. In most instances teaching was by showing,
with demonstrations of different skill sets for the younger generation to observe. In southern Africa
the San people, who survived by hunting and food gathering for thousands of years, used Stone
Age tools to cut up animals they had hunted. Even though the San were using Stone Age
technology, they were very skilled in killing animals. They used, among others, bow and arrow,
snares and slow poison technologies to hunt.
The bow and arrow method was used to hunt large game such as antelope, buffalo or eland. The
hunter would stalk the game to within about 20 m, which is the distance an arrow can fly. Instead of
killing animals instantly, which was not easy because the arrow had no fletching and often missed
the target, the San used poisoned arrows to kill the game. The animal would be poisoned to death
slowly, which took from a few hours to a few days depending on the size of the animal. The sources
of the poison were caterpillars, larvae of a small beetle, poisonous plants and snake venom, which
were put on the arrow. When the arrow struck an animal, the hunters would have to track it until it
died. Once the animal fell, the San would cut around the poisoned area and discard it. The Khoi
were also skilled at making such weapons. Archaeologists discovered that the San also used
snares to capture prey as early as 70 000 years ago (Wadley, 2010).
Traps and snares have an economic dimension since they reduce the costs of a long search by
bringing the animal to the hunter, rather than requiring that the hunter go after meat (Wadley,
2010). Since the prey was captured remotely, these devices created time and space for hunters to
engage in other activities that included social activities such as rituals.