The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
now the Eastern and Western Cape at about the same time, and some groups would have been a mixture of the two.
The tendency in South African history is to see the Khoe communities as being only a Western, Eastern and Northern Cape set of communities and as having originated there, whereas a broader historical lens beyond the 1652 paradigm shows us that there is a much bigger picture of the Khoe as a foundation people. The Khoe are at the root of many present-day communities in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, and our historical perspectives on the Khoe are stunted.
Colonial and neocolonial histories have crippled the history and heritage of the Khoe peoples by attaching it absolutely as an appendage to European colonial history of the 16th to 19th centuries. This type of lens on the past cannot define the bigger contribution of the Khoe to the commonwealth of southern African history and development. It plays into a neocolonial framework, a race paradigm and the de-Africanisation imposed by colonialism and apartheid. It is for this reason that one could view some of the historical narratives on the Khoe that claim to be an anti-colonial perspective as actually being a neocolonial perspective because it still clings to the 1652 paradigm. A by-product of this skewed historical approach can then result in expressions of race antagonism, as ‘race’ characteristics are assigned to a caricature of the Khoe to then distance the Khoe from their Xhosa cousins.
Khoe migrations
A range of the most prominent researchers on the Khoe over the past 60 years located the birthplace of the Khoe as having been in a circled area with the epicentre between Lake Ngami and the Makgadikgadi (formerly Makarikari) salt basin in Botswana. Richard Elphick,99 in his book Khoikhoi and the founding of White South Africa, published in 1985, used a map to illustrate the origin and expansion of the Khoe. His circle narrowly focuses on Botswana, whereas the Thõathõa Circle shows a bigger circle that includes more of Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa. Also, whereas Elphick narrows down his expansion of the Khoe’s southward migration mainly to South Africa, while giving just a hint of an expansion to northeast KwaZulu-Natal, the actual story of Khoe migratory expansion is much broader than is shown on his map.
Elphick’s approach, like that of the title of his book, is caught up in the white South African 1652 paradigm – a marginalisation of the full history and spread of the Khoe in the peopling of southern Africa. Those who narrow down Khoe history and heritage to simply a story of those classified as ‘Coloured’ follow the same approach as Elphick’s framing of Khoe history, except that they go one step further. They maintain that the Khoe did not migrate to the Cape but had been present in a place such as Cape Town for hundreds of thousands of years, not distinguishing between Stone Age hominins, early Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens. This assertion is made despite the fact that the Cape Flats were submerged under two metres of seawater 5 000 years ago, in addition to other adverse climatic conditions affecting the area, according to Mlambo and Parsons.100
My perspective on this history is that a real postcolonial shift needs to be embraced rather than putting a spin on history for political expedience and material claims. It is high time that the bigger picture of the history of the Khoe as a southern African family of peoples is explored – and there is much more exploration required than presently exists. It does a great disservice to the memory of the Khoe that their contribution is locked into a 16th-to-19th-century European lens of looking at the Africans of the South. The 1652 paradigm impedes further exploration by driving the Khoe into a ‘founding of white South Africa’ cul-de-sac.
As noted in the preceding section on the San, East African-descendant herder-hunters in Zimbabwe with Nilotic-Saharan and Cushite genetic and linguistic connections reached the area of the Shashe-Limpopo Basin 2 400 years ago in a slow migratory drift that resulted in engagements with the local San population known as the Tshua and Khwe.101 Over the next 500 years they engaged in relations with the Khwe and Tshua in Zambia, Angola, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and with other San formations in Botswana and Namibia. This dovetailed with the presence of micro-groups of people with farmer cultures from West Africa, Central Africa and East Africa between 100 BCE and 300 CE. Those earliest herders were likely to have descended from hunter-herders such as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, and Nilotic peoples before them. The proto-Khoe thus had a very rich genetic ancestral heritage and cultural heritage rooted in Tshua and Khwe San and enriched by elements from West, Central, East and North Africa going back thousands of years.
It is muted in our popular understanding of history that during the period 400 BCE to 100 CE and beyond, in the Thõathõa Circle there were also hunters, hunter-herders, hunter-herder-farmers, and farmers with metallurgy skills in the broad arena that we know as Zimbabwe today, as far down into South Africa as present-day Gauteng.102 To underline this point and introduce some perspective, this was before and during the time of Jesus Christ, and Europe as we know it did not exist. The rigidly distinct stereotypes that we assign to San, Khoe and Bantu-speaking farmers today as hunters, herders and farmers respectively were far from being the sharp divides suggested on the basis of colonial observations. Each of these groups would seem to have shared elements of one another’s modes of sustenance then, and are likely to have done so throughout the following centuries.
There were no walls between peoples practising these modes of living, nor were there mass societies at that time in the region. It would be another 800 years before as large a concentration of 5000 people would live together in a single built environment (the Mapungubwe kingdom). By the time that early Khoe herders had emerged, so too had the iron-working early farmers, and technology is likely to have been shared as well.
These two proto-micro-communities of peoples could not have been rigidly separate peoples at that time. Once beneficiation of raw materials appeared in society, the earliest forms of social classes would have emerged, as would trade have entered the arena of human relations. As soon as client-classes emerge they are employed in a manner in which technologies are shared. Where people perform different economic activities, social exchange develops social relations. There was plenty of good land for grazing and cultivation, and the area was rich in water and mineral resources. Wildlife was also in abundance, and the kind of pressures arising from scarcity of resources and dominant control over land appeared to have been absent. Conflict would have begun to develop when external trade commodified certain products that were bartered for externally produced products by about 700 CE.
When one refers to ‘engagement’, this does not mean one dramatic event at a moment in time. First as individuals, and then as relatively micro associations of people, these descendants of migrations could not have posed a threat to the San communities they encountered. This is in keeping with what is known about slow migratory drifts across the globe, where conflicts usually occured as a result of clashes of economic modes and clashes between organised societies competing for domination of territory and resources. Indications are that the San communities and cultures remained the largest groups of peoples numerically throughout much of the first 300 years of the first millennium CE, and that the modes of living of all groups were not far apart. Human deposits found by archaeologists have revealed no signs of sudden movements, dramatic wars or invasions by peoples.
Studies done on San rock art from these times do not show the kind of conflict with herders and farmer peoples evidenced later. Distinct Khoe rock art along the length of the Limpopo from west to east also provide some insight into their experiences. It is to this period that we can date the evolution into a new people with a multi-ethnic past generally referred to as the Khoe. Most scholars suggest that the period when the Khoe came into their own was about 2 000 years ago in the northern Botswana and southern Zimbabwe regions before migrating to other locations. One of the areas of migration for some Khoe by about 500 CE was the Kai !Gariep, Lesotho and Northern Cape region, and it is there where the distinct Cape Khoe identity first prospered.
‘Casual-herders’103 rather than full-blown ‘pastoralists’ may also be a more appropriate term for the mix of early San hunters with sheep and early proto-Khoe ancestors. The three proto-Khoe phases are identified by Eastwood and Smith as those Khoe who moved westward, southward and along the Limpopo. Eastwood and Smith,104 and Smith and Ouzman,105 note 953 archaeological sites along the Limpopo, at many of which there are rock paintings that can be distinguished from those made by San hunter-gatherers. These expressions are explained as having been created