Life
There’s a Dutch series called Tina in Sexbierum I highly recommend to watch. Tina is an Iranian artist who moved to a small Frisian community, after living for many years in Amsterdam. She was uprooted from Teheran when she was 12, and she can’t go back. Not to her childhoods’ home, not to her grandparents’ place, andnot to the graves of her ancestors.
What makes her story sharper than it first appears: she lands in a place with a very specific culture of its own. The Frisians have a word for it: mienskip. It means something like community spirit, mutual aid, local solidarity. The idea that you take care of each other, that you show up, that belonging is earned through presence. For Tina, that’s both a wall and a door.
That triggers something. Kinship isn’t only about who you know. It’s also about the place that shaped you, and what remains when that place becomes unreachable.
Then there’s Ghost Elephants, a film by Werner Herzog.
It’s a great film. It’s about origin stories too: where do we come from, and where do we go? In a beautiful way. There’s a guy called Steve Boyes, an explorer and conservation biologist, who wants to come face to face with the ghost elephant. The largest elephant ever documented is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the Fénykövi elephant, named after the Hungarian hunter who killed it in 1955, and it has never been spotted again. The film follows his expedition to the high plains of Angola, where the elephants are said to live.
The last known San master trackers lead the way in a world where they can read sand, prints, and the environment like we read a newspaper. That’s not a trick. It’s a knowledge system thousands of years old that doesn’t fit in a manual.
I won’t spoil the rest of the story, because it’s not a National Geographic story in the traditional sense. It’s about the people who live there, like the San people, and the idea that we are all originally San. Human migration started there, spreading out during the ice ages.
If you’re hunting for the ghost elephant, do you really want to find it? Or is the search itself the thing that keeps us going, keeps us connected?
I once rafted the mighty Zambezi, in Zimbabwe. I know the big rivers. The Congo. The Okavango Delta, where Frans Lanting made such beautiful photographs. But I never connected the dots.
Where do they originate? All three of those great rivers flow from the same source: the central plateau of Angola. One source, three directions, three continental waterways feeding ecosystems and societies. And that plateau is largely unreachable, so it’s largely untouched.
This is where Steve Boyes comes back in. Long before Ghost Elephants, he had already been working his way upstream. Since 2015, leading the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project, he and his team paddled over 7,400 miles of rivers in dugout canoes to trace the headwaters of the Okavango, the Zambezi and the Congo. What they found changed the map.
The Angolan Highlands aren’t just high ground. They are a vast network of ancient source lakes and peatlands, sponge-like formations that filter and store water before slowly releasing it into the rivers downstream. Boyes named it the Angolan Highlands Water Tower, and his research confirmed it is Africa’s second largest peatland discovery, providing roughly 95 percent of the water that sustains the Okavango Delta. A concept, he noted, that was previously unrecognized.
There’s a systemic logic in that which hits me as a designer: everything is connected, but the connection itself stays invisible until you read the map differently. Upstream. Back to the source.
In “Ghost Elephants”, the Western people first have to spend time with the Bushmen and the trackers before they are taken seriously. Eat together, live together. Waiting. Not for results, but for trust.
This is where mienskip and the San community spirit start to rhyme with each other. Both are built on the same bedrock: presence over transaction, time over efficiency, showing up before you’re needed. The Frisians call it by name. The San live it through every shared meal, every tracked footprint, every story told with the body. Different latitudes, same logic.
But what really struck me is how the San people tell their stories. It’s not only the clicking sounds or the voice. It’s the physical expression, the body. The film opens with an elder showing how elephants move. Not with words. With his whole body. The way he stretches, shifts his weight, lets his neck drop. It’s somewhere between play, gesture, and dance. You understand the elephant in those few seconds in a way no encyclopedia can give you. That bodily expression is so beautiful and so powerful. It’s clear in a way that words cannot be.
I want to be honest here: I don’t want to idealize village life in the Netherlands or Angola. In Sexbierum there’s gossip and nastiness too. And the same goes for the San people: there’s conflict, stealing, all of it. But the core principles of that society are so different from the fast-paced modern Western city.
We’ve sliced and diced and containerized everything into disciplines, roles, meetings and deliverables. Is that really the way forward? How do we integrate things, how do we really listen? Maybe mienskip is not just a Frisian curiosity. Maybe it’s a trace of something much older, still alive in places where people haven’t yet optimized it away. Something for later.
Three stories, two films, one theme. Kinship.
Tina, who can no longer visit the place that formed her, finding herself in a community where belonging requires showing up. Steve Boyes, searching for an elephant that may no longer exist. Three rivers all originating on a fairytale plateau high up in the sky. And San elders telling with their bodies what words cannot capture.
All those stories are about the same thing: the urge to understand where we come from, and what that means for who we are now. Not as abstract philosophy, but as a tangible question. Who are the people that came before you? Which place shaped you? And what connects you, really, to others?
Werner Herzog captures that kind of question better than anyone. Not with answers, but with images that stay with you. Watch Ghost Elephants, not for the answer, but for the search.
Watch Tina in Sexbierum on NPO Start Watch Ghost Elephants in a Cinema near you! Trailer on YouTube
“I Wish to Be a Lucky Hunter” by Bushmen of The Kalahari feat. Pops Mohamed, a 1995 field recording remastered in 2024, in which South African multi-instrumentalist Pops Mohamed spent years in the Kalahari recording San musicians and weaving their sounds into new forms. He said it best himself: “If people don’t understand where they come from, there is a hole in their soul.”[3]
Listen on: Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube
Now look at your own map. And read it upstream.