Bushmen are SA’s first nation
Bushmen are SA’s first nation whether the government recognises them or not. Yet the Bushmen, known also by the K-word of the Kalahari, the Khoisan, will not be recognised the first nation of SA, Deputy Minister Obed Bapela has decreed.
That, according to City Press, was what Bapela told the National Assembly’s portfolio committee on co-operative governance and traditional affairs on the eve of his roadshow to promote the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill.
If ever there has been a piece of proposed legislation invented by the ANC’s executive that best resembles the statutes of apartheid, the Traditional Leadership Bill is it.
Aninka Claassens, director and chief researcher of the Land and Accountability Research Centre in the faculty of law at the University of Cape Town, detailed the wickedly divisive and oppressive intent behind the bill in her oped piece in Business Day last week.
Bapela’s reference to Bushmen as Khoisan is evidence of his utter disrespect and negligent disregard for the most abused and persecuted people in SA’s bloody history. It is generally accepted “Khoisan” is derived from “Khoikhoi” (or perhaps the phonetically more correct “Khoe-khoe”) which means “best people”, or “people of people”. Khoisan means non-people or outside people.
The spurious ethnography that culturally and racially relates the Khoikhoi to the Bushmen is illustrated by the faux etymology that insinuates the Nama word for outsider, san, into the ancient identity of the Bushmen. It is little wonder they find it offensive. Remnants of the previously dominant subgroup /XAM KA !KE have adopted “Abathwa”.
The colonisation of southwestern Africa by the Hadzabe people from north-central Tanzania and the Mbuti pygmies from eastern Congo about 140,000 years ago gave rise to the hunter-gatherer Bushmen, writes Emeritus Prof Tim Crowe in The Conversation. About 2,000 years ago a second wave of colonisers, the Khoikhoi, arrived in southwestern Africa.
They were of similar genetic origin, but they had a pastoral culture which was a differentiation that put about 138,000 years of evolution and cultural development between the Khoikhoi and the Bushmen.
Crowe shows that genetically and culturally we may hypothesise that the Bushmen are as closely or as remotely related to Caucasians as they are to the Bantu. They have genetic markers that relate them to Neanderthals. They are the oldest extant people on earth and distinct in every sociobiological way. We may rightly call them the first nation of the world. They most certainly are the first nation of SA. No declaration, decree or fit of ideological fervour can change this.
If Bapela does not know this, he has not done his homework properly and is unfit to be in charge of traditional affairs.
And if he does have the facts, his recent declaration is the cynical work of a racial supremacist.
Race has no biological or taxonomic significance and it is possible for evolutionary genetic anthropologists to distinguish population differences among humans to infer the timing of their movements. Yet, the Bushmen, now lumped together with come-lately Nama and Koranna and Griqua and sundry people of diminishing blood (including former president Nelson Mandela), are not to be recognised as SA’s first
THEY WERE OF SIMILAR GENETIC ORIGIN, BUT THEY HAD A PASTORAL CULTURE WHICH WAS A DIFFERENTIATION
people, “because we do not know who arrived at which point, when and where, and that history is not easy to trace”, says Bapela.
Well, that is simply not true. Bushman history is easier to trace than much of the later colonists of southern Africa, who prefer revisionism and violent oppression to write their history for them. The Bushmen left a historical account across the entire subcontinent on almost every rock face and cave wall that would hold still for long enough to have paint slapped on.
The history of murder and expansionist pillage by black and white colonists is well documented by the colonists themselves.
What happened is an injustice of our past that we, the people of SA, are obliged to recognise.
Anyone who does not accept the first line of the Constitution should not be entitled to the rights and privileges it affords, especially if you are a government official.