There is so much laughter here. This whole day just felt like play. These are the opening lines of a journal entry I wrote on the first night of a week-long stay with a Hai//om San community in central-northern Namibia, southern Africa. This community is home to about three hundred Hai//om people, nearly all of them living in extreme poverty. Over half of the community is unemployed, individuals live in rusted zinc houses (most without running water), and they all rely on a few individuals with vehicles for transportation. Despite these very real troubles, I laughed more during my week with the Hai//om than I have in months in my home in the United States.
There is an infectious joy and openness pouring from Hai//om adults and children alike, and I believe it is because they retain elements of humanity’s evolved nest that the West has forgotten. An invaluable component of the evolved nest is self-directed social play, and I witnessed this almost constantly during my time with the Hai//om. The first night of my visit, I walked around various houses and observed groups of children playing together with no adults in sight. I watched from afar as a group of three boys and one girl, ages ranging from about five to eight years old, crouched in the dirt, huddled around a pile of sticks and leaves, absorbed in the task of creating something together. Another two kids, who looked to be about eight or nine years old ran past me, shortly followed by a younger child of about four years old toddling after them. There were children everywhere, wandering between homes with each other, giggling and yelling with delight. There seemed to be no segregation based on age or gender, and it was impossible to tell which children were related to one another and which child lived where. The children in this community, barring those who traveled to other towns to attend school, spend the majority of their time outside, engaging in unstructured, unsupervised play with multiple-aged playmates.
Developmental science and anthropological research show us that this type of play is our human heritage and is essential for building species-normal core values like cooperation, empathy, and autonomy (Gleason et al., 2021; Gray, 2014). Studies of hunter-gatherer play show that mixed age play is more nurturing than competitive play, as cooperation is enhanced when older children can guide younger ones (Gray, 2013, p. 25). Childhood play is associated with enhanced regulation of the brain’s stress response system and control of aggressive urges (Hatfield & Williford, 2017; van den Berg et al., 1999). The Hai//om children in the community were quite socially skilled, showing curiosity instead of fear towards strangers like myself and my colleagues. Their play-centered lifestyle supports right brain development, allowing them to build socioemotional intelligence, empathy, and self-regulation.
What I admired most about the Hai//om was that play is not limited to children; it is the heart of daily life throughout the lifespan. The purpose of my visit was to assist with a community-based theatre project funded by Kalahari Peoples Fund, and the creators of the production were members of the Hai//om Cultural Group. This group is a collection of adults aged twenty one to forty one, as well as a guest member in his seventies. My days were primarily spent with this group of seventeen people, and they exuded playfulness almost every moment. We spent hours on the first day listening to folk stories passed down from generations, the whole group laughing hysterically as each person told their favorite story. We played games, sang, and danced together daily, even after eight hours outside under the sweltering sun. There was almost no tension or fighting over ideas in the process of creating the theater production. In the rare moments that one member insisted on implementing his idea, the rest of the group teased him and laughed until he gave in, a situation that parallels evidence of hunter-gatherer San teasing hunters when their ego inflates (Lee, 2013, p. 57). Even the guest member, a deeply respected elder of the community, joined us in play, taking on a silly persona in part of the production and participating in dancing and other games with the group. The group as a whole welcomed my colleagues and me into their world with open arms. I was struck by the dissonance of how they were able to endure such economic hardship while maintaining a baseline of laughter and positivity. Beyond their playfulness, they displayed genuine care for us and made me feel like I belonged there. Community just seemed to form naturally in a way that I have not experienced in the current age of isolation in the United States.
As incredible as these observations were to my Western mind, they fit nicely with the wealth of research on the San and other hunter-gatherer societies. The Hai//om are a cultural sub-group of the San, often referred to as San Bushmen, a peoples indigenous to southern Africa. The San have been extensively studied by anthropologists as a hallmark example of our human heritage as small-band hunter gatherers, and genetic evidence suggests that all modern humans are descents of the San (Schlebusch, 2020). They are widely documented as being fiercely egalitarian, a species-normal disposition that playfulness fosters (Lee, 2013). For ninety nine percent of our existence as a species, humans lived as small-band hunter gatherers and raised children in accordance with the evolved nest. It makes sense that modern San communities display the egalitarian, compassionate nature presumed present in our ancestors, as their hunter-gather past is far less distant than that of people in the industrialized, Western world.
While some San groups remain as hunter-gatherer societies to this day, the Hai//om were brutally evicted from their land in the 1960s, forcing them to adapt to the market economy. Although the Hai//om I interacted with are no longer nomadic foragers, they maintain elements of the evolved nest, such as self-directed social play and a welcoming community of support, that allow them to exhibit positive mental health and resilience in adulthood despite systemic marginalization and poor living conditions. While rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness skyrocket in the West, even among those with high socioeconomic status, the Hai//om are connected, joyful, and present. The Hai//om revealed to me a key ingredient for happiness that the West seems to be missing, life-long play!
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