Yvette Abrahams (UCT)
Source: Wittenberg, Hermann; G. Baderoon; Y. Steenkamp (eds) 1998. Inter Action 6. Proceedings of the Fourth Postgraduate Conference. Bellville: UWC Press, pages 115-121.
Back to Archive The academic as research subject
Yvette: (At times the process of writing us out of history is painfully obvious. )
Editor:
- So many minorities suffer this in Africa, including the Boers.
- It is dreadful what they have done to the KhoiKhoi.
When I live in Cape Town I call myself Brown, a concept which captures my identity as a descendant of the Khoisan and slaves. I mind calling myself coloured, although indeed I often do so for reasons of unity in contexts where my Brown brothers and sisters prefer that appellation. When I travel north, however, these easy solutions work less well. North of the Hantam the distinction between coloureds and Nama are much sharper, because of historical differences between the descendants of southern Cape Khoisan and Malay slaves who moved north in the nineteenth century and the Khoisan people who stayed there all the time. As I cross the Gariep the concept Brown becomes ever more problematic since many Khoisan people there are in fact deeply black as to skin colour. So even though they may be Brown in a political sense, they do not like to be called brown. Moreover, the "Brown" word cannot be replaced by "Coloured" since most are not Coloured, since the apartheid administration there made a distinction between people classified coloured, and descendants of the Khoisan such as the Nama and Damara who were classified African. We are all of course Black, in the political sense of people descended from Africans who owe allegiance to our African heritage. But in the Cape, my African brothers and sisters refuse to recognize that fact, since they tend to refer to themselves as "Africans" and to me as Coloured. In Namibia, where my family tree is well known, I don't have that problem. So as I move from north to south and back again my vocabulary has to change, simply in order to make myself understood, simply in order to be able to convey my sense of who I am.
"Khoisan", the term I use to describe the indigenous autochthons of southern Africa, is of course a misnomer. It is an academic term invented by Isaac Schapera in the 1930's to include both the indigenes who had cattle and those who had not. Its usage as a modern term of ethnic nationalism is not one which has an indigenous historical parallel in any Khoisan language I know, for the simple reason that there was no reason to invent such a term. When only "we" lived in southern Africa, there was no need to have a term to distinguish "us" from "them". As far as I understand Khoisan history the meaningful levels of social relations before the whites came lay at clan and family level, all of whom had names. Our sense of ourselves as a people beyond this level was forged in the acts of dispossession, slavery and murder which were done to us precisely because we were the indigenous people of this country. To again use myself as data, it should be clear that my native nationalism did not spring, full blown, from the dregs of my beer glass. It is part of my historical legacy. The colonizers cared little whether we were Goringhaiqua or Gorachouqua. They cared only that we had what they wanted - our land and our labour. Thus we learnt that because we were attacked as an aggregate we had to respond as a people. The gradual growth of larger units of cohesion and organization in response to colonialism can be seen quite clearly in the name changes during the nineteenth century: from Namaqua to Nama, from Damaqua to Damara. The only ones who kept the clan appellation -qua were the Griqua, although they had by this time incorporated members far beyond the original clan of !Kariguriqua. So the historical roots of Brown nationalism are there, quite clear for all to see. But when the academics needed to begin analyzing the Khoisan as a people they reached for a term and came up with "Khoisan".
It is not a term which relates very well to indigenous language usages. The proper word should be our term for human: "Khoikhoin", men of men. The Brown Afrikaans translation of "Khoikhoin" is particularly nice since it lacks the more modern gendered implications of the English "men"; it is "mensmens", the real people. But of course I cannot use "Khoikhoin" because the academics of the early part of this century appropriated it to use for the Brown people who had cattle. They used "San", the Khoikhoin word for "gathering" to refer to those of us who had no cattle - a pretty sizeable majority by the early part of this century. Colonialism, remember, is the context in which all these name changes are happening. So if I use "Khoikhoi" in academic contexts everybody will think I am referring to cattle herders only, and not the milkers of the eland. Therefore I use "Khoisan" in academic contexts, an artificial term invented by academics, to make the point that we are, all of us Brown people, the dispossessed autochthons of this land. At home, and sometimes in political contexts, I am Khoikhoi. I am not as excessive as a friend of mine from the southern Cape, who swears he gets up in the morning, looks himself in the mirror, and says "thank God I'm not Coloured, I'm Khoikhoi". Were I to be consistent in my language usage, I would confuse utterly my academic peers - what would I say when referring to the Ju!twasi of the far north, would I call them the cattleless Khoikhoin ? It doesn't make sense north of the Gariep anyway, there the term "Khoikhoi" refers to the Brown people who came from the Cape last century, who eventually became part of the Nama. Brown people north of the Gariep (some of whom are black, remember) are nowadays either Damara, Nama, Baster, Kleurlinge or San, anything but Khoikhoin. Thus Khoisan, a term everybody can relate to because it is so artificial in the first place.
I felt less weird about this when I visited Canada a couple of years ago, where the term "Indian"is very contested. Many descendants of the autochthons prefer not to use it, referring instead to themselves as native Americans, native Canadians or native Caribbeans. But this gets very confusing at pan-native conferences, besides being completely inauthentic in any case because Caribbean is the only word which even has a native root, so others prefer to stick with "Indian" since, they argue, it is so hopelessly inappropriate anyway. The first objective, after all, of political organization is to make oneself understood.
The parallel is comforting. Like them, we were colonized, and it is important to understand that it is colonialism in the first place which has caused both this confusion of terms and the need to organize on a pan-native level. Four hundred years ago I would have been Ouma !Hamamus' great-granddaughter, and that would have been all the identity I wanted or needed beyond my given name. These other shifting identities and concepts I need precisely in order to rid myself of the colonialism which caused them. So in principle I could pick a term, any term, and get with my life. In practice, however, it is not so easy. In practice, I do not have much power to define myself. The legacy of colonialism means that I cannot be myself unless I am prepared to contest other definitions of me, definitions which determine how other people see me. The process of history which created me also created a linguistic situation in which I lack one word to communicate both my identity and my history to my environment. How did this happen ? Why does it continue to happen in what is supposed to be a post-colonial society ? In this paper I try to answer these questions by analyzing the master narratives in which I have to situate my social identity. As you have seen, they leave me nowhere to go, semantically.
Academic theory and practice
In practice this hits me with often stunning force. I have had a white academic tell me I cannot call myself Khoisan. To do so means (and I quote) I don't know my history, I don't know my anthropology and I don't know my ancestors. Perhaps this academic didn't know that in my own vernacular this is an insult, for to tell me I don't know who my father is, of course, to call my mother a prostitute. I will overlook this for a moment to explain that from his point of view, it is impossible that I can be Khoisan, unless I am one of the impoverished landless, powerless, everything-less inhabitants of the remote Kalahari desert. In the academic discourses about the Khoisan, nothing could be more disconcerting than to have one pitching up in their midst with three degrees and a huge attitude. I simply do not exist. My own discipline, history, has long ago disposed of the Khoisan, in fact our academic demise is coterminous with the development of history as an academic discipline. Thus, historians have been simply concerned to explain our extinction. Thus Marks argued that
[i]n accounting for the ultimate disappearance of the Khoisan as an ethnic entity, their prity for acculturation must be taken into account ... They literally acculturated themselves out of existence. The significance of this is not simply that it gave rise to the Cape Coloured community, but that many of the acculturated half-Khoi identified with whites and passed into their ranks...(1)
It should be noted, however, that Marks allowed us to exist at least up until the nineteenth century. Elphick considered us extinct much earlier than that. In his book devoted to the dismal story of Khoisan collapse, decline and catastrophe, he argued that:
Within sixty years of 1652 the traditional Khoikhoi economy, social structure and political order had almost entirely collapsed. My main goal here is to understand this collapse. It cannot be explained purely in military terms ... Neither can it be seen merely as a result of the smallpox epidemic of 1713, even though this swept away the bulk of the Western Cape Khoikhoi population. Khoikhoi decline was far advanced an probably irreversible well before this final catastrophe.(2)
You will readily understand now the reason behind some of my more alienating experiences. Thus I have sat in a meeting where a white colleague was asked "Are there any Khoisan left in this country ?" My colleague answered "No, genetically, there may be some traces, but culturally they are extinct". So I sat there, with a culture and a language I had up to that point thought was a historical legacy from my ancestors, but no, obviously I must have been mistaken! Academic history has written us out of history, it has begun with an assumption that we do not exist, and has gone on to write the history of our disappearance. The English language never needed a word for who I am because I am simply not there.
At times the process of writing us out of history is painfully obvious. Academics would go far out of their way to do it. For instance, Winifred Hoernle, travelling in the northern Cape in 1922, wrote :
Decided to move on, influence of Mission station too str(3)ong here, they say the other people are more savage and have as little to do with the Mission as possible, possibly they will be better for my purposes.
Plagued by a sense of ever-impending extinction, anthropologists pushed on to discover a way of life which they were convinced was fast disappearing. Thus they rode to the fringes of colonialism, past the Khoisan who were changing under the impact of war and dispossession. History, and Brown people became a contradiction in terms. Therefor the concept "Khoisan" - the last remnants of a static, unchanging and extinct people.
What became of these people in academic discourses ? As we can see in the quote from Marks, they became the Coloureds. What can one say about the academic discourses about the Coloureds ? To paraphrase Churchill, seldom has so much nonsense been spoken about so few by so many. Thus we have this extract by Crais:
Of the free, `Bastaards' were the most well off and sometimes possessed relatively large herds of livestock, but thair position in colonial society was ambiguous and contradictory. Adopting the culture of thair masters and joining them in commando raids on hunter-gatherers `Bastaards' were nevertheless consistently excluded from the status of burgers.(4)Nonetheless, any discussion about the Coloureds must take as its starting point the discourses about the Khoisan. As the noble savage moved ever further beyond the boundaries of civilization, they were replaced by stereotypes of the degraded savage. As February notes in his discussion of Coloured stereotypes in literature, by the early nineteenth century
... one notices how the term `Hottentot' and `coloured' come to be interchangeable in white thinking. It becomes even more interesting when one realizes that the term slave, by way of derogation, was never applied to the `coloured', as happened in the Americas. That the term slave never attained such obnoxious proportions in South Africa is probably due to the fact that the term `Hottentot' was already serving such a purpose for white South Africa.Hence this interchangeability of `Hottentot' and `coloured'.(5)
These stereotypes can be speedily summed up:
First, there is their love for liquor... second their irascibility and hot-headedness, culminating inevitably in a fight. The third standard element refers to their moral looseness. Finally there is the linguistic incomprehension resulting in ludicrous situations. (6)As the century wore on these stereotypes were to become more virulent, less comical. While the noble savages became exctint in white consciousness , the image of Coloureds as savages degraded further by civilization became a component part of the urban scene in the Cape. It still is. Turn the word over in your mind: Coloured means miscegenation, shameless lust, shame, and confusion. Small wonder that most of us refuse to be Coloured. Who in their right mind would want to be?
Now, viewed as history, the statements above could be conclusively disproved. They do, for instance, require the assumption that all our great-grandmothers at some point sat down and decided that Brown men were no longer attractive, and also that their children so despised their mother's culture that they wished to retain none of it. Such an event, if it had taken place, would be of such unprecedented lack of logic that it in itself would require explanation, and many, many historical studies. It would also have had to leave some trace in historical records. So we can be reasonably sure that we are dealing here with some form of fiction.
Viewed as creative art, as narrative, it becomes clear that these hegemonic discourses are cohesive, if not coherent. They all tell the same story, and a nasty story it is: first we were dead, then we chose to extinguish ourselves and now we are all bastards. That is the story which academic history chose to tell. Now, it is not farfetched to assume that the narrative reveals something about the narrator. The reason I am here today, the question I need help to answer,is why ? Why do these people hate us so much that they, metaphorically speaking, must constantly kill us off and swear at the remains?
N O T E S
1. Marks, S "Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" Journal of African History 13:2, 1972, p. 75.
2. Elphick, R Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977, p. xvii.
3. Carstens, P, G Klinghardt and M West (eds) Trails in the Thirstland: The Anthropological Field Diaries of Winifred Hoernle Centre For African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1987, p. 33.
4. Crais, C White Supremacy and Black Resistance in South Africa: The making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 45.
5. February, V Mind Your Colour: The `Coloured' Stereotype in South African Literature Kegan Paul, London, 1981, p. 24.
6. February Mind Your Colour, p. 26.
source: http://www.uwc.ac.za/arts/english/interaction/97ya.htm
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