Long an icon of popular culture, and a fixture in anthropological text books and films, and, more recently, a subject of anthropological and political controversy, the contemporary San (Bushmen, Basarwa) peoples are framed in contradictory ways. To some they represent the image of 'pristine' hunter-gatherers, a way of life like that of humanity's ancestors, a picture of authenticity in a world of false values. To others, they stand for the opposite, in many ways apartheid's most oppressed victims, marginalized minorities called into being by centuries of subordination and more recently by the forces of global capitalism.