Truth lies outside yearning glamour of the Klinker brick

O YOU think and dream in your language?” asked a silver-haired man over tea, his eyes laughing to the sound of his smile. “Do you greet me in my language, and I in yours?”

The gathering was light. The national investigative hearing into the human rights situation in indigenous communities felt like a harmony of friends. Yet there was an intensity – even a sadness – that fell like a long sigh over the proceedings at the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in Braamfontein this week.

There were men wearing the insignia of their Khoisan birthright in the small number who lined the tables of the hearing, but there weren’t many. In the bracelets and leopard-skin bands, in the beads and dreads, lay pride, survival. There was also frustration and a sense of continued astonishment that good people still found themselves in that place, for that purpose.

In 1994, we simply believed that, by 2016, full human rights would have been restored to the original South Africans. Yet here their representatives were – again – trying to establish a proper framework to protect their history and language. Here they were, again, cast as a minority battling a tide of other political priorities. As the chief executive of the troubled Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), Dr Mpho Monareng, warned at the hearing, we should be careful of othering the other.

At first, he was gentle, describing the “gift” the Khoi language gave to the Bantu languages. SAHRC commissioner Danny Titus warmed to the discussion.

“The click is a common trait,” said Monareng, prompting Titus to remark: “(Maybe) isiZulu and isiXhosa should be compensating the Khoi for the clicks.” Soft laughter.

But then Monareng delivered a quiet blow, around the government’s announcement last year on teaching Mandarin. This, while the languages of the Khoisan people, South Africa’s languages, have been neglected and undermined. He and Titus almost tumbled over each other in their assessment, asking if this was but a choice of ideological power.

Instead, they suggested, the Khoisan have been subjected to “tick-box exercises” where they get a nod and are then moved to the sidelines.

It sounds merely poetic to say the ancestral graves of some of the people at the hearing lie scattered across Joburg and Ekurhuleni. But the facts are there, and if you’re looking for an epicentre of Khoisan existence before our brothers and sisters came south from central Africa, Eikenhof, which lies under the Klipriviersberg, in the area between Soweto and Eldorado Park, could be it.

Google maps will take you down a dead end in the lower middle-class area of Meredale, just before Comptonville. But that’s not quite the spot. You have to drive further down the Golden Highway, across Chris Hani, past the sleepy aeroplane on top of the Sasol garage, past the social housing developments and the road to the Soweto Country Club, and find the Ebenezer Congregational Church.

That’s a primary landmark in more recent history, but several stone-walled Iron Age settlements have been discovered near there, in the green of the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve. Experts have dated them at around 1 500AD, and there are many more sites around Joburg that also show the transition as hunter-gatherers came into contact with African migrants.

Eventually, colonialism and apartheid dominated and, sadly, dug in.

Khoisan people have tried to make this area their own, even as the yearning glamour of Joburg’s south Klinker-bricked around them. But while there’s no true recognition now, there’s hope.

Addressing the SAHRC hearing, deputy chief land claims commissioner Thami Mdontswa said there was still a righteous obligation to follow the standards set by the constitution, which outline the right to restitution. And because of that, he explained, the commission is engaging the City of Joburg to honour the claims of its Khoisan people.

The truth of Eikenhof may yet shine.

We believed full human rights would have been restored