Requiem for the /Xam of Poison Mountain
For thousands of years southern Africa was populated by an ancient people known to themselves by many names and who had different languages. The colonisers, who first appeared at the Cape in the early 17th century, called them all Bushmen. The meeting of cultures that followed would not end well for a group of hunter-gatherers known as the /Xam. By Don Pinnock
In the Cederberg, the Gifberg (Poison Mountain) rises 600m above the coastal plain within the Matsikamma range; they were part of the home range of a KhoeSān hunter-gatherer group known as the /Xam for thousands of years.
The /Xam wintered in the Matsikamma canyons, protected from northwest storms beneath beetling overhangs and in water carved caves. In these isolated rock keeps, they painted what was important to them and which gave protection from – or guidance into – a spiritual world that has now been lost.
In silent testimony to their presence are antelope, elephants, half-animal half-human therianthropes, entoptic lines, nets, dots and the people themselves, dancing.
The caves are silent, but the patina on the rocks where they sat or placed their hands is polished glassy by thousands of years of skin on sandstone.
Most spoken languages of the Khoe-Sān (a term embracing both Khoekhoen pastoralists and Sān hunter-gatherers) have been lost, first replaced by Dutch, then Afrikaans, but they live on in hundreds of place names throughout South Africa. The sophisticated, filigree art of the San begs interpretation, but the colonisers dispatched their last artists without bothering to ask what it meant. We can only now speculate.
The arrival of the Dutch in the 17th century was a disaster for the /Xam. The first Khoe-Sān resistance to the Cape colony’s expansion beyond the Cape Peninsula took place when white farmers entered the Tulbagh basin at the beginning of the 18th century. In retaliation, a commando system was developed, setting a pattern of nearly two centuries of violence.
Just as the /Xam were reeling from these commando attacks, a smallpox epidemic swept through their bands. According to a report, among certain groups only one in 10 survived.
In 1725, the Cape government allocated the first loan farms in the Olifants River Valley west of the Matsikamma. The region supported herds of game including elephants, rhinos and hippos with an abundance of “veldkos” plant life. These farmers soon found themselves under attack from /Xam hunter-gatherers whose food source was being threatened.
By 1739, skirmishes had escalated into a full-scale war between white farmers and the /Xam across a wide front. With game being shot out, the hunter-gatherers had turned increasingly to cattle theft. The colony was in panic and Europeans sent to deal with the attacks were almost hysterically fearful of the /Xam’s deadly accurate poisoned arrows.
Commandos set out from Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Their ruthless search-anddestroy tactics were horrendous, with women and children killed alongside the men or enslaved. /Xam men were seen as fit only for extermination.
By the end of 1739, the Khoekhoen pastoralists and /Xam hunter-gatherers had been shattered, dispirited and many subjugated. As the now emboldened European pastoralists moved northwards into the Bokkeveld, Hantam and Roggeveld, those /Xam who could, undertook evasive migration into the high mountains or the deep Karoo. Those who couldn’t were inboeked (conscripted) into forced labour. Many of their descendants are still farm labourers today.
The Gifberg area, partly because of its remoteness and the presence of gif (Amaryllis belladonna), which is toxic to grazing animals, was of no interest to white farmers and would have been relatively safe as a place of refuge.
The /Xam were practised exploiters of what, for them, was the area’s bountiful environment far from the pastoralists in the valleys and coastal plain below. They were also relatively safe from slave-capturing raids for a while.
But, from 1740, Cape government policy was to force on the /Xam permanent “tranquillity” – to either destroy them or take them captive. It was an exercise in crushing all opposition and acquiring labour. /Xam society along the Matsikamma range was gradually eroded and fell apart.
The way of life of the /Xam may have disappeared but not their genes, which live on in small, gracile farm workers along the Cape Fold Mountain chain and their beautiful, elfin children.
In the caves and overhangs of the Gifberg, as in many similar places throughout South Africa, the bones of their ancient culture live on in the enigmatic art their ancestors left behind. But, for the most part, the meaning has been lost. DM168