The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
apartheid was just as much a historical project as it was one that reached towards a racialist vision of the future. Through this anthropological work, the difference and resultant separation was made to look like a natural consequence of South Africa; that is, South Africa, its geography, its people, its races and cultures, etc. were seen to historically divide themselves naturally along racial and ethnic lines … However, the ideological and intellectual construction of apartheid, despite this ‘grounding’ rhetoric, was in many ways the result of transnational, and transoceanic, discourses on race …
In Chapter 1, we will look more closely at the anthropological activities of Leonhard Schultze in the early 20th century in German South West Africa (Namibia), during the period in which genocide was carried out on the Nama, San and Herero peoples by Germans. Schultze was the man who created the term ‘Khoisan’ and also argued for their extermination. He has also indelibly influenced ethnography and anthropology teaching in South African universities.
Sides goes on to explain the relationship between German race theories (including Germany’s extermination practices in genocide against the Namibians) and South African anthropology during the first four decades of the 20th century. This is framed as the ‘genealogy between the anthropological discipline of German “Afrikanistik” which fell under the larger umbrella of “Völkerkunde” and its South African ethnological correlate, “volkekunde” … that ultimately culminated in the apartheid ideology … Drawing on a German tradition of philological classification, South African anthropology increasingly imagined a national taxonomy in which language was equal to both racial and geographical “origins”’.16
Though the paradigm of thinking of the first four decades of the 20th century, as well as that of Hendrik Verwoerd’s ethno-nationalism and perpetual primitivisation overlay on African peoples, is widely rejected today, it is still flirted with by significant sectors of South African society – black and white. (Verwoerd, who was minister of ‘native affairs’ before he became prime minister in 1958, is regarded as the architect of apartheid.) New voices in the research arena have challenged the distortions that gained traction in the 20th century by using solid facts that expose a different narrative. Yet the influence of the earliest ethnography-anthropology thinkers that had pervaded all the social sciences by the 1950s still continues to be sanctioned today, despite much critique; hence the call for decolonisation in academic institutions.
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Chapter 1 will take us on a journey of social history that began over 2 600 years before European shipping became a regular feature at the Cape of Good Hope. It addresses the disconnect between our older history of Africa, southern Africa and the peopling of the South, and the story of the clash between Europeans and the African land they colonised and the people they subjugated.
CHAPTER 1
Africa: Beginnings and challenging narratives
This chapter aims to cover in broad strokes the progression in the peopling of southern Africa and the civilisations of southern Africa from 3 000 years ago until the beginning of European colonisation in what is now South Africa. The discussion will be structured under the following themes:
•The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives
•The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives
•The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives
•Perspectives on the San foundation people
•Perspectives on the Khoe foundation people
•Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people
•A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from about 800 CE
•Slavery epochs as an influence on early migrations and identity formation
From the time of the emergence of Kemet (ancient Egypt) about 5 000 years ago,1 African civilisations spread to include Nubia, Punt, Kerma, Kush, Carthage, Nok and Mauritania by 431 CE, and by this time the foundations of organised southern African societies were being established.
Here it is important to differentiate between the emergences of what are called advanced organised societies or civilisations, and the earliest emergence of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) and the many evolutionary phases through to Homo sapiens sapiens and then on to early Neolithic proto-societies. The Neolithic periods leading to the emergence of the various great civilisations started approximately 12 000 years ago and had different timelines in different parts of the world. ‘Neolithic’, or the later part of what archaeologists call the Stone Age, refers to the period when humans had started farming and domesticating animals, but still used stone instead of metal for making weapons and tools.
These proto-societies were the precursors of what we call ‘civilisations’: well-developed states of human society marked by numerically large numbers of organised people living in advanced built environments under cohesive conditions. Other features of such states include developed forms of food production and distribution, political orders, governance, cultural cohesion, industry, common social norms, and keeping some form of written, graphic or symbolic record.
The early civilisations on which the later Western European civilisation modelled itself were mainly those of Greece, Persia and Rome, which were accordingly foregrounded in educational institutions. Other, and in some cases even older, cradles of early civilisations that had emerged in Africa, Arabia-Eurasia, India, China and South America were ignored or received little attention. The Eurocentric approach to the study of human civilisations is largely a colonial distortion that requires us to get back to the idea of ‘universal study’ at universities instead of the highly colonial approach that still tends to prevail in South African institutions. In southern Africa, the Mapungubwe state marks a similar emergence of an era of great states or civilisations – Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Thulamela, Khami, Mutapa and Rozvi – which in turn were the foundations and catalysts for the spread of many great social formations. This chapter will deal with the emergence of these states.
Certainly in southern Africa we can establish the emergence of proto-societies between 300 CE and 850 CE, when the beginnings of southern African states and kingdoms, starting with the Mapungubwe state, can be evidenced. We can also show how even earlier the foundation peoples – the San, the Khoe and the Kalanga – were part of the building of these states.
It is during this period that we also see southern African societies trading with Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and China, and producing steel,2 at a time when Europe had not yet done so. The Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Monomutapa kingdoms evidence the emergence of an advanced African civilisation in southern Africa long before the entry of European colonialism into the continent.
The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives
Blombos Cave, which is situated about 300 km from Cape Town on the southeastern coast, has been an ongoing archaeological site since 1991 where deposits dated from between 120 000 to 70 000 years ago right up to 300 years ago have been found. In the popular arena, the name of Blombos Cave and its findings are frequently quoted by laypeople in a manner that does not distinguish between the different eras of Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens development markers found here and at other South African sites.3 Again, in the popular arena there is also not much distinction made between modern humans and older archaic human species that go back to before Homo sapiens emerged, and which indeed for periods of time existed alongside Homo sapiens up to about 18 000 years ago.
The Blombos findings particularly provide insights on Homo sapiens, early Homo sapiens sapiens, and human societies and social formations of the past 3 000 years to 300 years ago.4 The site’s importance is underlined by the fact that successive colonies of societies with a dominant hunting-and-gathering economic mode, from archaic humans through to Homo sapiens and pre-San Homo sapiens sapiens and on to San and to a much lesser extent to Khoe, can be studied in one progression over a long period of time. A 73 000-year-old drawing made with an ochre crayon that could be classed as prehistoric art, and possibly symbolism, has added a new dimension to the development history of early Homo sapiens before they are dated as having spread out to Eurasia.5
The