THE BUSHMAN MYTH REVISITED, Genocide, Dispossession and the Road to Servitude, with a folio of contemporary photographs by Margaret Courtney-Clarke

310pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, paperback, University of Namibia Press, Windhoek, 2025

ISBN: 9789994557448

This history of Namibia's Bushman population is a substantially reworked version of Robert J Gordon's path-breaking book The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass, originally published in the USA in 1992. It introduces much new material and brings fresh perspectives to bear on the subject through the lenses of settler colonialism and genocide, both transnational phenomena that place this case in a global frame.

"Few histories are as harrowing to document as exterminatory violence visited upon an entire social group, and the reduction of survivors to utter abjection - especially if the victims are one of humanity's ancestral cultures. Gordon accomplishes this task as regards Namibias Bushman population with analytical rigour, singular depth of scholarship, and deep-felt compassion. Lucid, incisive, and cogent, The Bushman Myth Revisited is requisite reading for an understanding not only of the Namibian Bushman experience under colonial rule, but also of the distinctive natures of both German and South African occupation of the territory." Mohamed Adhikari, author of The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples and Destroying the Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples

Namibian-born cultural anthropologist Robert J. Gordon is Emeritus Professor at the University of Vermont and a research associate at the University of the Free State. His other books include Ethnologists in Camouflage, Picturing Bushmen, The Enigma of Max Gluckman and Going Abroad: Travelling like an Anthropologist.