The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
on the San, Nama and Herero in the early 20th century in what is now Namibia. In 1904 the Herero rose up in a war of rebellion againt the German colonisers, and in 1905 the Nama followed suit. The resistance was brutally suppressed by forces under General Lothar von Trotha, and survivors, including women and children, were kept in concentration camps24 where they were subjected to forced labour and a range of abuses.
As Wittenberg25 explains, Schultze had studied zoology under Ernst Haeckel, a leading German Darwinist academic, and only later turned to ethnography. Schultze was a Jekyll and Hyde character who waxed lyrical about Khoe culture and compiled a record on the Nama similar to that of Bleek and Lloyd on the !Kun and |Xam. But the same man, as Wittenberg points out, was engaged in reprehensible activities during the time of the genocide as General Von Trotha’s ‘embedded scientist’.
These same people that Schultze26 romanticised in literature was considered by him to be a threat to humanity and nearer to animal life. Dr Bofinger, the camp doctor on Shark Island, and Schultze were responsible for cutting off heads of dead prisoners and sending them back to laboratories in Berlin for further studies. It is noted by Olusoga and Erichsen27 that most of those imprisoned in the concentration camps, and particularly the ones who passed through Dr Bofinger’s field hospital, did not come out of there alive. Dr Bofinger and Schultze experimented on live ‘specimens’ and the ‘hospital’ was where bodies were broken and decapitated and skulls were split, making Dr Bofinger the most feared of the Germans by the Nama.
German race scientist Christian Fetzer,28 a contemporary of Schultze’s, regarded the Nama as being close to the Anthropoid Ape. According to Olusoga and Erichsen,29 Schultze is on record as saying with reference to the Nama that these ‘races’ were unfit for work and ‘should be allowed to disappear’, which was a euphemism for extermination. Schultze argued that, for the colonial project to succeed, ‘[t]he struggle for our own existence allows no other solution. We who build our houses on the graves of these races have a responsibility to safeguard our civilisation, sparing no means.’
Likewise, though without similar aberrations involved, the same applies to the origins of the term ‘Bantu’. It was first introduced in a hypothesis by Wilhelm Bleek30 in 1862 to controversially label as one so-called ‘race’ peoples using a vast number of languages that make up a language family of over 680 variants used by over 400 different ethnicities widely spread over the continent of Africa.
Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd carried out linguistic and anthropological studies on |Xam and !Kun prisoners from the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, after having had the prisoners released into their custody as subjects. The ethics of this is often overlooked by those enamoured by their work. Wilhelm Bleek’s role in academia has been romanticised because of his research on the San, but he was well known as a pioneer of racist theory31 and can rightly be called the father of the system of race classification in South Africa. Moreover, Bleek’s work also stands accused of ‘civilising’ and ‘censoring’ the narratives of the |Xam and !Kun.32
These are considerations that must be kept sharply in mind when we look at the science of genetics, too, because some of the racist colonial ideas and terminology have been imported into modern genetics and skew the reports that are produced. Non-scientific language is used and subjective political views are tagged on to scientific findings. The modern-day surviving San still find themselves subjected to theories suggesting that they are not part of the mainstream human family but are instead ‘another separate branch-species’ of humanity.
Genetic mapping and the Thõathõa Triangle
We can see and track migrations and migratory drifts across the African continent and out of Africa that link back to the northeast African Homo sapiens community and original L-gene ancestor, which inform the foundation of genetic science. There is an argument that there was more than one movement out of Africa by Homo sapiens but that the main migration into Arabia, Europe, Asia and further afield occurred about 70 000 years ago.
The earlier migrations, however, have different markers from those of the African L-gene family of markers. Those with southern African mtDNA such as San, Khoe and various others link back to this common L-gene ancestor. Likewise, those who have sub-Saharan mtDNA and Nilotic-Cushitic mtDNA, who are from ethnic groups that speak Bantu languages and Nilotic-Cushitic languages, also track back to the same L-gene ancestor. The L-gene sequence demonstrates that the different African indigenous peoples are all part of one human family and are not separate ‘races’ even though they evolved in different localities.
Mlambo and Parsons33 succinctly explain the genetic mapping of all human beings today starting with the common female ancestor mentioned earlier. This oldest mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene type, labelled L-0,
… is mostly found amoung Northern San/Bushmen people living in the northern Kalahari. These people, like everyone alive, also carry traces of other mtDNA gene types as well … The second-oldest mtDNA gene type (L-1) originated around 110 kya. It is mostly found among Twa/Pygmy people in the eastern Congo Basin. The third-oldest mtDNA gene type (L-2) originated around 100 kya. It is mostly found among people speaking Niger-Congo (or Niger-Kordofanian) languages, notably the Bantu languages. The fourth mtDNA gene type (L-3) is mostly found among people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages, notably Somali, Amharic, and Semitic languages. Around 60 kya, the L-3 gave rise to new genetic types that are numbered L-3M and L-3N. All the other mtDNA types in the world today are descended from L-3M and L-3N. [The abbreviation ‘kya’ stands for ‘thousand years ago’.]
Mlambo and Parsons34 further elaborate that the ‘L-0d’ Homo sapiens genetic type had spread from northeast Africa down to Tanzania across and along the Zambezi to Angola and also down through Zimbabwe, and into Botswana and Namibia by 140 000 years ago.
Another genetic type, ‘L-0d1’, split off from the westward trajectory around the Zambezi and had drifted much more slowly southwards through Zimbabwe down to the Kai !Gariep area by 30 000 years ago and to the southwestern Cape by 22 000 years ago. Yet another genetic type, ‘L-0k’, split off in Tanzania and moved down through Mozambique into what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
These were early Homo sapiens migrants who moved out of East Africa from the area of the common ancestor whose descendants also moved across the whole of Africa. Much further down the ages, about 10 000 years ago, diverse San societies began to emerge from the L-0d, L-0k and L-0d1 ancestors.
The haplogroup L-0 locates in the region bordering Kenya and Ethiopia about 194 000 years ago.35 Across Africa, the L-1 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory of descent from East Africa moved into Central Africa; the L-2 mtDNA haplogroup into the western bulge of Africa, likewise with some of the L-3 mtDNA haplogroups. The L-4 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory reached into North Africa.
Each mtDNA haplogroup has many further subdivisions of haplogroups. In the case of eastern and southern Africa, the mtDNA of the region largely consists of subgroups of L-0.36 The oldest of these, between 160 000 years ago to 140 000 years ago, is evidenced as being present in the southwestern corner of what I call the Thõathõa Triangle area, which runs from Aranos in Namibia up to Dese in Ethiopia and down to Bethel in South Africa, and across back to Aranos. The specific subgroup at Aminuis in Namibia is notated as L-0d.
If one draws an arc to connect Aranos and Bethel and then complete the circle that includes parts of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Arica, this is the Thõathõa Circle at the bottom of the Thõathõa Triangle that reaches up to Ethiopia. The sides of this triangle are not hard borders but rather soft, blurred sides. This tool emphasises the theory that in my view best explains our distant past: the multiregional theory of sites (plural) of origin for Homo sapiens (the L-gene sequence and possible other extinct Homo sapiens groups).
Thõathõa37 means ‘beginnings’ in the Kora language, and it is used here simply for illustrative purposes in creating some geographical parameters for the historical exploration in this book. Within this triangle there have been several the most important archaeological finds that assist us to understand the southern African past, including areas that can be identified as cradles (plural) of humankind. As was noted before, there are several