Khoe story shifts over time
Andy Mason’s facts are correct: there was no “Merrie Africa” (Letters, June 30). In turn, let me respond that his main example is limited to San hunter-gatherers, not Khoe pastoralists. Also, his example is of San enserfed by several Tswana chiefdoms in today’s Botswana. My letter was mostly concerned to rebut a previous letter that denounced specifically the Nguni for this.
The historical evidence of specifically Nguni incorporating Khoe “not as equals but as clients with a defined lower status” is limited chronologically and spatially to that century in which unusually large numbers of Khoe were being evicted from their former pastures by trekboer invasion and seeking immigration to Xhosa chiefs.
There is no evidence that the significant minority of Xhosa clans listed by Jeffrey Peires in House of Phalo, whose ancestry was entirely Khoe, were demoted to client status. This assimilation happened in previous centuries, before trekboer shooting of wild animals and seizure of Khoe pastures changed the dynamics of interaction between black Africans and Khoe.
Historians also need to be alert to other instances where San-black conflict only flared up after white colonial governments deported a black African chiefdom on to lower Drakensberg land formerly ranged by San. ■ The extermination of the Khoisan in the Western Cape can be described in no other way than a genocide: they were hunted down over a period of more than 100 years, with permits issued as if for animals, by Dutch East India Company commandos and early colonists.
It is important to raise this uncomfortable issue from our past and to invite discussion, so that this can be analysed and put on the agenda of our national discussions and debate.
The Khoisan nation was not successfully exterminated; indeed, there are almost 40-million South Africans with more than 20% Khoisan DNA, and almost 10-million with more than 75% Khoisan DNA, out of our 55-million citizens. There are 12 Khoisan groups over areas from the Northern Cape to Cape Town and Fort Beaufort; each has a chief and there is a national leadership.
Cape Town’s pre-colonial Khoisan name is Hoerikwagga, and the Camissa River was the river from which the first European sailors and traders drank in the 1500s and 1600s.
My information is that the Khoisan were treated as equals in the Eastern Cape, and that they intermarried with Xhosa and AmaPondo clans, and contributed both genetically and linguistically to South Africa.
In the Western Cape, they were pushed off their lands. Many were shot and the Khoisan mostly became a broken nation subjugated to colonists as labourers and translators.
This history is horrific but needs to be put on the agenda of colonial wrongs. Restitution was forgotten in 1994. South Africa owes much to this First Nation, and they deserve a much broader discussion and recognition.
The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill seeks to tie them into a sort of apartheid-like role, which is unhealthy and inappropriate for the great nation they are.