The New Yorker, October 15, 1990 P. 78
REFLECTIONS about lions. In the 50s writer lived for some years among the Juwa and Gikwe Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. She went there with her parents & brother to record the Bushmen's way of life. Her own interest was in the lions. In the mid-80s she returned & found that the people & the lions had changed greatly. In the 50s the Kalahari Desert seemed remote. The Bushmen were the only people known to have lived there. In those days the Western Kalahari was still whole, a delicate ecosystem of enormous antiquity. Archeological work donce since the 50s shows encampments occupied more than 30,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherer economy as it was practiced by these people will probably prove to have been among the most successful human economies ever practiced if duration & stability measure success. Tells how in the 50s the people lived in peace with the lions who are not, dangerous when they aren't hunted. Describes the old way of living by the old rules. Tells about encounters with lions & observations about them. Changes occurred when farmers expanded their holdings & used more mechanized methods & introduced cattle. The lions becamse the unfortunates of the population-the poor. In the developint commercial farmlands of South-West Africa (now Namibia) almost all the lions were hunted out. In what was the western remnant of the lion nation, now separated from the eastern section by a belt of farms & settlements about 100 miles wide, an effort was made to preserve some of South-West Africa's wildlife by the creation of Etosha National Park. Tells about the park, which writer visited, and the controlled conditions there. Tells about lion behavior today in the wake of all the changes.