Abstract: This paper examines inter-ethnic relations between subaltern groups, in this case, Herero settlers on San land in the large arid Omaheke region in Namibia. Its stimulus is a remark made by a Herero Genocide activist who when asked about the genocide of “Bushmen” responded: “They must organize. They are just bushmen.…” To make sense of this remark I examine the history of Herero/San relations by focusing on Herero colonization of San land and problematize San or Bushman servitude. I suggest environmental circumscription has increasingly limited Bushman exit options. On the level of meaning Herero ethnicity is enacted in everyday interactions ranging from razzias and villeinage, to rape and sexual exploitation and emphasize the lasting legacy of what Bourdieu terms “symbolic violence.” Noting the similarities between Afrikaner and Herero colonization of the region, who both classified and treated Bushmen as a pseudo-species, I suggest that their pastoralism was privileged as part of an expansive settler colonialism precisely for its capacity to possess and dispossess, to eliminate and replace, and to exterminate the original inhabitants.