The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
in Namibia and Angola have all contributed to language destruction and the destruction of societies.
Jones46 illustrates this reality by showing how as a result of the SADF wars, engagements with various peoples and migration to South Africa from Angola and Namibia, the !Xun and Khwe peoples, relatively small communities, were exposed to multilingualism that has impacted negatively on the !Xun and Khwedam languages.
The example of language illustrates how identities and ethnicities also change over time and how societies do not remain static for thousands of years. For a long time there has been an erroneous view, now challenged by specialists in San and Khoe languages such as Menán du Plessis,47 that the suggested widespread borrowing from ‘Khoisan’ languages into the Nguni languages is supported by strong evidence. She argues that there are indications of influence in the reverse direction, and presents evidence, particularly with regard to the clicks used in Nguni languages being different from those that had been in the San languages.48
The clicks that occur in other Bantu languages to the north also present a challenge in that the cross-influences in language may have occurred much further back in time between forebear San and Bantu speakers outside of South Africa, given that San peoples resided as far north as Kenya, Zambia and northern Angola. In line with this book’s underlying theme of the story of ‘loss’, the point of these linguistic observations is to illustrate how assimilation and dominance negatively impacted language, leading to the loss of language, and contributing to marginalisation and discrimination.
Du Plessis49 unpacks the extinction of Kora or !Ora, one of the original languages of the Western Cape Khoe and the 19th-century Korana revivalists, to show how the language became extinct over time as a result of wars, migration and generational changes, and was replaced by Afrikaans.
Once, there were more languages of the Khoe peoples, who were spread throughout Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mpumalanga, KZN, Swaziland, Mozambique as well as right down to the Cape. These languages would have died out and joined with other languages as Khoe foundation peoples assimilated into new societies along with other groups. From a practical perspective, Nama or Khoekhoegowab, which was initially the language of the upper West Coast and Namibia, offers a language for Korana, Griqua and Cape Khoe revivalists as it has official status in Namibia and thrives in institutions of learning. Khoekhoegowab clearly links in to Kora and older languages that are now extinct. It may offer a restorative path for revival of a Khoe language for some in South Africa and should be recognised as an official language.
As will be seen later on, some of the speakers of the Namib-Kgalagadi-Gariep languages are evidenced to have been part of the evolution of society that formed the multi-ethnic Mapungubwe state or kingdom as the beginning of an age of southern African kingdom formation – our southern African civilisation. We can only speculate as to which language or languages or language combinations were spoken or developed under these circumstances. There is a dialectical relationship between the formation of societies and language, but up to now this social history has largely been unknown to those looking at linguistics and genetics.
Each of the different micro-communities developing in southern Africa between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE is likely to have moved along different paths of development, with some following migratory drifts and others not, some cultivating crops and others not, some keeping sheep and others not, and others practising various combinations of all three modes of living. Some engaged in mining, metallurgy and craftsmanship as well.
There is clarity that various San peoples across southern Africa cannot be stereotyped as simply having been hunter-gatherers, living in isolation or as nomads, and then be treated as a species or ‘race’ with a completely separate lived reality from other Africans.
There is also the notion that San people wandered about naked or near naked, which is debunked by Vibeke Viestad50 in her work on ‘dress as social relations’. Despite there being over twenty surviving San peoples in six countries, there are claims that all San people look alike, have a single culture and a single language, and are short in stature, have light skin colour and specific features as per race arguments. The book Voices of the San51 provides a photographic overview of the many San communities in southern Africa, including the photographs of the 17 San authors of the book, which demolishes this myth. There is also the mid-19th-century collection of portrait photographs by Gustav Fritsch52 that shows photos of San people who defy the stereotype. Prins53 and others peel back the curtain on the ‘Secret San’ of the Drakensberg among the Zulu people, known by a range of names from AbaTwa to ||Xegwi, where this community also does not fit the stereotype.
This kind of racialising and colourising of San and Khoe social identities is deeply rooted in reaction to disparaging colonial paradigms of thinking related to ‘colourising’ identity and the rejection of a constructed ‘Coloured’ identity based on miscegenation, instead of a focus on social identity. In taking a position against ‘Coloured’ terminology, an equally colourist approach is adopted by some who created another colourist paradigm of ‘brown and black’ in response. Adhikari,54 also drawing on Zimitri Erasmus and Zoë Wicomb, points out in his paper on racial stereotyping: ‘Racial identities in South Africa became ever more reified during the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of Apartheid policies institutionalising these identities to an unprecedented degree.’
Vernon February55 further explores how the stereotyping of people classified as ‘Coloured’ is deeply rooted in the stereotyping of the San and the Khoe over the past 370 years. The negative product of this is that this ‘colourist’, ‘race-exclusivist’ culture and the primacy culture of ‘firstism’ have crept into many otherwise excellent academic papers that do not question this paradigm’s colonial and Verwoerdian apartheid roots. Voices of the San56 also strongly makes the following point:
The San and the Khoekhoen are often identified as one group, and it will therefore be pertinent to this history of the San to include a note on this common misperception … in the early years of European settlement … the newcomers had much difficulty in telling the San and the Khoekhoen apart and thus many myths may have been wrongly attributed to either of the groups, owing to the observations and writings of short-term visitors, missionaries, hunters and explorers.
Voices of the San57 raises several these points in sections entitled ‘Myths about the San’ and ‘Idealism and Romanticism’. Many of these myths have entered the academic arena without being subjected to due critique. As a result, wrong is presented as right and vice versa. As we will see in this chapter, also informed by Voices of the San and an array of archaelogists, rock art experts, linguists and geneticists, it is also clear that until at least 1200 CE those known today as Khoe did not have a presence in the southernmost reaches of South Africa, and that their society was different from San societies. In the post-650 CE period, as the Khoe and Xhosa evolved their pastoral and herding economy in the Eastern Cape and later from 1000 CE in the Western Cape, the San, except for small fishing groups, moved from the coastal areas to the hunting fields and mountains of the Central Cape.
Within the oldest languages that we have knowledge of in southern Africa we can also see the relationship between language and social consciousness regarding the value of land and the sense of belonging between Africans and their land. The existence of particular words demonstrates a conscious human relationship to environment and place of abode, and thus challenges the suggestion of ignorance about belonging and of landownership that was attached to Africans by European colonialism. Ancient African consciousness is shown by words such as !hub (land) and |amma or |ammis (water), which links to !xaib (place) that can sustain human life, and which results in !’ãs (human settlement).
The localities of settlement, and of different peoples coming together, are shown at sites that are near water. Archaeologists have found the richest deposits of markers of modern human habitat where land and fresh water come together, which makes sense because without water humans cannot survive or sustain themselves. When one looks at the Thõathõa Triangle and Thõathõa Circle, one is immediately struck by the abundance of water. It is around the waterways of southern Africa, from the Zambezi and Shashe-Limpopo basins to the Camissa in Table Bay, that diverse ethnicities came together in the peopling of southern Africa and gave birth to many new formations of peoples of the South – Mzansi.
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