Khoi and San want ‘coloured’ scrapped

Khoisan activist and Bhisho MPL Christian Martin wants Stats SA to conduct an early census to determine how many South Africans identify as Khoi and San.

Martin also wants the race groups added on all official government documents pertaining to demographics.

In his letter to Stats SA, Martin said research by the University of Pretoria had discovered there were 350 000 people who identified as Khoi and San, but alluded that there could be more as the statistics were based on old research.

The letter reads: “Our concern is that government recently went on public hearings on the traditional recognition of the Khoi and San Bill. Yet there are no proactive moves from a reliable institution of your sort.

“We as the Khoi and San community would welcome an early census or at least some form or sort of exercise to determine how many self-identified Khoi and San individuals are in our country.

“This exercise would go a long way in assisting the bill when signed by the president to become an act”.

While the e-mail was sent to Stats SA spokesman Ashwell Jenneker, among others, he said they had not received any communication from Martin or the Khoisan chiefs requesting a meeting or to determine how many Khoi and San people there were in the country.

“We did not receive such a request,” Jenneker said, although he confirmed the e-mail address that Martin used was correct.

Martin has been on a mission to have the government recognise the Khoisan as the First Nation of South Africa and also wants the land claims of 1913 and the coloured identity to be scrapped.

He had previously stated that “we also want our language to be recognised as an official language of this country”.

Martin, who was part of the Khoisan Four, embarked on a 14-day hunger strike in December in a last-ditch attempt to get the leadership of the country to listen to their demands.

Last year, Martin and other Khoi activists lobbied for the removal of the term “coloured’ from the statutes of South Africa saying he regarded the term as derogatory. He said other terminologies such as “k-word and koelie” had been removed as per the Racial Discrimination Act of 1950 back in 1991.

“The terminology coloured is still used in all government documents. We as Khoi and San descendants see [this] as an insult and government [reneging] on its own beliefs of rectifying the past,” he said.