The Lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land

By Patric Tariq Mellet

In this radical critique of established pre-colonial and colonial history, Mellet centres land dispossession, the destruction of livelihoods and the brutality of slavery in South Africa. Drawing on scholarly work and his own experience of searching for identity, Mellet provides a bold new perspective on the loss of land and belonging. Characters such as Autshumao, Krotoa and Doman come to life in the story of the founding of a port at Cape Town – over 50 years before Jan van Riebeeck arrived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780624089711

Patric Tariq Mellet

PATRIC TARIQ MELLET is a former liberation movement cadre and a resident cultural and history analyst on Cape Talk. In 2009 his work on the intangible heritage received a Western Cape Provincial Honours award. In 2019 the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture appointed him to the Governance Council of the South African Heritage Resources Agency. 

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PATRIC TARIQ MELLET

A decolonised history of land

TAFELBERG

Preface

What is it that motivates me to write about the loss of land, the loss of belonging and the loss of identity here at the southern tip of Africa? Is it just that I am deeply bothered by the vast expanse of shacks across half of the Cape Flats and Cape Peninsula where every rainy season people are flooded out of the only place that they call home, and every windy season they are burnt out? Could it be that I am disturbed about how many people on the Cape Flats are backyard dwellers where three or more families share tiny sub-economic homes and most are unemployed, with communities besieged by gangs wreaking havoc and death rates usually associated with wars? Or is that a culture of brutality and violence in general, and against women and children in particular, has become so entrenched that society as a whole now hardly blinks an eye when figures such as 47 for deaths and an equal numbers for rapes in just one Cape Town district are reported on most weekends?

Or is it the stark poverty and nothingness that greets me when travelling to rural areas where each smart, predominantly white town has what can only be described as a segregated dormitory ‘slavery town’ next to it? Is it because 25 years after the fall of apartheid there is little evidence of agrarian reform in these same rural districts? Or perhaps my focus results from the fact that I spent much of my life as a freedom fighter with many years in underground resistance and then more in exile, active in the broad liberation movement? Is it that I am afraid of the consequences for our country of what the poet Langston Hughes called ‘a dream deferred’?

All these questions contribute to my consciousness. But my motivation goes back all the way to my own childhood and personal experiences and feelings of homelessness, a lack of belonging, exploitation, and trying to recover an identity that had been erased as a result of social engineering.

As a child, two things stood out for me. The first was that my single mother and I did not have a place called home. Mum, a low-paid laundry worker in District Six, rented rooms in other people’s homes and moved about frequently. In her room she would have a bed, an ablutions bucket, a basin for bathing, a Primus stove for cooking, a table and a chair. It was a Spartan existence.

Much of the time she could not have me with her, so I was fostered by three different families before I was six years old. The trajectory of my life from there was a short stint with my mother, and then into a brutal children’s asylum, next into an industrial trade school, and at the end of my 15th year into a factory to work. There was never any sense of ‘home’. No sense of belonging, except perhaps to District Six where my mother worked and where she took me with her to her workplace during those periods that I lived with her. In the District my mum was known as ‘Cleaners’ and I was ‘Cleaners’ Boy’, and that was about as much a sense of belonging and identity that I had in my upbringing.

My lack of rootedness also arose out of my dysfunctional family life. My mother, who was 40 years old when I was born, had had four other children before me, one of whom had died. Mum had been divorced from her children’s father and then briefly had a relationship with my father. My father, or sire, as he is known to his many children by different mothers, had been born in District Six. He was a shoemaker working in a factory near the garment factory where my mother had been working at that time. They were never married and they acrimoniously parted ways when I was just 18 months old. At the time I was in hospital recovering from third-degree burns over my upper body as a result of a Primus-stove cooking accident at home. Sixty years after my accident, the Primus stove is still a symbol of poverty in South Africa.

Mum’s mainstay was her matriarchal extended family – my grandmother and my mum’s older sister, Doll. It was at this time that apartheid was being ushered in. ‘Race’ classification had a devastating effect on our family that were a mix of people who would be classified as Coloured, Indian and White. (As will be shown in the book, this classification system defied the fact that those classified as ‘Coloured’ have 195 roots of origin, the vast majority of whom were Africans, with Asian and some European admixture.) My grandmothers were ‘Coloured’ and my grandfathers white, my Aunty Doll’s husband was Indian, and my cousins had features ranging from the darkest Asian looks to the fairest of European complexions.

Apartheid with its race classification, group areas, separate amenities, prohibition of mixed marriages, and immorality legislation decimated a family that was as multi-ethnic as ours. As poor people, the adults, all women, also relied heavily on one another economically and for practical and moral support, especially with us kids. Under the new apartheid laws, the assault on family life became too much for my mother’s sister. Aunty Doll and her entire brood of children and grandchildren moved to the United Kingdom to get away from the classification monster and its impact on lives. Only one son stayed on and became a seaman who spent much of his time on the high seas while his wife and children remained in Grassy Park in Cape Town.

My mum was then very much on her own with her fatherless child. In desperation, she placed an advert in a weekly church newspaper asking for a family to take me in as one of their own. That was my third foster home, where I spent two years in a family that had eight children. Mum had a nervous breakdown and was in no position to work, nor to look after herself and take care of me. I was aware enough to know that she felt alone and vulnerable, having lost her family support structure.

It was at this point that as an eight-year-old I briefly came under the influence of a German nun from the Holy Cross Convent in District Six, who did my mother a favour by looking after me sometimes when she could not take me along to her workplace because of company inspectors’ visits.

Sister Mary Martin became my part-time carer for a while. She had a devotion to the Peruvian slave saint Martino de Porres of Lima and I would often see her kneeling at the feet of St Martin’s statue, talking to him. A white woman asking for guidance from a statue of a long-dead black man was a sight to behold for a kid whose family life had been so disrupted by the apartheid system. Through storytelling, Sister Mary Martin introduced me to San Martino de Porres and to the history of slavery and the connection that the people around her in District Six had to the enslaved at the Cape. The stories captivated me and provided me with a key to understanding what the deeper sense of ‘belonging’ was all about. It was my first experience of being able to associate deeply with anything. District Six and Marty, as I called him, became my muses for life.

As I grew up, I came to learn of my own family heritage rooted in the African and Asian enslaved and in local indigenous African peoples. I learnt about white people owning Africans and Asians as slaves – people who were treated worse than animals. People who got no compensation at all, not even the measly five rand per week my mother was earning from Monday to Saturday at the Hanover Street laundry shop. Over time I came to learn that 24 of my own ancestors were Africans and Asians who were enslaved, and to this day I have a soul connection to African and Asian cultures.

I learnt that I was part of a bigger whole – ‘our’. In the mid-1960s when the destruction of District Six and forced removals under the ethnic cleansing brought on by the Group Areas Act of 1950 began, my child’s mind was horrified about this wrenching of people from their homes and from the land under their feet. What had once been wastelands on the Cape Flats became the dumping grounds for those removed from ‘grey areas’ (so-called racially mixed suburbs) across the southern suburbs of Cape Town from Sea Point to Simon’s Town.

Father Vincent O’Gorman, an old non-conformist Irish priest, was my high-school history teacher in standard six. On the first day of class, he dramatically threw the history textbook into the rubbish bin while loudly exclaiming: ‘Propaganda! Rubbish! I will not teach you this rubbish. At the end of the year before you write exams, I will coach you about what the Education Department wants, but until then we will explore history. Official histories are versions. There are always other versions. Don’t even accept mine. I want you to remember this throughout your lives.’ And so it came to be that a young boy had an early awakening to a lifelong path of struggling against racism, apartheid and dispossession on the path to freedom.

Though unable to continue my schooling beyond a trade-school junior certificate, I was an avid reader who sought out books about African, Asian and Latin American struggle heroes and their beliefs. I was particularly drawn to Latin American liberation theologians, some of who were among the most radical leaders of that time. I embarked on a path of self-education and lifelong learning and would eventually attain an MSc degree in my mid-40s through self-funded part-time night study.

Over time I would, by taking the step of commitment to liberation, find myself in a position to learn at the feet of such great leaders as OR Tambo, Dan Thloome, Henry ‘Squire’ Makgothi, Ray Alexander, Ruth Mompati, Sophie de Bruyn, Reg September, Wolfie Kodesh, Archie Sibeko, Joe Slovo and so many more. I was fortunate later to undergo liberation movement training and mentorship under one of South Africa’s foremost academic thinkers, Professor Jack Simons. Jack did much to help me understand and make sense of who I was and what all the ingredients were that made up identity. Joe Slovo and Jabulani Mzala Nxumalo were others who contributed to that learning curve. I was furnished with the basic intellectual tools that assisted me to explore the wonderful world of identity when colour, ‘race’, ethnicity, ideology, primacy and nationalism of any type are removed from the picture.

This is how it came to be that I took my studious interest in Southern African social history to a new level. The themes of subjugation of indigenous peoples, land dispossession and expropriation of labour without compensation, loss of independent livelihoods, loss of African social infrastructure, and the brutalisation of slavery all came into focus. I have travelled the world, visiting and living in over thirty countries, and seen war and peace, affluence and poverty. In none of the societies I observed was the rich–poor divide as great as it is in South Africa. The dialectical relationship between loss and denial of home or land on the one hand, and enslavement or expropriation of unpaid labour on the other, is the theme that runs through every black person’s experience in South Africa. It deeply impacts the soul of people.

In recent years, writers such as Botlhale Tema in Land of My Ancestors (2019) and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi in The Land is Ours (2018) have begun different conversations about land, slavery and the genesis of what we call the ‘land question’ today. The narrative of this book joins in conversation with theirs in exploring what Africans lost through the colonial expropriation of land and, by extension, home, belonging, identity, soul, support systems and social cohesion.

The year 1652 has been presented as the genesis of social history in South Africa, and of human advancement and civilisation of Africans. Our history was relegated to the realm of the natural history framework of Iron Age and Stone Age hominins. African social history as taught by institutions of learning in South Africa was said to have begun with the establishment of a European colony in 1652. This can be referred to as the ‘1652 paradigm’. Despite an abundance of research from a range of academic fields that exposes the fallacy of this paradigm, it is still widely entrenched. The aim of this book is to break out of this constricting approach and look at African social history from long before 1652 and beyond this paradigm, incorporating key parts of history that have been ignored by mainstream studies or have remained restricted to academic debate and discourse that seldom reaches the public arena.

Five themes will be explored in five chapters. The book draws on studies in the fields of history, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, rock art, anthropology, climatology, social history and oral history to contrast some of the latest thinking with colonial and neocolonial interpretations.

The first chapter challenges the colonial myth that presents 17th-century southern Africa as ‘an empty land’ free of Africans, save for a few wandering San and Khoe who conveniently had no interest in or consciousness of land ownership. It also debunks the myth that at about the same time of European exploration of what is now South Africa, a mass invasion of black alien people swooped down from Nigeria, Cameroon and the Great Lakes and tried to wrest the land from the San, Khoe and Europeans. The chapter provides a narrative that contests the colonial ‘empty land’ narrative by looking at the period from 1000 BCE until 1652 CE. By taking a social history approach, it fundamentally challenges the colonial constriction of African people’s progress to a version of natural history. Its focus is on the peopling of southern Africa over 3 000 years and the trajectory of social formation over that time.

The second chapter looks at Khoe and European engagement over 52 years prior to 1652, involving the establishment of a Khoe trader community, and the first ‘hot war’ between the Dutch and the Khoe that led to the expulsion of all Khoe communities from the Cape Peninsula. The loss of the first indigenous direct-trading development by the Khoe at the hands of the Dutch generally does not feature in other historical narratives. This story culminates with Van Riebeeck’s words written by his own hand in his journal: ‘We had to tell them that their land had fallen to us by the sword.’ This debunks the version that all land acquired by Europeans was by means of civilised treaties and fair bargaining.

The third chapter moves from the genesis of land dispossession at the shoreline frontier to look at the four instruments of land dispossession as well as the nineteen wars of dispossession over 227 years that resulted in the formation of the Cape Colony. Along this trajectory, one community of Africans after the other faced a range of atrocities and dispossession of land and livelihoods, and became conquered subjects of colonial rule. Against this background, the chapter raises the issue of ‘crimes against humanity’ as described in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and asks whether politicians’ articulation of restorative justice as a call for ‘expropriation of land without compensation’ should not be formulated differently.

The fourth chapter tackles the often-forgotten question of who added productive value to the land seized by the Europeans from indigenous Africans. This is the story of migrants of colour largely forcibly brought to the Cape as enslaved people from elsewhere in Africa and from Asia. It is made clear that without the skills and labour of enslaved and later also indentured and migrant workers, there would not have been towns and villages, road infrastructure, built environments and land transformed into productive farms. Commanders and governors of the early Cape constantly appealed to the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) for slave labour and skills, as the Europeans were unable to do the required work for ultimate European control of the land and could not meet the increasing demand by passing vessels for produce and services.

The fifth chapter argues that, to understand the loss of land and the historical narrative beyond a 1652 colonial paradigm, we must also deal with the question of alienation from the land and its relationship to loss of identity, namely de-Africanisation as part of an imposed ideological framework. It also looks at the ties that bind us as Africans of diverse ethnicities and cultures, particularly our common cause of facing the adversity of crimes against humanity and transcending that adversity. Divide-and-rule strategies relied on the de-Africanisation of local identities that had evolved over 3 000 years, rationalised local identities, and created two silos of Africans labelled ‘Natives’ and ‘Coloureds’.

In the conclusion, I turn to contemporary times and argue that, in the context of restorative justice, decolonisation should be understood in a much more comprehensive way than is suggested by the narrowly framed ‘land question’.

All histories are versions, and this book, like all works, is a version or interpretation of a lived reality and a path of learning. In making my thoughts and explorations part of public discourse, I am opening this narrative to engagement by others with a wide array of views that may challenge my own – that is the nature of discourse. There are a great many fascinating perspectives in other works, and I encourage all to explore these. My only caution is that, as soon as someone presents their version as being the absolute truth rather than a perspective, healthy distrust should set in.

My sincere wish is for people to explore beyond the imposed borders – physical or mental – no matter whether this comes from the colonial or neocolonial corner or from new gatekeepers of what may be considered to be politically correct or ethnically correct. The citations in this book are not there simply to accredit authors or to back up arguments. They are also intended to assist exploration by providing references to enable readers to consult the sources themselves and formulate their own perspectives.

A need has been expressed for an easy reference work on the subject of the history of African loss of land and sustainable livelihoods, the breakdown of structures of social cohesion and the deconstruction of culture, as well as enslavement and expropriation of labour without compensation. While the book is an attempt to meet this need, it is by far not a comprehensive account of all facets of our past. It is a simple reader covering just five broad areas to encourage people to explore our past and not just accept the stunted version of history they may have been taught at school. There is also a need articulated by many who cry out for belonging and reunion with ancestral roots lost in the sands of time as land and people were removed from each other. For memories to heal, the memory must be restored and shared. Bringing to light the history that has been hidden is the start of a process of restorative memory that is vital to restorative justice.

PATRIC TARIQ MELLET

Introduction

A story is like a wind blowing from afar and you feel it … it floats to your ear.¹

ǀǀKabbo, ǀXam storyteller

In South Africa today we have manifestations of xenophobia, ‘tribal’ and ethnic chauvinism, racism, narrow Verwoerdian ethno-nationalism, as well as dubious claims of being ‘First People’ and all sorts of contestations rooted more often than not in the championing of relatively modern identity formations within a European-defined national territory – South Africa – which did not even exist before 1910. Alongside this is a historical construct of European colonialism and white supremacy that still dominates the history landscape of South Africa. All the above-mentioned manifestations feed off this root narrative.

In 1980, Shula Marks,² a South African historian at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), inspired a new generation of historians and social scientists to break out of the previous colonial paradigm in the arena of social history at universities in South Africa. Her critique was made against the backdrop of the fact that, at the very formation of university institutions in South Africa, an unhealthy funding relationship in return for doing research for ‘native policy’ or ‘resolving the native problem’ on behalf of the government³ gave rise to a colonial trajectory of thinking rather than independent academic inquiry. In her paper about the ‘empty land’ myth, Marks⁴ says:

While there are many questions that remain unanswered and are perhaps unanswerable, recent research has provided a radical reinterpretation of South Africa’s past; a reinterpretation which challenges so many of the preconceived stereotypes which still serve to legitimise the Republic’s apartheid practices …

South Africa came into being as a unified entity as a result of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) fought between the British and two independent Boer republics established by the Dutch-speaking descendants of European settlers outside of the British Cape and Natal Colonies. After the British victory, the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 out of four surviving territories as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, with provincial boundaries established and an agreement on a national border.

In 1911, in a process of divide and rule, a range of different African peoples were bureaucratically deprived of their African identity by being labelled ‘Coloured’ while yet others were labelled ‘Natives’, with over fifty ethnic groups⁵ reduced to nine linguistic-based national formations that were imposed on them. In 1913 the new Union government enacted a devastating Land Act, which effectively consolidated and affirmed possession of all land seized by white colonists since 1652 in the previous two British colonies and former Boer republics and restricted African landownership to the 13% of land that had not been expropriated.

When waving a flag created 25 years ago, shouting that we are proudly South African and ‘othering’ those considered outsiders and deemed to be aliens, we forget this fact that the Union of South Africa and its borders were created as part of a peace treaty ending the Anglo-Boer War and with total disregard for the communities through which these borders rode roughshod. Neither the borders nor the name ‘South Africa’ had the blessing of the majority of people forced into that framework.

The post-1994 democratic republic of South Africa inherited this 1910 configuration of the country with its internationally recognised borders. There was no resolution to the ‘land question’ in all its many facets, and the deeper spiritual connection to land and belonging remains unaddressed 25 years into post-apartheid South Africa. Part of the alienation still prevalent in our society is due to the fact that African social history has also been erased and replaced with a narrative that justifies expropriation of land from Africans by Europeans.

We were raised on a distorted colonial and apartheid narrative which said that there was a sudden wave of northern ‘Bantu’, alternatively ‘black’ or ‘Nguni’, alien invaders of South Africa in the period of the 15th to 17th centuries, who allegedly stomped over people the writers called ‘Bushmen’ (San) and ‘Hottentots’ (Khoe). The latter were said to have been a few nomadic ‘noble savages’ in a relatively unpopulated Cape who, according to this same slanted narrative, were conveniently almost wiped out by a smallpox epidemic. The cornerstone of this thinking was first expressed by the historian George McCall Theal (1837–1919), whose work is peppered with references to Africans as ‘barbarous’. According to Theal, ‘The country was not the Bantu’s originally any more than the White man’s, because the Bantu were also immigrants.’⁶

Constructed identities and terminology

The constructed stereotypical and amalgamated identities of the San and the Khoe were presented as ‘Khoisan’, which was later given an attribute of ‘brown-ness’ by colonists. Other Africans were projected as the so-called alien enemy of ‘brown’ people and were given the overlay of ‘blackness’. In the 1970s, PW Botha’s ‘Stratcom Counter-Insurgency Strategy’ and ‘Total National Strategy’ turned towards a policy of ‘toenadering’ (Coloured alignment with white Afrikaners) aimed at ‘Coloured’ people.⁷

Through both overt and covert tactics, this policy sought to inculcate a spirit of ‘die bruin Afrikaner’ (the brown Afrikaner) and superiority over those classified as ‘black’. Under these strategies, linkages were forged between state-created subversive organisations such as Boerevolk and elements in the Cape (Coloured) Corps in the South African Defence Force (SADF), educationists and clergymen to influence the mainstream and intelligentsia on to a schismatic path. The aim was to break any form of resistance unity by fomenting ‘Coloured’ and ‘Khoisan’ nationalism. This mischief included stoking counter-antagonism among those classified ‘black’ towards those classified ‘Coloured’.

All these terms – ‘Coloured’, Khoe, San, Khoisan, Bantu, Nguni and the ethnicised later usage of the term ‘black’ in South Africa since its promulgation in 1977 – are colonial constructs. ‘Black’ as an official ethnic term was specifically created after the 1976 anti-Bantu Education protests to defuse anger and to undermine the Black Consciousness Movement. All these terms are loaded, and each has a history rooted in racist ethnographic and anthropological studies where notions of race, intelligence and criminality were constructed to create a colonial and apartheid legal framework to control black people. Some may argue that terms do not matter, but I posit that they do. They can be shown to have played a major role in distorting historical narratives, and like a virus they infect the intellectual legacy of the future.

In time the colonial academic world went a step further and intellectually wiped out the existence of the San and the Khoe in the interest of the colonial government by asserting that these peoples no longer existed except in the form of a genetic fingerprint. The de-Africanisation of the San and the Khoe and their enforced assimilation into a constructed ‘Coloured’ identity has resulted in cultural genocide on a grand scale in South Africa. The first step in controlling communities is the obliteration of memory and the deconstruction of culture, replacing it with void, and then creating a new construct.

Bernedette Muthien,⁸ in expressing her own rootedness as a person of San and Khoe heritage, recalls Yvette Abrahams⁹ expressing how she felt when a white university tutor delivering a course on the Khoe once emphatically stated that the Khoe and their culture no longer existed, saying: ‘No, physically there may be some genetic (Khoe) mixtures still around but their culture is extinct …’ Abrahams explained the effect of this statement on her as a Khoe descendant: ‘This white man came to extinguish my community and my culture in a sentence. And me with them, for who am I without my community and culture?’ Abrahams¹⁰ recalls the experience as one of ‘symbolic genocide’.

At another level, some sectors of our society have unfortunately been beguiled by a neocolonial mindset that has adopted the division of African identity. So, they see Khoe and San as a separate ‘race’ from those other peoples who celebrate a Pan-African identity alongside singular community identities. This plays into the constructed colonial identities that had been set up to be antagonistic towards one another. Consequently, one finds a narrative saying that some are ‘black’ and ‘alien’ and others are ‘brown’ and indigenous. Then an ethno-nationalist paradigm of ‘firstism’ joins in a cocktail of racism to make bizarre and unfounded claims. ‘Firstism’ is a concept usually linked to ‘nation’ or nationalism. It involves the elevation of an ethnic or race group to having primacy of rights before any other or to the exclusion of rights of others, and is premised on ‘right of first occupation’ of a territory or a claim of having originated in a specific territory. Indigenous peoples’ rights to be neither marginalised nor to face discrimination and to enjoy equality are not the same as ‘firstism’, though sometimes a few project it as such.

I use the term ‘indigenous’ guardedly, as it is generally an adjective referring to flora and fauna ‘occurring naturally’ and, in my opinion, can reduce the human being to that level. It has simply been pinned onto ‘othered’ human beings and is also closely related to the term ‘native’, which was adopted by Europeans after conquest when liberalism painted a veneer of patronising enlightenment and the championing of ‘upliftment’ of those conquered. For me, ‘indigenous’ with its many and contradictory meanings is a zoologist’s, ethnographer’s and anthropologist’s appendage. The English noun for a person identifying as indigenous to a locality, region or continent is ‘indigene’ (sometimes spelt with a capital letter). It begs the question as to why it has become entrenched convention to use an adjective instead of a noun.

This was first brought to my attention in West Africa, where people are referred to as indigenes of an area whereas plants and animals are indigenous. In South Africa, however, the noun ‘indigene’ does not seem to be commonly used. Hence for communication’s sake I mostly use ‘indigenous’ in this text, although there are also occasions where I have retained ‘indigenes’. This is an example of colonisation through language. Just because the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and various other European- and North American-dominated bodies have set the parameters for discourse and communication, it does not mean that Africans must fall in line. The European concept of ‘nations’ and the primacy concept of ‘first’ along with the term ‘indigenous’ are also colonial constructs which stymie and distort the way forward for decolonised discourse.

In the quest to discover and assert one’s roots and to revive memory, it is important to acknowledge that there are many who do not need to ‘revive’ the memory because they did not lose their culture and identity. Instead, they kept it alive under difficult and impossible circumstances. We need to be very careful that we do not buy into the notion that all forms of cultural survival just vanished. The flame of suppressed cultures has always burnt bright regardless of everything that has been thrown at it. Like all cultures, San and Khoe cultures have not remained static and have been moulded and creolised over time. Nobody engaging in revivalism should ride roughshod over San and Khoe communities that have survived the entire colonial and apartheid era and nurtured their culture at great cost. One is struck with awe when watching communities performing the rieldans and can see ancient culture in every move. There are so many manifestations of the living culture of San and Khoe that do not require a 7th- or 17th-century interpretation for authenticity. A contrived 7th- or 17th -century look based on colonial texts can certainly be questioned and even seen as an insult.

When some revivalist formations impinge on surviving San or Khoe communities in an opportunistic manner for gain and distort the legacy, this, too, is in many ways a form of cultural genocide. Revivalist communities have every right to express and celebrate their identity, but should first do thorough research to ensure that they are not overlooking surviving communities.

The historical narrative of this book tackles this ethno-nationalist ‘race’-antagonistic approach at its roots and argues that San and Khoe should never be marginalised from the broader African family of peoples of whom they are a part. We will never be able to tackle the very real discrimination and marginalisation faced by San and Khoe communities for as long as this neocolonial approach continues to be embraced. It is for this reason that the world consultative forums such as the UN, the ILO and the African Union (AU) refer to ‘indigenous communities who face discrimination and marginalisation’ when dealing with the experiences of the San, Nama, Korana, Griqua and Cape Khoe in South Africa.

A decade ago I had the pleasure to feature together with the late Dr Neville Alexander in a multi-media stage show called ‘Afrikaaps’, which was also the subject of a documentary by the same title made by Dylan Valley.¹¹ We were talking heads beamed onto a screen within the show performed by a talented group of young people who presented the alternative story of Afrikaans as a black language – Afrikaaps.

This production had a central attraction for both of us when we assisted the producers with their workshopping of the content of the show. It was that the content rejected the false separation and mischievously fanned antagonisms between slavery heritage, San and Khoe heritage, and the broader African heritage of Xhosa and other peoples, and rather emphasised the creolisation that occurred through common experiences of subjugation and resistance. The coming together of various tributaries of peoples in events around the Kai !Gariep River was explained by Alexander¹² as a reference point for understanding Cape cultural heritage:

The Gariep River is one of the major geographical features of this country. It traverses the whole of South Africa and its tributaries have their catchment areas in all parts of the country. It is also a dynamic metaphor, which gets us away from the sense of unchanging, eternal and god-given identities … It accommodates the fact that at certain times of our history, any one tributary might flow more strongly than the others, that new streamlets and springs come into being and add their drops to this or that tributary, even as others dry up and disappear; above all, it represents the decisive notion that the mainstream is constituted by the confluence of all the tributaries, ie that no single current dominates, that all the tributaries in their ever-changing forms continue to exist as such, even as they continue to constitute and reconstitute the mainstream …

Similarly, I used the Camissa River in Cape Town to explain the coming together of people in a common experience of adversity and resistance by local Africans of many roots as well as the African-Asian enslaved with diverse roots. The !Gariep and Camissa analogies pose an antithesis to narrow ethno-nationalism and notions of ‘race purity’.

The role of anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists

Much of the narrow ethno-nationalist thinking was part of the colonialisation imperative in the early emergence of South African universities and their ‘think-tank’ relationships with the new Union government that provided funding for the establishment of ethnography, linguistics, and anthropology departments to assist them with what was called the ‘native problem’ and resolution of the ‘land question’.¹³

Leonhard Schultze, Wilhelm Bleek (earlier for the Cape government), the Rev. WA Norton, AR Radcliffe-Brown, Isaac Schapera, Carl Meinhof and Nicolaas van Warmelo, a combination of conservative-right and liberal academics, are some of the people whose research helped to inform the Union government and its successor, the apartheid regime, on how to deal with ‘race’, land, language, culture and identity. This set the grounds for law-making and for national discourse about the majority African population that gave birth to the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, among other laws of dispossession.

In his book The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982), John W Cell¹⁴ takes an in-depth look at the relationship between race segregation in the United States of America (US) and separate development in the Union of South Africa. He tackles the respective approaches to what in South Africa was called the ‘native’ problem and in the US the ‘negro’ problem where intellectual race theories underpinned the trajectory of white supremacism. Thereby Cell links the South African story of race politics and intellectual thought to the global preoccupation with superior and inferior race pigeonholing.

Kirk Bryan Sides¹⁵ makes the point that

… apartheid was just as much a historical project as it was one that reached towards a racialist vision of the future. Through this anthropological work, the difference and resultant separation was made to look like a natural consequence of South Africa; that is, South Africa, its geography, its people, its races and cultures, etc. were seen to historically divide themselves naturally along racial and ethnic lines … However, the ideological and intellectual construction of apartheid, despite this ‘grounding’ rhetoric, was in many ways the result of transnational, and transoceanic, discourses on race …

In Chapter 1, we will look more closely at the anthropological activities of Leonhard Schultze in the early 20th century in German South West Africa (Namibia), during the period in which genocide was carried out on the Nama, San and Herero peoples by Germans. Schultze was the man who created the term ‘Khoisan’ and also argued for their extermination. He has also indelibly influenced ethnography and anthropology teaching in South African universities.

Sides goes on to explain the relationship between German race theories (including Germany’s extermination practices in genocide against the Namibians) and South African anthropology during the first four decades of the 20th century. This is framed as the ‘genealogy between the anthropological discipline of German "Afrikanistik which fell under the larger umbrella of Völkerkunde and its South African ethnological correlate, volkekunde … that ultimately culminated in the apartheid ideology … Drawing on a German tradition of philological classification, South African anthropology increasingly imagined a national taxonomy in which language was equal to both racial and geographical origins"’.¹⁶

Though the paradigm of thinking of the first four decades of the 20th century, as well as that of Hendrik Verwoerd’s ethno-nationalism and perpetual primitivisation overlay on African peoples, is widely rejected today, it is still flirted with by significant sectors of South African society – black and white. (Verwoerd, who was minister of ‘native affairs’ before he became prime minister in 1958, is regarded as the architect of apartheid.) New voices in the research arena have challenged the distortions that gained traction in the 20th century by using solid facts that expose a different narrative. Yet the influence of the earliest ethnography-anthropology thinkers that had pervaded all the social sciences by the 1950s still continues to be sanctioned today, despite much critique; hence the call for decolonisation in academic institutions.

* * *

Chapter 1 will take us on a journey of social history that began over 2 600 years before European shipping became a regular feature at the Cape of Good Hope. It addresses the disconnect between our older history of Africa, southern Africa and the peopling of the South, and the story of the clash between Europeans and the African land they colonised and the people they subjugated.

CHAPTER 1

Africa: Beginnings and challenging narratives

This chapter aims to cover in broad strokes the progression in the peopling of southern Africa and the civilisations of southern Africa from 3 000 years ago until the beginning of European colonisation in what is now South Africa. The discussion will be structured under the following themes:

•The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives

•The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives

•The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives

•Perspectives on the San foundation people

•Perspectives on the Khoe foundation people

•Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people

•A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from about 800 CE

•Slavery epochs as an influence on early migrations and identity formation

From the time of the emergence of Kemet (ancient Egypt) about 5 000 years ago,¹ African civilisations spread to include Nubia, Punt, Kerma, Kush, Carthage, Nok and Mauritania by 431 CE, and by this time the foundations of organised southern African societies were being established.

Here it is important to differentiate between the emergences of what are called advanced organised societies or civilisations, and the earliest emergence of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) and the many evolutionary phases through to Homo sapiens sapiens and then on to early Neolithic proto-societies. The Neolithic periods leading to the emergence of the various great civilisations started approximately 12 000 years ago and had different timelines in different parts of the world. ‘Neolithic’, or the later part of what archaeologists call the Stone Age, refers to the period when humans had started farming and domesticating animals, but still used stone instead of metal for making weapons and tools.

These proto-societies were the precursors of what we call ‘civilisations’: well-developed states of human society marked by numerically large numbers of organised people living