The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
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