The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
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