ABSTRACT
The nature of Bushman social organization coupled to the coercive nature of the authoritarian colonial state made violence the means of choice whereby Bushmen were to be controlled. There is irrefutable evidence that violence is indeed a feature of life in the northeastern Kalahari. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, Bushmen in the northeastern Kalahari were people without history and with ample time, and their history was the history of their struggle against the state. The decline of banditry in the northeastern Kalahari was characterized in one crucial respect by Bushmen being locked into a system of social relationships and political arrangements that made them "natural" bandits and outlaws. Bushmen bandits expressed a deep-seated unease with the state, with the very form of the state, as that magical harbinger of harmful benevolence. Bushmen living in such areas inevitably attached themselves to black households where their status approximated that of villenage.
