The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet

The Lie of 1652 - Patric Tariq Mellet


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date this spread of Limpopo Khoe herders from about 100 CE, with examples of Khoe rock art spread through to Mpumalanga and southern Mozambique.

      The earliest embrace of pastoralism by hunter-gatherers is thought to have occurred in East Africa among the Hadza and Sandawe peoples as a result of migratory drifts of sheep-keeping people of Nilotic origin (from the Nile Basin) who had acquired their sheep in North Africa and the Middle East. They would have been hunters with sheep rather than simply being herders.

      The soul of the Khoe as those who nurture a close relationship with domestic animals tracks back to these ancient roots that came together with the ancient roots of hunter societies as well. Through the work of Karim Sadr106 and many others we can observe that southern African hunter-gatherers may have first embraced sheep herding as far north as the Zambezi Basin. Thus sheep may have migrated at a faster rate than people, with some San peoples having some sheep before the emergence of proto-Khoe, as was noted before. Micro groups of East African herders drifted over time into southwestern Zimbabwe, northern Botswana and the confluence region of the Shashe-Limpopo Basin region in about 300 BC.

      Sadr107 points out that there is an invisibility of Khoe herder migrations to the south from an archaeological perspective until the turn of the second millennium, except for an Eastern Cape site evidencing proto-Khoe and proto-Xhosa. Evidence is available that shows that at the Kei River area some Iron Age agro-pastoralists were present with Khoe herders in about 650 CE. The Khoe are only likely to have arrived as far as the Southern Cape, Eastern Cape and Western Cape sometime around 1000 CE or later. The following observations by Sadr are worth noting:108

      The difficulty of detecting the archaeology of the Khoekhoe migration may have something to do with our essentialist theoretical stance as well, whereby we imagine the first pastoralists to have been like the seventeenth-century Cape Khoe. But if cultures and identities are social constructs, they can form and dissolve rapidly. From this perspective, the seventeenth-century Cape Khoekhoe culture (for example as described by Kolbe in 1719) perhaps only took on its final form in the second millennium AD and may have been restricted to the coastal areas on the western side of southern Africa. It certainly dissolved soon after contact with Europeans (Elphick 1985).

      That the culture was preserved in European writing, art and cartography – caught in the ‘literary lattice,’ as Anthony Humphreys (1998) puts it – may have imparted the false impression of an identity more stable and solid than it really was, and this in turn may have diverted us into thinking that it could be traced back wholesale into the first millennium AD. Archaeology can trace the origins of some of the cultural traits that constituted the seventeenth-century Khoekhoe package: the pots, the livestock, the production strategies, and the art, if not the language. These traits originated at different times and in different places and perhaps did not coalesce into the classic Cape Khoekhoe culture until the second millennium AD.

      At best, the archaeological evidence suggests that LSA (Late Stone Age) pastoralism (as opposed to casual herding) may have been a second millennium AD development in southern Africa. There is certainly no archaeological evidence to show that a coherent, mass migration abruptly brought livestock and ceramic technology to the Cape around 2000 years ago.

      The proto-Khoe who were birthed through the coming together over a long period with the Tshua around the Sashe-Limpopo Basin drifted deeper into Botswana and Namibia and down to the Kai !Gariep territory. It is from the Kai !Gariep that the Cape Khoe tributaries flowed, just like the river. This was an analogy that the late Dr Neville Alexander109 was fond of using for the peopling of South Africa. Sometime between 500 CE and 650 CE some major event occurred at the Kai !Gariep, according to oral legend related by Wuras,110 which resulted in some remaining and two other groups moving off in opposite directions, westward and southeastward.

      Khoe and Xhosa

      The opening chapters of Peires’s111 history of the Xhosa, The House of Phalo, indicates that the early |Kosa predate later Nguni-speaking migratory drifts. It is most likely that the earliest farmers with metallurgy skills in the Eastern Cape originated from the Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga ‘foundation people’ who first emerged along the Limpopo in the evolution towards the Mapungubwe kingdom. These are the first likely foundation roots of Xhosa and Thembu peoples, and more interdisciplinary research is needed to investigate these roots and the linkages going back to the Kalanga or the Zhizo-Kalanga founders of Mapungubwe, and the Kalanga founders of Great Zimbabwe. The Thembuland Xalanga area and the association of the name with the Fish Eagle repeats a recurring theme at all sites of Kalanga settlement – the appearance of the symbolic bird that is associated with the Kalanga, the well-known Great Zimbabwe bird that now appears on Zimbabwe’s national flag.

      The archaeological finds across southern Africa of micro-groups of proto-Khoe herders and Zhizo-Kalanga farmers show that these are not separated by a long period of time, and that a slow migratory drift across southern Africa preceded later migrations in the first half of the second millennium. This is key to understanding the peopling of South Africa.

      Embracing the older history and heritage of the Khoe across the whole of southern Africa does not alter the fact that the Cape Khoe had habitat in the Western Cape, were the first indigenous people who had contact with the Europeans in the 15th to 17th centuries, and were the first to have resisted colonialism. As will be shown later in this book, the Khoe are the people who can be proud of having engaged in the longest resistance movement to colonialism of all groups in South Africa, facing ethnocide and de-Africanisation machinations by Europeans along the way. They were also the first to have suffered subjugation and loss of land. These are the pillars of the struggle of indigenous people against marginalisation and discrimination in the 21st century and for the right to restore their economic sustainability and rebuild social cohesion. Embracing the older history and heritage actually enhances the case for support to address restorative justice.

      The Khoe mode of living was continuously evolving as it spread across different regions. It was highly influenced every step of the way by other cultures, particularly those of the farmer cultures around them. The likelihood is that the southernmost Khoe evolved to a large extent to become the southwestern Cape Khoe as they existed in the 17th century, after the move into the Eastern Cape and down the southwestern coast from the Northern Cape. From those regions, early in the beginning of the second millennium the Khoe further evolved into the formations that would be engaged by the European travellers and colonists. By the time of the European incursion the southwestern Cape Khoe culture and economy had diversified, and I would talk of a well-developed livestock ranching society following advanced farming principles of rotational grazing.

      The history and evolution of the |Kosa or Xhosa show very clearly that Xhosa and Khoe were evolving culturally and structurally at the same time. There was much overlap, and if we look at the Xhosa clan system and the communities of clans, the minor principalities and the two kingdoms of Gcaleka and Rharhabe today, it is clear that those referred to as Xhosa are a confederation of peoples. In his history of the Xhosa in their days of independence, Peires challenges the notion of a homogeneous Xhosa nation and provides the evidence for a body of incorporated communities allowing for a high degree of diverse practices – a confederation. Within this confederation, as shown in the Iziduko clan name system, there are also Khoe peoples that can be identified within the Xhosa. As will be shown in more detail in Chapter 5, this complexity of the Xhosa would later be manipulated by the colonial and apartheid regimes to create a Xhosa linguistic ‘nation’.

      Intergroup relations in what is now the Eastern Cape were marked at different times by co-existence, by incorporation and by pastoral encroachment, and also by displacement. Intermarriage and sexual relations occurred, along with other forms of social engagement. Groups such as the |Xam (Cape San) had already been living across the Eastern, Western and central Cape areas for centuries before the Khoe and Xhosa arrived with their pastoral and agricultural culture.

      The hegemony of agro-pastoralism brought into the Eastern Cape arena by the Khoe, early Xhosa and Thembu, and the Xhosa confederacy that later evolved (which consisted of two kingdoms and incorporated other migrant groups), displaced Cape San hegemony in the region over time. This, however, did not mean that all the San left the Eastern Cape. All communities of the Eastern Cape would experience greater impacts together as a result of later migrations of northeastern


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