The exterminators were VOC and Boer troops
It is scary that 23 years after apartheid was overthrown “an Englishman now living in South Africa” parrots exactly the official line that was pushed by the apartheid regime’s department of information brochures, school history books and the then SABC (“There are two sides to colonialism’s legacy”, Letters, June 9)
Richard Garratt alleges that “the Nguni people colonised Southern Africa, displacing indigenous people, [San and Khoikhoi] marginalising them, and displacing them ruthlessly to its desert regions”. All that he left out was the rest of that official line: “until the white man brought law and order”.
San/Bushmen lived everywhere from Lake Chrissie in Mpumalanga to the Transkei and Free State more than 1000 years after Nguni and other Iron Age cultivators arrived. It was a century of genocide by Boer and Dutch East India Company (VOC) commandos that exterminated them where they lived. Read Mohamed Adhikari’s The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples.
It seems the settler variant of Holocaust denialism is displacement — to project the atrocities of white invaders on to their current political opponents — the black majority.
The Nguni and other black clans did not “displace” but intermarried with and assimilated the local Khoikhoi, from Mapungubwe on the Limpopo to the Eastern Cape. Jeffrey Peires’s The House of Phalo devotes an appendix to listing how one-third of today’s Xhosa clans are entirely Khoikhoi by ancestry.
Contrast this assimilation with the white settlers designating Khoikhoi as “half-castes”, “Basters”, “coloureds”; dispossessing them from their pastures, enserfing them as “apprentices” and “displacing ruthlessly” the Griqua from Saldanha Bay district to the semidesert north of Griqualand West.
The calls for decolonisation of university syllabuses fall short of how to unbrainwash whites who never went to university, or learnt the last-century settler hagiography of Die Groot Trek and Rhodes. Perhaps TV and the internet could be used to remedy the cultural damage wreaked not by only apartheid, but apparently also English colonial mythology?