Читать книгу The Lie of 1652 - Patric Tariq Mellet - Страница 4

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.