Blacks subjugated Khoesan
Keith Gottschalk (Letters, June 15) is quite right, in his rejoinder to a previous writer, to remind readers that there is overwhelming evidence pointing to the extermination (bordering on genocide) of the San and Khoe that was conducted by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Boer troops, and concomitantly that Nguni speakers in the main assimilated many of these groups into their various societies without discrimination.
But the issue is not so clear-cut when it comes to broadly dismissing the argument that the displacement of the Khoesan and their general demise cannot in any way be attributed to black African agency.
Though relations in frontier zones were generally open to negotiation, as more and more Nguni agropastoralists occupied these frontiers, they drove natural animals into more remote regions, thereby forcing hunter-gatherer groups to move away from previously occupied regions to less favourable margins such as the southern Kalahari and the lower Drakensberg.
Furthermore, there is a significant body of literature (comprising many African scholars) illustrating that the Khoesan were incorporated into Nguni and Sotho-Tswana societies, not as equals but as clients with a defined lower status. This was especially the case in the southern Kalahari regions where Tswana chiefdoms such as the BaKwena and BaNgwaketse, through the emergence of forms of what can be called serfdom (clientship and botlanka) pauperised the San or BaKgalagadi and in most cases reduced them to perpetual bondage and servitude, much in the way that women were permanently subordinated by legal circumscriptions that denied them rights of inheritance and so on.
Today this discrimination is reflected historically in the way that Botswana’s Basarwa find themselves economically and politically marginalised in the land of their birth. Surviving San oral traditions also describe their displacement from the fertile regions in today’s northern Cape, such as around the VaalHarts confluence, by Batlhaping and Batlharo Setswana-speakers.
These forms of servitude and circumscription imposed on the San by Africans were not nearly in the same league as those of the slavery practised in the colonial Cape or the random extermination of the Cape San. Nor did they bind the San into perpetual impoverishment. But they do account in part for the general decline and impoverishment of a once-stable people.
In our rush to absolve ourselves of any taint of a “colonial” mentality or white bias, let us not adopt an equally myopic and romanticised view of African societies by falling into the “Merrie Africa” syndrome. Without necessarily attributing such an imputation to Gottschalk, I do believe that these issues need raising and acknowledgment before they are drowned out in an ever-loudening chorus of political correctness regarding the legacies of the past. —