A Decolonised History of Land (PDF)

 PATRIC TARIQ MELLET A decolonised history of land TAFELBERG  Preface W hat is it that motivates me to write about the loss of land, the loss of belonging and the loss of identity here at the southern tip of Africa? Is it just that I am...

 PATRIC TARIQ MELLET A decolonised history of land TAFELBERG  Preface W hat is it that motivates me to write about the loss of land, the loss of belonging and the loss of identity here at the southern tip of Africa? Is it just that I am deeply bothered by the vast expanse of shacks across half of the Cape Flats and Cape Peninsula where every rainy season people are flooded out of the only place that they call home, and every windy season they are burnt out? Could it be that I am disturbed about how many people on the Cape Flats are backyard dwellers where three or more families share tiny sub-economic homes and most are unemployed, with communities besieged by gangs wreaking havoc and death rates usually associated with wars? Or is that a culture of brutality and violence in general, and against women and children in particular, has become so entrenched that society as a whole now hardly blinks an eye when figures such as 47 for deaths and an equal numbers for rapes in just one Cape Town district are reported on most weekends? Or is it the stark poverty and nothingness that greets me when travelling to rural areas where each smart, predominantly white town has what can only be described as a segregated dormitory ‘slavery town’ next to it? Is it because 25 years after the fall of apartheid there is little evidence of agrarian reform in these same rural districts? Or perhaps my focus results from the fact that I spent much of my life as a freedom fighter with many years in underground resistance and then more in exile, active in the broad liberation movement? Is it that I am afraid of the consequences for our country of what the poet Langston Hughes called ‘a dream deferred’? All these questions contribute to my consciousness. But my motivation goes back all the way to my own childhood and personal experiences and feelings of homelessness, a lack of belonging, exploitation, and trying to recover an identity that had been erased as a result of social engineering. As a child, two things stood out for me. The first was that my single mother and I did not have a place called home. Mum, a low-paid laundry worker in District Six, rented rooms in other people’s homes and moved about frequently. In her room she would have a bed, an ablutions bucket, a basin for bathing, a Primus stove for cooking, a table and a chair. It was a Spartan existence. Much of the time she could not have me with her, so I was fostered by three different families before I was six years old. The trajectory of my life from there was a short stint with my mother, and then into a brutal children’s asylum, next into an industrial trade school, and at the end of my 15th year into a factory to work. There was never any sense of ‘home’. No sense of belonging, except perhaps to District Six where my mother worked and where she took me with her to her workplace during those periods that I lived with her. In the District my mum was known as ‘Cleaners’ and I was ‘Cleaners’ Boy’, and that was about as much a sense of belonging and identity that I had in my upbringing. My lack of rootedness also arose out of my dysfunctional family life. My mother, who was 40 years old when I was born, had had four other children before me, one of whom had died. Mum had been divorced from her children’s father and then briefly had a relationship with my father. My father, or sire, as he is known to his many children by different mothers, had been born in District Six. He was a shoemaker working in a factory near the garment factory where my mother had been working at that time. They were never married and they acrimoniously parted ways when I was just 18 months old. At the time I was in hospital recovering from third-degree burns over my upper body as a result of a Primus-stove cooking accident at home. Sixty years after my accident, the Primus stove is still a symbol of poverty in South Africa. Mum’s mainstay was her matriarchal extended family – my grandmother and my mum’s older sister, Doll. It was at this time that apartheid was being ushered in. ‘Race’ classification had a devastating effect on our family that were a mix of people who would be classified as Coloured, Indian and White. (As will be shown in the book, this classification system defied the fact that those classified as ‘Coloured’ have 195 roots of origin, the vast majority of whom were Africans, with Asian and some European admixture.) My grandmothers were ‘Coloured’ and my grandfathers white, my Aunty Doll’s husband was Indian, and my cousins had features ranging from the darkest Asian looks to the fairest of European complexions. Apartheid with its race classification, group areas, separate amenities, prohibition of mixed marriages, and immorality legislation decimated a family that was as multi-ethnic as ours. As poor people, the adults, all women, also relied heavily on one another economically and for practical and moral support, especially with us kids. Under the new apartheid laws, the assault on family life became too much for my mother’s sister. Aunty Doll and her entire brood of children and grandchildren moved to the United Kingdom to get away from the classification monster and its impact on lives. Only one son stayed on and became a seaman who spent much of his time on the high seas while his wife and children remained in Grassy Park in Cape Town. My mum was then very much on her own with her fatherless child. In desperation, she placed an advert in a weekly church newspaper asking for a family to take me in as one of their own. That was my third foster home, where I spent two years in a family that had eight children. Mum had a nervous breakdown and was in no position to work, nor to look after herself and take care of me. I was aware enough to know that she felt alone and vulnerable, having lost her family support structure. It was at this point that as an eight-year-old I briefly came under the influence of a German nun from the Holy Cross Convent in District Six, who did my mother a favour by looking after me sometimes when she could not take me along to her workplace because of company inspectors’ visits. Sister Mary Martin became my part-time carer for a while. She had a devotion to the Peruvian slave saint Martino de Porres of Lima and I would often see her kneeling at the feet of St Martin’s statue, talking to him. A white woman asking for guidance from a statue of a long-dead black man was a sight to behold for a kid whose family life had been so disrupted by the apartheid system. Through storytelling, Sister Mary Martin introduced me to San Martino de Porres and to the history of slavery and the connection that the people around her in District Six had to the enslaved at the Cape. The stories captivated me and provided me with a key to understanding what the deeper sense of ‘belonging’ was all about. It was my first experience of being able to associate deeply with anything. District Six and Marty, as I called him, became my muses for life. As I grew up, I came to learn of my own family heritage rooted in the African and Asian enslaved and in local indigenous African peoples. I learnt about white people owning Africans and Asians as slaves – people who were treated worse than animals. People who got no compensation at all, not even the measly five rand per week my mother was earning from Monday to Saturday at the Hanover Street laundry shop. Over time I came to learn that 24 of my own ancestors were Africans and Asians who were enslaved, and to this day I have a soul connection to African and Asian cultures. I learnt that I was part of a bigger whole – ‘our’. In the mid-1960s when the destruction of District Six and forced removals under the ethnic cleansing brought on by the Group Areas Act of 1950 began, my child’s mind was horrified about this wrenching of people from their homes and from the land under their feet. What had once been wastelands on the Cape Flats became the dumping grounds for those removed from ‘grey areas’ (so- called racially mixed suburbs) across the southern suburbs of Cape Town from Sea Point to Simon’s Town. Father Vincent O’Gorman, an old non-conformist Irish priest, was my high-school history teacher in standard six. On the first day of class, he dramatically threw the history textbook into the rubbish bin while loudly exclaiming: ‘Propaganda! Rubbish! I will not teach you this rubbish. At the end of the year before you write exams, I will coach you about what the Education Department wants, but until then we will explore history. Official histories are versions. There are always other versions. Don’t even accept mine. I want you to remember this throughout your lives.’ And so it came to be that a young boy had an early awakening to a lifelong path of struggling against racism, apartheid and dispossession on the path to freedom. Though unable to continue my schooling beyond a trade-school junior certificate, I was an avid reader who sought out books about African, Asian and Latin American struggle heroes and their beliefs. I was particularly drawn to Latin American liberation theologians, some of who were among the most radical leaders of that time. I embarked on a path of self-education and lifelong learning and would eventually attain an MSc degree in my mid-40s through self-funded part-time night study. Over time I would, by taking the step of commitment to liberation, find myself in a position to learn at the feet of such great leaders as OR Tambo, Dan Thloome, Henry ‘Squire’ Makgothi, Ray Alexander, Ruth Mompati, Sophie de Bruyn, Reg September, Wolfie Kodesh, Archie Sibeko, Joe Slovo and so many more. I was fortunate later to undergo liberation movement training and mentorship under one of South Africa’s foremost academic thinkers, Professor Jack Simons. Jack did much to help me understand and make sense of who I was and what all the ingredients were that made up identity. Joe Slovo and Jabulani Mzala Nxumalo were others who contributed to that learning curve. I was furnished with the basic intellectual tools that assisted me to explore the wonderful world of identity when colour, ‘race’, ethnicity, ideology, primacy and nationalism of any type are removed from the picture. This is how it came to be that I took my studious interest in Southern African social history to a new level. The themes of subjugation of indigenous peoples, land dispossession and expropriation of labour without compensation, loss of independent livelihoods, loss of African social infrastructure, and the brutalisation of slavery all came into focus. I have travelled the world, visiting and living in over thirty countries, and seen war and peace, affluence and poverty. In none of the societies I observed was the rich–poor divide as great as it is in South Africa. The dialectical relationship between loss and denial of home or land on the one hand, and enslavement or expropriation of unpaid labour on the other, is the theme that runs through every black person’s experience in South Africa. It deeply impacts the soul of people. In recent years, writers such as Botlhale Tema in Land of My Ancestors (2019) and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi in The Land is Ours (2018) have begun different conversations about land, slavery and the genesis of what we call the ‘land question’ today. The narrative of this book joins in conversation with theirs in exploring what Africans lost through the colonial expropriation of land and, by extension, home, belonging, identity, soul, support systems and social cohesion. The year 1652 has been presented as the genesis of social history in South Africa, and of human advancement and civilisation of Africans. Our history was relegated to the realm of the natural history framework of Iron Age and Stone Age hominins. African social history as taught by institutions of learning in South Africa was said to have begun with the establishment of a European colony in 1652. This can be referred to as the ‘1652 paradigm’. Despite an abundance of research from a range of academic fields that exposes the fallacy of this paradigm, it is still widely entrenched. The aim of this book is to break out of this constricting approach and look at African social history from long before 1652 and beyond this paradigm, incorporating key parts of history that have been ignored by mainstream studies or have remained restricted to academic debate and discourse that seldom reaches the public arena. Five themes will be explored in five chapters. The book draws on studies in the fields of history, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, rock art, anthropology, climatology, social history and oral history to contrast some of the latest thinking with colonial and neocolonial interpretations. The first chapter challenges the colonial myth that presents 17th-century southern Africa as ‘an empty land’ free of Africans, save for a few wandering San and Khoe who conveniently had no interest in or consciousness of land ownership. It also debunks the myth that at about the same time of European exploration of what is now South Africa, a mass invasion of black alien people swooped down from Nigeria, Cameroon and the Great Lakes and tried to wrest the land from the San, Khoe and Europeans. The chapter provides a narrative that contests the colonial ‘empty land’ narrative by looking at the period from 1000 BCE until 1652 CE. By taking a social history approach, it fundamentally challenges the colonial constriction of African people’s progress to a version of natural history. Its focus is on the peopling of southern Africa over 3 000 years and the trajectory of social formation over that time. The second chapter looks at Khoe and European engagement over 52 years prior to 1652, involving the establishment of a Khoe trader community, and the first ‘hot war’ between the Dutch and the Khoe that led to the expulsion of all Khoe communities from the Cape Peninsula. The loss of the first indigenous direct-trading development by the Khoe at the hands of the Dutch generally does not feature in other historical narratives. This story culminates with Van Riebeeck’s words written by his own hand in his journal: ‘We had to tell them that their land had fallen to us by the sword.’ This debunks the version that all land acquired by Europeans was by means of civilised treaties and fair bargaining. The third chapter moves from the genesis of land dispossession at the shoreline frontier to look at the four instruments of land dispossession as well as the nineteen wars of dispossession over 227 years that resulted in the formation of the Cape Colony. Along this trajectory, one community of Africans after the other faced a range of atrocities and dispossession of land and livelihoods, and became conquered subjects of colonial rule. Against this background, the chapter raises the issue of ‘crimes against humanity’ as described in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and asks whether politicians’ articulation of restorative justice as a call for ‘expropriation of land without compensation’ should not be formulated differently. The fourth chapter tackles the often-forgotten question of who added productive value to the land seized by the Europeans from indigenous Africans. This is the story of migrants of colour largely forcibly brought to the Cape as enslaved people from elsewhere in Africa and from Asia. It is made clear that without the skills and labour of enslaved and later also indentured and migrant workers, there would not have been towns and villages, road infrastructure, built environments and land transformed into productive farms. Commanders and governors of the early Cape constantly appealed to the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) for slave labour and skills, as the Europeans were unable to do the required work for ultimate European control of the land and could not meet the increasing demand by passing vessels for produce and services. The fifth chapter argues that, to understand the loss of land and the historical narrative beyond a 1652 colonial paradigm, we must also deal with the question of alienation from the land and its relationship to loss of identity, namely de-Africanisation as part of an imposed ideological framework. It also looks at the ties that bind us as Africans of diverse ethnicities and cultures, particularly our common cause of facing the adversity of crimes against humanity and transcending that adversity. Divide-and-rule strategies relied on the de-Africanisation of local identities that had evolved over 3 000 years, rationalised local identities, and created two silos of Africans labelled ‘Natives’ and ‘Coloureds’. In the conclusion, I turn to contemporary times and argue that, in the context of restorative justice, decolonisation should be understood in a much more comprehensive way than is suggested by the narrowly framed ‘land question’. All histories are versions, and this book, like all works, is a version or interpretation of a lived reality and a path of learning. In making my thoughts and explorations part of public discourse, I am opening this narrative to engagement by others with a wide array of views that may challenge my own – that is the nature of discourse. There are a great many fascinating perspectives in other works, and I encourage all to explore these. My only caution is that, as soon as someone presents their version as being the absolute truth rather than a perspective, healthy distrust should set in. My sincere wish is for people to explore beyond the imposed borders – physical or mental – no matter whether this comes from the colonial or neocolonial corner or from new gatekeepers of what may be considered to be politically correct or ethnically correct. The citations in this book are not there simply to accredit authors or to back up arguments. They are also intended to assist exploration by providing references to enable readers to consult the sources themselves and formulate their own perspectives.  A need has been expressed for an easy reference work on the subject of the history of African loss of land and sustainable livelihoods, the breakdown of structures of social cohesion and the deconstruction of culture, as well as enslavement and expropriation of labour without compensation. While the book is an attempt to meet this need, it is by far not a comprehensive account of all facets of our past. It is a simple reader covering just five broad areas to encourage people to explore our past and not just accept the stunted version of history they may have been taught at school. There is also a need articulated by many who cry out for belonging and reunion with ancestral roots lost in the sands of time as land and people were removed from each other. For memories to heal, the memory must be restored and shared. Bringing to light the history that has been hidden is the start of a process of restorative memory that is vital to restorative justice. PATRIC TARIQ MELLET  Introduction A story is like a wind blowing from afar and you feel it … it floats to your ear.1 ǀǀKabbo, ǀXam storyteller I n South Africa today we have manifestations of xenophobia, ‘tribal’ and ethnic chauvinism, racism, narrow Verwoerdian ethno-nationalism, as well as dubious claims of being ‘First People’ and all sorts of contestations rooted more often than not in the championing of relatively modern identity formations within a European-defined national territory – South Africa – which did not even exist before 1910. Alongside this is a historical construct of European colonialism and white supremacy that still dominates the history landscape of South Africa. All the above-mentioned manifestations feed off this root narrative. In 1980, Shula Marks,2 a South African historian at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), inspired a new generation of historians and social scientists to break out of the previous colonial paradigm in the arena of social history at universities in South Africa. Her critique was made against the backdrop of the fact that, at the very formation of university institutions in South Africa, an unhealthy funding relationship in return for doing research for ‘native policy’ or ‘resolving the native problem’ on behalf of the government3 gave rise to a colonial trajectory of thinking rather than independent academic inquiry. In her paper about the ‘empty land’ myth, Marks4 says: While there are many questions that remain unanswered and are perhaps unanswerable, recent research has provided a radical reinterpretation of South Africa’s past; a reinterpretation which challenges so many of the preconceived stereotypes which still serve to legitimise the Republic’s apartheid practices … South Africa came into being as a unified entity as a result of the Anglo- Boer War (1899–1902) fought between the British and two independent Boer republics established by the Dutch-speaking descendants of European settlers outside of the British Cape and Natal Colonies. After the British victory, the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 out of four surviving territories as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, with provincial boundaries established and an agreement on a national border. In 1911, in a process of divide and rule, a range of different African peoples were bureaucratically deprived of their African identity by being labelled ‘Coloured’ while yet others were labelled ‘Natives’, with over fifty ethnic groups5 reduced to nine linguistic-based national formations that were imposed on them. In 1913 the new Union government enacted a devastating Land Act, which effectively consolidated and affirmed possession of all land seized by white colonists since 1652 in the previous two British colonies and former Boer republics and restricted African landownership to the 13% of land that had not been expropriated. When waving a flag created 25 years ago, shouting that we are proudly South African and ‘othering’ those considered outsiders and deemed to be aliens, we forget this fact that the Union of South Africa and its borders were created as part of a peace treaty ending the Anglo-Boer War and with total disregard for the communities through which these borders rode roughshod. Neither the borders nor the name ‘South Africa’ had the blessing of the majority of people forced into that framework.  The post-1994 democratic republic of South Africa inherited this 1910 configuration of the country with its internationally recognised borders. There was no resolution to the ‘land question’ in all its many facets, and the deeper spiritual connection to land and belonging remains unaddressed 25 years into post-apartheid South Africa. Part of the alienation still prevalent in our society is due to the fact that African social history has also been erased and replaced with a narrative that justifies expropriation of land from Africans by Europeans. We were raised on a distorted colonial and apartheid narrative which said that there was a sudden wave of northern ‘Bantu’, alternatively ‘black’ or ‘Nguni’, alien invaders of South Africa in the period of the 15th to 17th centuries, who allegedly stomped over people the writers called ‘Bushmen’ (San) and ‘Hottentots’ (Khoe). The latter were said to have been a few nomadic ‘noble savages’ in a relatively unpopulated Cape who, according to this same slanted narrative, were conveniently almost wiped out by a smallpox epidemic. The cornerstone of this thinking was first expressed by the historian George McCall Theal (1837–1919), whose work is peppered with references to Africans as ‘barbarous’. According to Theal, ‘The country was not the Bantu’s originally any more than the White man’s, because the Bantu were also immigrants.’6 Constructed identities and terminology The constructed stereotypical and amalgamated identities of the San and the Khoe were presented as ‘Khoisan’, which was later given an attribute of ‘brown-ness’ by colonists. Other Africans were projected as the so-called alien enemy of ‘brown’ people and were given the overlay of ‘blackness’. In the 1970s, PW Botha’s ‘Stratcom Counter-Insurgency Strategy’ and ‘Total National Strategy’ turned towards a policy of ‘toenadering’ (Coloured alignment with white Afrikaners) aimed at ‘Coloured’ people.7  Through both overt and covert tactics, this policy sought to inculcate a spirit of ‘die bruin Afrikaner’ (the brown Afrikaner) and superiority over those classified as ‘black’. Under these strategies, linkages were forged between state-created subversive organisations such as Boerevolk and elements in the Cape (Coloured) Corps in the South African Defence Force (SADF), educationists and clergymen to influence the mainstream and intelligentsia on to a schismatic path. The aim was to break any form of resistance unity by fomenting ‘Coloured’ and ‘Khoisan’ nationalism. This mischief included stoking counter-antagonism among those classified ‘black’ towards those classified ‘Coloured’. All these terms – ‘Coloured’, Khoe, San, Khoisan, Bantu, Nguni and the ethnicised later usage of the term ‘black’ in South Africa since its promulgation in 1977 – are colonial constructs. ‘Black’ as an official ethnic term was specifically created after the 1976 anti-Bantu Education protests to defuse anger and to undermine the Black Consciousness Movement. All these terms are loaded, and each has a history rooted in racist ethnographic and anthropological studies where notions of race, intelligence and criminality were constructed to create a colonial and apartheid legal framework to control black people. Some may argue that terms do not matter, but I posit that they do. They can be shown to have played a major role in distorting historical narratives, and like a virus they infect the intellectual legacy of the future. In time the colonial academic world went a step further and intellectually wiped out the existence of the San and the Khoe in the interest of the colonial government by asserting that these peoples no longer existed except in the form of a genetic fingerprint. The de-Africanisation of the San and the Khoe and their enforced assimilation into a constructed ‘Coloured’ identity has resulted in cultural genocide on a grand scale in South Africa. The first step in controlling communities is the obliteration of memory and the deconstruction of culture, replacing it with void, and then creating a new construct. Bernedette Muthien,8 in expressing her own rootedness as a person of San and Khoe heritage, recalls Yvette Abrahams9 expressing how she felt when a white university tutor delivering a course on the Khoe once emphatically stated that the Khoe and their culture no longer existed, saying: ‘No, physically there may be some genetic (Khoe) mixtures still around but their culture is extinct …’ Abrahams explained the effect of this statement on her as a Khoe descendant: ‘This white man came to extinguish my community and my culture in a sentence. And me with them, for who am I without my community and culture?’ Abrahams10 recalls the experience as one of ‘symbolic genocide’. At another level, some sectors of our society have unfortunately been beguiled by a neocolonial mindset that has adopted the division of African identity. So, they see Khoe and San as a separate ‘race’ from those other peoples who celebrate a Pan-African identity alongside singular community identities. This plays into the constructed colonial identities that had been set up to be antagonistic towards one another. Consequently, one finds a narrative saying that some are ‘black’ and ‘alien’ and others are ‘brown’ and indigenous. Then an ethno-nationalist paradigm of ‘firstism’ joins in a cocktail of racism to make bizarre and unfounded claims. ‘Firstism’ is a concept usually linked to ‘nation’ or nationalism. It involves the elevation of an ethnic or race group to having primacy of rights before any other or to the exclusion of rights of others, and is premised on ‘right of first occupation’ of a territory or a claim of having originated in a specific territory. Indigenous peoples’ rights to be neither marginalised nor to face discrimination and to enjoy equality are not the same as ‘firstism’, though sometimes a few project it as such. I use the term ‘indigenous’ guardedly, as it is generally an adjective referring to flora and fauna ‘occurring naturally’ and, in my opinion, can reduce the human being to that level. It has simply been pinned onto ‘othered’ human beings and is also closely related to the term ‘native’, which was adopted by Europeans after conquest when liberalism painted a veneer of patronising enlightenment and the championing of ‘upliftment’ of those conquered. For me, ‘indigenous’ with its many and contradictory meanings is a zoologist’s, ethnographer’s and anthropologist’s appendage. The English noun for a person identifying as indigenous to a locality, region or continent is ‘indigene’ (sometimes spelt with a capital letter). It begs the question as to why it has become entrenched convention to use an adjective instead of a noun. This was first brought to my attention in West Africa, where people are referred to as indigenes of an area whereas plants and animals are indigenous. In South Africa, however, the noun ‘indigene’ does not seem to be commonly used. Hence for communication’s sake I mostly use ‘indigenous’ in this text, although there are also occasions where I have retained ‘indigenes’. This is an example of colonisation through language. Just because the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and various other European- and North American- dominated bodies have set the parameters for discourse and communication, it does not mean that Africans must fall in line. The European concept of ‘nations’ and the primacy concept of ‘first’ along with the term ‘indigenous’ are also colonial constructs which stymie and distort the way forward for decolonised discourse. In the quest to discover and assert one’s roots and to revive memory, it is important to acknowledge that there are many who do not need to ‘revive’ the memory because they did not lose their culture and identity. Instead, they kept it alive under difficult and impossible circumstances. We need to be very careful that we do not buy into the notion that all forms of cultural survival just vanished. The flame of suppressed cultures has always burnt bright regardless of everything that has been thrown at it. Like all cultures, San and Khoe cultures have not remained static and have been moulded and creolised over time. Nobody engaging in revivalism should ride roughshod over San and Khoe communities that have survived the entire colonial and apartheid era and nurtured their culture at great cost. One is struck with awe when watching communities performing the rieldans and can see ancient culture in every move. There are so many manifestations of the living culture of San and Khoe that do not require a 7th- or 17th-century interpretation for authenticity. A contrived 7th- or 17th -century look based on colonial texts can certainly be questioned and even seen as an insult. When some revivalist formations impinge on surviving San or Khoe communities in an opportunistic manner for gain and distort the legacy, this, too, is in many ways a form of cultural genocide. Revivalist communities have every right to express and celebrate their identity, but should first do thorough research to ensure that they are not overlooking surviving communities. The historical narrative of this book tackles this ethno-nationalist ‘race’- antagonistic approach at its roots and argues that San and Khoe should never be marginalised from the broader African family of peoples of whom they are a part. We will never be able to tackle the very real discrimination and marginalisation faced by San and Khoe communities for as long as this neocolonial approach continues to be embraced. It is for this reason that the world consultative forums such as the UN, the ILO and the African Union (AU) refer to ‘indigenous communities who face discrimination and marginalisation’ when dealing with the experiences of the San, Nama, Korana, Griqua and Cape Khoe in South Africa. A decade ago I had the pleasure to feature together with the late Dr Neville Alexander in a multi-media stage show called ‘Afrikaaps’, which was also the subject of a documentary by the same title made by Dylan Valley.11 We were talking heads beamed onto a screen within the show performed by a talented group of young people who presented the alternative story of Afrikaans as a black language – Afrikaaps. This production had a central attraction for both of us when we assisted the producers with their workshopping of the content of the show. It was that the content rejected the false separation and mischievously fanned antagonisms between slavery heritage, San and Khoe heritage, and the broader African heritage of Xhosa and other peoples, and rather emphasised the creolisation that occurred through common experiences of subjugation and resistance. The coming together of various tributaries of peoples in events around the Kai !Gariep River was explained by Alexander12 as a reference point for understanding Cape cultural heritage: The Gariep River is one of the major geographical features of this country. It traverses the whole of South Africa and its tributaries have their catchment areas in all parts of the country. It is also a dynamic metaphor, which gets us away from the sense of unchanging, eternal and god-given identities … It accommodates the fact that at certain times of our history, any one tributary might flow more strongly than the others, that new streamlets and springs come into being and add their drops to this or that tributary, even as others dry up and disappear; above all, it represents the decisive notion that the mainstream is constituted by the confluence of all the tributaries, ie that no single current dominates, that all the tributaries in their ever-changing forms continue to exist as such, even as they continue to constitute and reconstitute the mainstream … Similarly, I used the Camissa River in Cape Town to explain the coming together of people in a common experience of adversity and resistance by local Africans of many roots as well as the African-Asian enslaved with diverse roots. The !Gariep and Camissa analogies pose an antithesis to narrow ethno-nationalism and notions of ‘race purity’. The role of anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists Much of the narrow ethno-nationalist thinking was part of the colonialisation imperative in the early emergence of South African universities and their ‘think-tank’ relationships with the new Union government that provided funding for the establishment of ethnography, linguistics, and anthropology departments to assist them with what was called the ‘native problem’ and resolution of the ‘land question’.13 Leonhard Schultze, Wilhelm Bleek (earlier for the Cape government), the Rev. WA Norton, AR Radcliffe-Brown, Isaac Schapera, Carl Meinhof and Nicolaas van Warmelo, a combination of conservative-right and liberal academics, are some of the people whose research helped to inform the Union government and its successor, the apartheid regime, on how to deal with ‘race’, land, language, culture and identity. This set the grounds for law-making and for national discourse about the majority African population that gave birth to the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, among other laws of dispossession. In his book The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982), John W Cell14 takes an in-depth look at the relationship between race segregation in the United States of America (US) and separate development in the Union of South Africa. He tackles the respective approaches to what in South Africa was called the ‘native’ problem and in the US the ‘negro’ problem where intellectual race theories underpinned the trajectory of white supremacism. Thereby Cell links the South African story of race politics and intellectual thought to the global preoccupation with superior and inferior race pigeonholing. Kirk Bryan Sides15 makes the point that … apartheid was just as much a historical project as it was one that reached towards a racialist vision of the future. Through this anthropological work, the difference and resultant separation was made to look like a natural consequence of South Africa; that is, South Africa, its geography, its people, its races and cultures, etc. were seen to historically  divide themselves naturally along racial and ethnic lines … However, the ideological and intellectual construction of apartheid, despite this ‘grounding’ rhetoric, was in many ways the result of transnational, and transoceanic, discourses on race … In Chapter 1, we will look more closely at the anthropological activities of Leonhard Schultze in the early 20th century in German South West Africa (Namibia), during the period in which genocide was carried out on the Nama, San and Herero peoples by Germans. Schultze was the man who created the term ‘Khoisan’ and also argued for their extermination. He has also indelibly influenced ethnography and anthropology teaching in South African universities. Sides goes on to explain the relationship between German race theories (including Germany’s extermination practices in genocide against the Namibians) and South African anthropology during the first four decades of the 20th century. This is framed as the ‘genealogy between the anthropological discipline of German “Afrikanistik” which fell under the larger umbrella of “Völkerkunde” and its South African ethnological correlate, “volkekunde” … that ultimately culminated in the apartheid ideology … Drawing on a German tradition of philological classification, South African anthropology increasingly imagined a national taxonomy in which language was equal to both racial and geographical “origins”’.16 Though the paradigm of thinking of the first four decades of the 20th century, as well as that of Hendrik Verwoerd’s ethno-nationalism and perpetual primitivisation overlay on African peoples, is widely rejected today, it is still flirted with by significant sectors of South African society – black and white. (Verwoerd, who was minister of ‘native affairs’ before he became prime minister in 1958, is regarded as the architect of apartheid.) New voices in the research arena have challenged the distortions that gained traction in the 20th century by using solid facts that expose a different narrative. Yet the influence of the earliest ethnography-anthropology thinkers that had pervaded all the social sciences by the 1950s still continues to be sanctioned today, despite much critique; hence the call for decolonisation in academic institutions. *** Chapter 1 will take us on a journey of social history that began over 2 600 years before European shipping became a regular feature at the Cape of Good Hope. It addresses the disconnect between our older history of Africa, southern Africa and the peopling of the South, and the story of the clash between Europeans and the African land they colonised and the people they subjugated. 7.Goodwin, J & Schiff, B. Heart of whiteness: Afrikaners face black rule in the new South Africa. Simon & Schuster (1995), pp. 290–291; read with The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, vol 51 issue 202, ‘South Africa: A “new deal” for the Coloured’ (1961), pp. 198–202; read with Waldmeir, P. Anatomy of a miracle: The end of apartheid and the birth of the new South Africa. Rutgers University Press (1998), pp. 30–33. 10.Abrahams, Y. Colonialism, dysfunction and dysjuncture: The historiography of Sarah Bartmann. Doctoral dissertation, History Department, University of Cape Town (2000), p. 209. 11.Valley, D. Afrikaaps: The documentary. https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/0644f463-accf-4f2c-89ab- 30894563f28b/afrikaaps/docs-for-sale 8.Muthien, B. The KhoeSan & partnership beyond patriarchy & violence. Master’s thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Stellenbosch (2008), p. 17. 9.Abrahams, Y. Colonialism, dysfunction and dysjuncture: The historiography of Sarah Bartmann. Doctoral dissertation, History Department, University of Cape Town (2000), pp. 208–210. 14.Cell, JW. The highest stage of white supremacy: The origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South. Cambridge University Press (1982). 15.Sides, KB. Pigments of our imagination: Anthropological myths, racial archives and the transnationalism of apartheid. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles (2014), pp. 3–4. 12.Alexander, N. Great Gariep: Metaphors of national unity in the new South Africa. In Now that we are free: Coloured communities in a democratic South Africa, edited by W James, D Caliguire and K Cullinan. IDASA (1996). 13.Philips, H. The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The formative years. UCT Press (1993), pp. 19–27. 16.Sides, KB. Pigments of our imagination: Anthropological myths, racial archives and the transnationalism of apartheid. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles (2014), p. 21. 3.Philips, H. The University of Cape Town 1918–1948: The formative years. UCT Press (1993), pp. 19–27. 4.Marks. S. The myth of the empty land: African history. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1980). 1.A wind blows from afar … are the words of ‖Kabbo Kabbo, a |Xam storyteller, who said in 1873 that a story is like a wind that blows from afar and you feel it … it floats to your ear. http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/stories/289/ 2.Marks, S. The myth of the empty land: African history. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1980). 5.Gillomee, H & Mbenga, B (eds). New history of South Africa. Tafelberg (2007), p. 33. 6.Theal, GM. History of South Africa since September 1795. Cambridge University Press (2010).  CHAPTER 1 Africa: Beginnings and challenging narratives T his chapter aims to cover in broad strokes the progression in the peopling of southern Africa and the civilisations of southern Africa from 3 000 years ago until the beginning of European colonisation in what is now South Africa. The discussion will be structured under the following themes: The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives Perspectives on the San foundation people Perspectives on the Khoe foundation people Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from about 800 CE Slavery epochs as an influence on early migrations and identity formation From the time of the emergence of Kemet (ancient Egypt) about 5 000 years ago,1 African civilisations spread to include Nubia, Punt, Kerma, Kush, Carthage, Nok and Mauritania by 431 CE, and by this time the foundations of organised southern African societies were being established. Here it is important to differentiate between the emergences of what are called advanced organised societies or civilisations, and the earliest emergence of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) and the many evolutionary phases through to Homo sapiens sapiens and then on to early Neolithic proto- societies. The Neolithic periods leading to the emergence of the various great civilisations started approximately 12 000 years ago and had different timelines in different parts of the world. ‘Neolithic’, or the later part of what archaeologists call the Stone Age, refers to the period when humans had started farming and domesticating animals, but still used stone instead of metal for making weapons and tools. These proto-societies were the precursors of what we call ‘civilisations’: well-developed states of human society marked by numerically large numbers of organised people living in advanced built environments under cohesive conditions. Other features of such states include developed forms of food production and distribution, political orders, governance, cultural cohesion, industry, common social norms, and keeping some form of written, graphic or symbolic record. The early civilisations on which the later Western European civilisation modelled itself were mainly those of Greece, Persia and Rome, which were accordingly foregrounded in educational institutions. Other, and in some cases even older, cradles of early civilisations that had emerged in Africa, Arabia- Eurasia, India, China and South America were ignored or received little attention. The Eurocentric approach to the study of human civilisations is largely a colonial distortion that requires us to get back to the idea of ‘universal study’ at universities instead of the highly colonial approach that still tends to prevail in South African institutions. In southern Africa, the Mapungubwe state marks a similar emergence of an era of great states or civilisations – Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Thulamela, Khami, Mutapa and Rozvi – which in turn were the foundations and catalysts for the spread of many great social formations. This chapter will deal with the emergence of these states. Certainly in southern Africa we can establish the emergence of proto- societies between 300 CE and 850 CE, when the beginnings of southern African states and kingdoms, starting with the Mapungubwe state, can be evidenced. We can also show how even earlier the foundation peoples – the San, the Khoe and the Kalanga – were part of the building of these states. It is during this period that we also see southern African societies trading with Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and China, and producing steel,2 at a time when Europe had not yet done so. The Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Monomutapa kingdoms evidence the emergence of an advanced African civilisation in southern Africa long before the entry of European colonialism into the continent. The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives Blombos Cave, which is situated about 300 km from Cape Town on the southeastern coast, has been an ongoing archaeological site since 1991 where deposits dated from between 120 000 to 70 000 years ago right up to 300 years ago have been found. In the popular arena, the name of Blombos Cave and its findings are frequently quoted by laypeople in a manner that does not distinguish between the different eras of Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens development markers found here and at other South African sites.3 Again, in the popular arena there is also not much distinction made between modern humans and older archaic human species that go back to before Homo sapiens emerged, and which indeed for periods of time existed alongside Homo sapiens up to about 18 000 years ago. The Blombos findings particularly provide insights on Homo sapiens, early Homo sapiens sapiens, and human societies and social formations of the past 3 000 years to 300 years ago.4 The site’s importance is underlined by the fact that successive colonies of societies with a dominant hunting-and-gathering economic mode, from archaic humans through to Homo sapiens and pre-San Homo sapiens sapiens and on to San and to a much lesser extent to Khoe, can be studied in one progression over a long period of time. A 73 000-year-old drawing made with an ochre crayon that could be classed as prehistoric art, and possibly symbolism, has added a new dimension to the development history of early Homo sapiens before they are dated as having spread out to Eurasia.5 The artefacts, prehistoric art and other markers found at Blombos Cave6 can be divided into a range of early Homo sapiens deposits, and both early and older Homo sapiens sapiens deposits. The deposits of the past 3 000 to 300 years do not necessarily form a continuum of one hominin group from the older past to the present, regardless of the fact that the modes of living relate to different colonies of hunter-gatherers. (The term ‘hominin’ includes modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors.) It is my perspective that if we want to understand southern African social history, we must be careful not to conflate these different periods. The early European visitors to South Africa used the same lack of differentiation, a recurring theme in South African history, to imply that the Africans they met were a primitive mix of archaic humans and modern humans, which anthropologists called Capoids (a term and concept seldom used today). European philosophers and historians called their derogatory construct of indigenous Africans of the Cape ‘noble savages’. This was done to pin down the San and Khoe peoples that they met as being ‘uncivilised’ and without any social formation or economy of significance. Europeans casually and in records referred to the San and Khoe as ‘beasts’. This disparaging theme has persisted to this day, and is now often camouflaged by patronising romanticism and attempts to project the San and Khoe as a ‘species branch of humanity’, alternatively as a ‘race’. Henshilwood and Van Niekerk7 give us a glimpse of the complexities of human evolution in terms of the origins of human behaviour and timelines using the Blombos findings. In a technical overview, McCreery8 illustrates how the Blombos findings are reshaping archaeological understanding of the origins of modern human behaviour and the capabilities of early Homo sapiens and the African Middle Stone Age. This does not change the basics of archaeological science, nor do the early Homo sapiens deposits at archaeological sites negate the other archaeological findings from the past 12 000 to 3 000 years about human social development in southern Africa of the relatively modern ancestors of those to whom we refer as the San, Khoe and Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga foundation peoples. The last-mentioned group, who will be discussed in more detail later, was a mix of San, early Khoe and other hunter-herder-farmers who evolved locally from slow migrational drifts identified as the West African Kalundu tradition, the Central African Nkope tradition, and the East African Kwale tradition.9 Mlambo and Parsons10 explain that there is much more complexity to the southern African hominin landscape by elaborating on a range of findings at archaeological sites. These include the Kalambo Falls on the Tanzania–Zambia border, the Matobo Hills sites in Zimbabwe, Tsodilo Hills in Botswana’s northern Kalahari, the Apollo Caves in Namibia, Howieson’s Poort, Klasies River, and Diepkloof in the Eastern Cape, the Sibudu rock shelter in KwaZulu- Natal, the Spoegriver site near the Kai !Gariep river, the Seacow Valley site, Rose Cottage Cave near Lesotho in the Free State, Border Cave on the border of eSwatini (Swaziland), Wilton Farm in the Eastern Cape, Elands Bay near Cape Town, the Pinnacle Point Caves at Mossel Bay, and others. Archaic humans were widely distributed across southern Africa, and indications such as those at Blombos Cave show there were other early Homo sapiens – some genetically related to the San and others not. Mlambo and Parsons show deposits at this entire array of sites linked to sites in Tanzania and sites as far north as Kenya and up to Ethiopia. This suggests that many earlier migrations from territories north and east of present-day Zimbabwe took place some thousands of years before the events of 3 000 years ago. The earliest first peoples of southern Africa were much more complex and diverse than the picture presented by some of our contemporary discourse that is often stymied by fashionable politics. The authors also look at these movements in relation to huge and landscape-altering climatic conditions, which is a fascinating subject not dealt with in this book. It raises questions about when the populating of areas occurred, if one considers that 4 000 years ago the entire Cape Flats was under seawater, making an island of the mountains of the Cape Peninsula. Though variations in academic opinion exist on many details, the various social sciences are at one in recognising that the oldest Neolithic societies of southern and East Africa, from Tanzania, Zambia and Angola down to the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas, were those diverse societies of ancestors of those today generally referred to as San communities. The San family of communities are the survivors of just some of those social groups going back 10 000 years ago. This makes the San communities that still survive in the 21st century the oldest peoples today. Their ancestors also exist in the bloodlines and cultures as hidden foundations for all other African groups in South Africa today, including the various branches of the Khoe peoples who are in part the closest descendent formation largely of the Tshua San and Khwe San, with some Nilotic, sub-Saharan and Cushite herder roots too. The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives The field of genetics today complements much of the archaeological and social history research that is at the cutting edge of informing us about the period of 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. Geneticists conducting a genetic study led by Rebecca Cann11 in 1987 were able to trace back all of humanity living today to a female ancestor who is likely to have lived in northeast Africa about 194 000 years ago, and identified this as the mitochondrial DNA gene type L. Since then this study has become the basis of scientific human-genome tracking studies worldwide.12 The fact that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited from mothers enables researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. The L mtDNA genetic lineage to which all modern humanity (Homo sapiens sapiens) traces back was not the only Homo sapiens group to have existed over the past 300 000 years, nor the only hominin species. But the L lineage and its many offshoots are the only surviving Homo sapiens sapiens. This early human community with the L mtDNA gene type was small, and lived alongside other Homo sapiens and archaic human species at the time of dispersal across Africa and later into Arabia, Europe, Asia and beyond. Mlambo and Parsons13 point out that the only archaeological remains of this group of modern humans known so far in East Africa is probably a Homo sapiens skull found on the Omo River in Ethiopia, dated about 168 000 years ago. Approximately 70 000 years ago, at the time of dispersal, those L mtDNA gene type humans are likely to have been a mix of more than one stream of Homo sapiens from across Africa after over 100 000 years of circular migrations on the continent. In all of humanity today mtDNA readings can be proved to go back to this root, and this means that all modern people in their various locations are migrants. Genetics argues that there is only one human race, which evolved in different localities and progressed in different timeframes. The L mtDNA haplogroup marker is used to track the genetic ancestry of all people today, which is identified in a vast number of descendent haplogroups that geneticists then further refine. (A ‘haplogroup’ represents a group of people who have inherited common genetic characteristics from the same most recent common ancestor going back several thousand years.) Through this process they can track DNA admixture and localities where different peoples resided. Geneticists are also able to track migratory movements as well as admixture between different groups of Homo sapiens over time. Furthermore, they can track admixture with other archaic human groups too. This work shows that there is no pure single line of descent for anyone today, and that migration within Africa resulting in one group of Homo sapiens affecting the DNA of others was a constant over time. Theories about the geographic origin of Homo sapiens Various theories have emerged over the past 20 years that have led to debates about where the actual origin of Homo sapiens resides. This has been driven by the questionable notion that there must be one single place to which we can emphatically assign Homo sapiens origin. Some of this thinking is rooted in a constructed racist paradigm in pursuit of a primacy race obsession. Some, erroneously I believe, contrast two single-origin claims by talking competitively of an eastern African origin versus a southern African origin of modern humans. One version that suggests southern Africa as the place of origin is based on a Stanford University study14 where the geneticists engage in subjective speculation with strong overtones of having been influenced by non-genomic local perspectives of a contemporary quasi-political nature. One cannot be scientifically objective when this occurs. This study, which gave rise to much media speculation, nonetheless makes it very clear that they cannot draw a hard in situ conclusion about the origins of those they loosely refer to as ‘bushmen’ and ‘hunter-gatherers’.15 Another controversial study in the same vein was that of Shuster, Miller, Ratan et al.,16 which saw an angry backlash by San communities in Namibia over what they called unethical practices, stereotyping and insulting language, and constructs that also went far beyond the field of expertise of genomics. Yet another study, done by the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Australia, where researchers zoomed into the Kalahari and made some sensational claims in the journal Nature17, also came in for much criticism. The scientific journalist KN Smith18 found the approach taken and the claims made in Nature to be shockingly simplistic and deficient. The Stanford and Australian studies also must be read with a wealth of other genomic studies showing that southern Africa has the most diverse DNA reading results in the world, which shows admixture and migration to have been a major feature of our past. These researchers should also have done more than pay broad lip service to interdisciplinary studies. In my reading of the paper, the Stanford study takes a position that many other studies have also found, and then simply moves in a direction of inverting the migratory direction from southwest to northeast without a convincing argument. My own perspective is that multidisciplinary scientific evidence in the region suggests that the past cannot be explained as simply as one narrow place of origin, nor is there one surviving pure ethnic group of people that can represent people of ‘first’ origin in the narrow sense. Our recognition of the San is as a foundation people who have the oldest surviving direct roots to those Homo sapiens sapiens ancestors who survived natural attrition over the last few thousand years. More importantly, besides there being distinct San communities today, all other African communities also have old San communities as part of their genetic, ancestral and cultural heritage. As such, the San represent the cement that binds us in a strong, uniting pan-African heritage that is greater than ethnic division or ‘race’ constructs. Respect for the San in our South African heritage should be at the centre of our thinking. Marginalisation of and discrimination against San communities is a grave injustice and impedes us all from truly celebrating African unity. For those who disrespect the San peoples, it translates into having no self-respect as Africans. The other theory that speaks of Homo sapiens originating in South Africa is more noteworthy than the Stanford paper because it goes beyond genetic debates and includes the study of old human deposits of an artistic and symbolic nature. The actual theory arising from the discoveries at Blombos Cave, which is still debated, makes a different point from that which argues that South Africa is the original birthplace of the lineage of human beings today instead of East Africa. This South Africa theory is not about the origins of modern humans of today, but rather about a possible dispersal of different Homo sapiens who had reached South Africa about 100 000 years ago, from another place of origin. It links to theories that there are likely to have been multiple places of origin of different groups of early Homo sapiens, and not just a single one. The theory arising from the Blombos Cave discoveries19 proceeds from a position which suggests that a small group of early primitive Homo sapiens originating elsewhere were living in an Ice-Age refuge on the South African coast for a period and then about 70 000 years ago migrated fairly quickly to East Africa. It is suggested that in East Africa there was a possible clash with the other Homo sapiens in the region at that time, which could have contributed to the out-of-Africa migration. The researchers from the University of Huddersfield who, along with colleagues from other universities, developed this theory have made it very clear that there is ‘no suggestion of any direct-line linkage to people in South Africa today’, and that the genetics of today’s descendants of those called ‘Khoi-San’, namely the L-gene mtDNA markers, does not support any connection to these early possible Homo sapiens deposits at Blombos Cave.20 The theory is not in conflict with northeast Africa as the place of origin of the Homo sapiens line of ancestors of the surviving San communities, but rather embraces yet another emergent theory. This other theory has more substance than counterposing East Africa and South Africa as places of origin, but though gaining traction it is also still far from universally accepted. This is the multiregional theory of the origins of Homo sapiens. While agreeing that Africa is the birthplace of Homo sapiens, it posits that there was a patchwork of highly structured populations of Homo sapiens evolving at different locations in Africa over time. Fossils from sites across Africa that go back 100 000 years further than the northeast African L- gene skull are argued to have remains that could be those of a species linked to Homo sapiens. Alternatively, the fossils may represent a different intermediary species altogether, or a cross-bred link between archaic humans and early Homo sapiens21 preceding the L-0 ancestor of northeast Africa. My own position is that the northeast Africa story of the emergence of those Homo sapiens from whom the modern Homo sapiens sapiens – our surviving species – descend, is the foundation of human-genome genetic science today, and is still the most solid scientific theory to date. But it is not exclusive from the multiregional theory, nor the theory that a proto-Homo sapiens intermediary species may have preceded the findings dating back to 194 000 years ago. Indeed, genetic science consistently shows us that the DNA of other hominin species from across Africa can be found alongside the Homo sapiens L-gene mtDNA findings. The approach I have employed in arriving at my perspective has been to bring aspects of the East African L-gene yardstick and the multiregional theory of origins together in plotting out a much larger area of Africa as containing cradles of humankind – plural. This is a different perspective that relies on using the available evidence rather than aligning my thoughts with competitive poles in social science thinking about East Africa vs South Africa, or with any notions of ‘firstism’ in explaining human origins. This approach also brings archaeological evidence, paleontological evidence and genetic evidence closer together. It further recognises that a range of human species lived across the region, sometimes with time overlaps, including archaic humans alongside early Homo sapiens with some interbreeding, but that this died out long before the emergence of social groups or communities that fit the full description of modern people, including San communities. The area to which I refer is plotted from northeast Africa in a large triangle, which I call the Thõathõa Triangle, with its southernmost points in Aranos in Namibia, and Bethel in South Africa. This will be illustrated and elaborated on below. This triangle’s edges are blurred rather than hard, and Morocco in northwest Africa could be an outrider point to the northeast and Blombos an outrider in the southeast. (Some of the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens, dated about 315 000 years ago, have been found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.22) There is no certainty on these finer matters concerning the period between 194 000 years ago and 300 000 years ago, but it is safe to say that this continuing discourse does not greatly impact on the period with which this book deals. Most researchers in the fields of archaelogy, palaeontology and genetics would state today that rigidity has no place in this arena of studies. The approach to be taken requires less of the old-fashioned tree approach – with trunk, branches, roots and leaves representing a human tree – and more of one that sees the past as an interrelated network in time. Homo sapiens is more likely to have evolved within a set of interlinked groups whose interconnectivity changed through time rather than there having been a ‘primacy people’ of any sort,23 and the later migratory habits of humanity were probably occurring then as well. Brutal climatic changes are just one factor that underlines such observations. Race theories and genetics Race theories were born out of the social sciences later associated with genetics, namely ethnography and anthropology. These two fields have greatly influenced neocolonial political theories that are still fashionable in some quarters today. Here I would like to sound a caution about the term ‘Khoisan’ and its variants used by some geneticists who fail to observe the proper scientific protocol of using the term ‘Southern African mtDNA’. The same caution should be applied to the use of the term ‘Bantu’ with reference to people instead of to languages. The scientific genetic protocol for the people some refer to as ‘Bantu’ is ‘sub- Saharan African mtDNA’. The terms ‘Khoisan’ and ‘Bantu’ both have a sordid history. As was mentioned earlier, the term ‘Khoisan’ was created by Leonhard Schultze in the political context of the genocide carried out by the Germans on the San, Nama and Herero in the early 20th century in what is now Namibia. In 1904 the Herero rose up in a war of rebellion againt the German colonisers, and in 1905 the Nama followed suit. The resistance was brutally suppressed by forces under General Lothar von Trotha, and survivors, including women and children, were kept in concentration camps24 where they were subjected to forced labour and a range of abuses. As Wittenberg25 explains, Schultze had studied zoology under Ernst Haeckel, a leading German Darwinist academic, and only later turned to ethnography. Schultze was a Jekyll and Hyde character who waxed lyrical about Khoe culture and compiled a record on the Nama similar to that of Bleek and Lloyd on the !Kun and |Xam. But the same man, as Wittenberg points out, was engaged in reprehensible activities during the time of the genocide as General Von Trotha’s ‘embedded scientist’. These same people that Schultze26 romanticised in literature was considered by him to be a threat to humanity and nearer to animal life. Dr Bofinger, the camp doctor on Shark Island, and Schultze were responsible for cutting off heads of dead prisoners and sending them back to laboratories in Berlin for further studies. It is noted by Olusoga and Erichsen27 that most of those imprisoned in the concentration camps, and particularly the ones who passed through Dr Bofinger’s field hospital, did not come out of there alive. Dr Bofinger and Schultze experimented on live ‘specimens’ and the ‘hospital’ was where bodies were broken and decapitated and skulls were split, making Dr Bofinger the most feared of the Germans by the Nama. German race scientist Christian Fetzer,28 a contemporary of Schultze’s, regarded the Nama as being close to the Anthropoid Ape. According to Olusoga and Erichsen,29 Schultze is on record as saying with reference to the Nama that these ‘races’ were unfit for work and ‘should be allowed to disappear’, which was a euphemism for extermination. Schultze argued that, for the colonial project to succeed, ‘[t]he struggle for our own existence allows no other solution. We who build our houses on the graves of these races have a responsibility to safeguard our civilisation, sparing no means.’ Likewise, though without similar aberrations involved, the same applies to the origins of the term ‘Bantu’. It was first introduced in a hypothesis by Wilhelm Bleek30 in 1862 to controversially label as one so-called ‘race’ peoples using a vast number of languages that make up a language family of over 680 variants used by over 400 different ethnicities widely spread over the continent of Africa. Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd carried out linguistic and anthropological studies on |Xam and !Kun prisoners from the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, after having had the prisoners released into their custody as subjects. The ethics of this is often overlooked by those enamoured by their work. Wilhelm Bleek’s role in academia has been romanticised because of his research on the San, but he was well known as a pioneer of racist theory31 and can rightly be called the father of the system of race classification in South Africa. Moreover, Bleek’s work also stands accused of ‘civilising’ and ‘censoring’ the narratives of the |Xam and !Kun.32 These are considerations that must be kept sharply in mind when we look at the science of genetics, too, because some of the racist colonial ideas and terminology have been imported into modern genetics and skew the reports that are produced. Non-scientific language is used and subjective political views are tagged on to scientific findings. The modern-day surviving San still find themselves subjected to theories suggesting that they are not part of the mainstream human family but are instead ‘another separate branch-species’ of humanity. Genetic mapping and the Thõathõa Triangle We can see and track migrations and migratory drifts across the African continent and out of Africa that link back to the northeast African Homo sapiens community and original L-gene ancestor, which inform the foundation of genetic science. There is an argument that there was more than one movement out of Africa by Homo sapiens but that the main migration into Arabia, Europe, Asia and further afield occurred about 70 000 years ago. The earlier migrations, however, have different markers from those of the African L-gene family of markers. Those with southern African mtDNA such as San, Khoe and various others link back to this common L-gene ancestor. Likewise, those who have sub-Saharan mtDNA and Nilotic-Cushitic mtDNA, who are from ethnic groups that speak Bantu languages and Nilotic-Cushitic languages, also track back to the same L-gene ancestor. The L-gene sequence demonstrates that the different African indigenous peoples are all part of one human family and are not separate ‘races’ even though they evolved in different localities. Mlambo and Parsons33 succinctly explain the genetic mapping of all human beings today starting with the common female ancestor mentioned earlier. This oldest mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene type, labelled L-0, … is mostly found amoung Northern San/Bushmen people living in the northern Kalahari. These people, like everyone alive, also carry traces of other mtDNA gene types as well … The second- oldest mtDNA gene type (L-1) originated around 110 kya. It is mostly found among Twa/Pygmy people in the eastern Congo Basin. The third-oldest mtDNA gene type (L-2) originated around 100 kya. It is mostly found among people speaking Niger-Congo (or Niger-Kordofanian)  languages, notably the Bantu languages. The fourth mtDNA gene type (L-3) is mostly found among people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages, notably Somali, Amharic, and Semitic languages. Around 60 kya, the L-3 gave rise to new genetic types that are numbered L-3M and L-3N. All the other mtDNA types in the world today are descended from L-3M and L-3N. [The abbreviation ‘kya’ stands for ‘thousand years ago’.] Mlambo and Parsons34 further elaborate that the ‘L-0d’ Homo sapiens genetic type had spread from northeast Africa down to Tanzania across and along the Zambezi to Angola and also down through Zimbabwe, and into Botswana and Namibia by 140 000 years ago. Another genetic type, ‘L-0d1’, split off from the westward trajectory around the Zambezi and had drifted much more slowly southwards through Zimbabwe down to the Kai !Gariep area by 30 000 years ago and to the southwestern Cape by 22 000 years ago. Yet another genetic type, ‘L-0k’, split off in Tanzania and moved down through Mozambique into what is now KwaZulu-Natal. These were early Homo sapiens migrants who moved out of East Africa from the area of the common ancestor whose descendants also moved across the whole of Africa. Much further down the ages, about 10 000 years ago, diverse San societies began to emerge from the L-0d, L-0k and L-0d1 ancestors.  The haplogroup L-0 locates in the region bordering Kenya and Ethiopia about 194 000 years ago.35 Across Africa, the L-1 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory of descent from East Africa moved into Central Africa; the L-2 mtDNA haplogroup into the western bulge of Africa, likewise with some of the L-3 mtDNA haplogroups. The L-4 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory reached into North Africa. Each mtDNA haplogroup has many further subdivisions of haplogroups. In the case of eastern and southern Africa, the mtDNA of the region largely consists of subgroups of L-0.36 The oldest of these, between 160 000 years ago to 140 000 years ago, is evidenced as being present in the southwestern corner of what I call the Thõathõa Triangle area, which runs from Aranos in Namibia up to Dese in Ethiopia and down to Bethel in South Africa, and across back to Aranos. The specific subgroup at Aminuis in Namibia is notated as L-0d. If one draws an arc to connect Aranos and Bethel and then complete the circle that includes parts of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Arica, this is the Thõathõa Circle at the bottom of the Thõathõa Triangle that reaches up to Ethiopia. The sides of this triangle are not hard borders but rather soft, blurred sides. This tool emphasises the theory that in my view best explains our distant past: the multiregional theory of sites (plural) of origin for Homo sapiens (the L-gene sequence and possible other extinct Homo sapiens groups). Thõathõa37 means ‘beginnings’ in the Kora language, and it is used here simply for illustrative purposes in creating some geographical parameters for the historical exploration in this book. Within this triangle there have been several the most important archaeological finds that assist us to understand the southern African past, including areas that can be identified as cradles (plural) of humankind. As was noted before, there are several outrider exception sites that fall outside of this triangle, such as Blombos Cave and the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco. For me, the answer to these sites lies in the migratory spirit in Homo sapiens linked to following waterways or coastal routes. In six southern African countries, strong showings of the L0-d, L0-d1 and L0- k mtDNA markers are among surviving San communities who trace back to the East African ancestor L-0. Evidence of the strongest, but not the only, descendants of L-0 today are the Hadza and Sandawe peoples of present-day Tanzania, and some of the following communities: Cape Khoe, Korana, Griqua, Nama and ‘Coloured’, alternatively referred to as Camissa African communities as a term of self-identification by some. The latter concept will be explained in further chapters.  All these communities also have mtDNA markers of other ‘L-1 – L-6’ sub- Saharan African mtDNA markers, as well as mtDNA markers from Asia, Eurasia and Europe. All other of the ten officially classified ‘African’ communities in South Africa also have some degree of L0-d, L0-d1 and L0-k Southern African haplogroup markers that are carried by the San and Khoe social groups mentioned. Mellet38 notes that, according to one study by Himla Soodyall, 17per cent of those self-identifying as sub-Saharan Africans had southern African mtDNA markers along with sub-Saharan Y-DNA markers (male lineage). There are no ‘pure’ lineages; over 194 000 years of the purity of any people would be impossible. Genetic studies have demolished the ‘race’ and ‘ethnographic’ constructs as a means of identifying humanity. Variants of the same L-0 mtDNA can also be found among some white South Africans and also among diverse peoples across the globe. But having mtDNA of a particular type does not make them San people or Khoe people today, as there is a huge difference between DNA markers in humans and notions of identity. The ancestors of one of the three main branches of San in southern Africa migrated to Namibia and surrounding Botswana around 140 000 years ago. The ancestors of the San in the northeastern parts of South Africa migrated there by 45 000 years ago, and other ancestors migrated to the southern reaches of the Cape by 30 000 years ago and 22 000 years ago.39 Again, in terms of the multiregional theory of human origins in Africa, this does not preclude the existence of other, extinct Homo sapiens in the same areas at early periods of time. What is clear, however, is that all humans in Africa today are descendants of humans who were migrants at some point in history; that all modern humans in the south and east of Africa are in ancient terms genetically related to San communities; and that all share a common root. Another way of seeing this is that, if all have an ancient ancestral connection with the ancestors of the San, and all share the fact that the San communities of at least 3 000 years ago to the present are our foundation people, then it is imperative that the San are put at the centre of our society and duly honoured. It is my perspective that the surviving San are a core connection of the African soul. The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives Broadly speaking, there are two overarching families of languages in Africa: Bantu languages and non-Bantu languages. Among the latter, the oldest of these are most often referenced as ‘Khoisan’ languages, but more accurately they are the Namib-Kgalagadi-Gariep (NKG) and Kwadi regional families of different languages with different roots, if we use the protocol of geo-terms rather than ethnographic labels. Looking at the linguistic arena through a non-ethnographic lens may assist us to better examine this important part of African social history and its ancient roots. Jones40 shows us that there are four broad families of languages in Africa: 1 436 Niger-Congo (Bantu) languages; 371 Afro-Asiatic (formerly called Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic languages); 196 Nilo-Saharan languages; and 35 ‘Khoisan’ (NKG as well as Kwadi) languages. In all these languages there has been borrowing from each other, which attests to the fact that there are no absolute, solid walls that have separated peoples over vast expanses of time. Linguistics, like genetics, reveals the migratory spirit in the history of Homo sapiens and dispels the notion of the ‘natural separation’ of so-called ‘races’. Güldemann41 has explored the inter-relationships between the three other African language families and the NKG family of languages and Kwadi, and provides argument and evidence to suggest that they are genealogically related. In his mapping of languages, he links the Khoe languages to Kwadi and the East African Sandawe language. Güldemann notes five different ‘Khoisan’ (NKG) languages that are still spoken in South Africa today, four of which have dictionaries and one (Xiri) only wordlists. He references 2 000 speakers of these languages in South Africa. In the case of Xiri, there are only three surviving people who still speak it. The story of modern human development extends back over many thousands of years, where human proto-social groups lived and died out and left some tracer-markers that help us to understand past societies. Much, however, has not been left or has not survived dramatic natural events, or indeed is yet to be discovered. Languages, dialects or elements of these frequently change, or are adopted, kept or discarded. Language is also porous and not rigid. It defies the tendency for people today to want to box languages into conserved ‘tribal’, nationalist, ethno-nationalist or ‘race’ silos. The same applies to religions, all of which have as many convergent beliefs as they have divergent or unique elements. Religious beliefs are a key cultural element of humanity and also hold the secrets of the migratory spirit of humans. Much of southern Africa below the equator is home to the Ngoma faith.42 This traditional faith, roughly translated as ‘the way of the drum’ (ngoma, also creolised to ‘ghoema’) is facilitated by the sangomas, who are diviners, and the faith has more than 3 000 years of history that is closely tied to the circular migratory drifts in the region. In the Cape it also influenced the faith and subculture colloquially known as ‘Doekum’ that derived from the Southeast Asian Dukun and Lewsi practices, and similar influences from Madagascar, as a result of slavery. The presence of Masbieker enslaved people taken from across southern Africa to the Cape resulted in the Ngoma faith rapidly mixing with other faith cultures in the City of Cape Town. Old tenets of San and Khoe faiths also came into the mix, as did European and other Asian faiths. In other parts of the world along the slave routes one finds similar faith traditions in the form of Voudoun and Santeria. All these incorporate ancestral veneration, communication with the ancestral and spirit world, and physical and emotional healing. The outer form in devotions involves drumming, chanting, dancing and engagement with spirits and ancestors. Spirituality in the tradition of the indigenous African Ngoma faith is also about the union between ancestors and the land, health and good fortune. Spirituality is intricately aligned to language and thus must be considered as key to linguistic interpretation, most especially in that European scholars tend to approach language rigidly through written text. In Africa, from the art in burial places in ancient Kemet down to the southern Cape rock art, artistic expressions can be seen to be as important a part of language, and it brings faith and communication together. Understanding the relationship of people to their belief system is vital to an understanding of social history. Coming to an understanding of African social history cannot leave out the study of belief systems and practices, nor omit the exploration of storytelling traditions. I would argue that linguistics in Africa cannot be dealt with in a silo divorced from the broader world of artistic expression and expressions of faith. Güldemann’s43 linguistic work supports the work done by archaeologists, geneticists, rock art experts, anthropologists and other social scientists in showing that, within the Thõathõa Triangle, there are linkages between herder- hunter languages in East Africa and with peoples speaking Niger-Congo languages, Afro-Asiatic languages and Nilo-Saharan languages.44 By focusing on the !Xun and Khwedam languages, Jones45 uses the experience of speakers in contemporary times to demonstrate how languages change or become extinct. She says that ‘traditional language settings’ build and nurture language but when these become ‘vulnerable language settings’ and ‘new language settings’, language changes or it dies out, and this alters culture too. Creolisation of language creates a circular effect that results in a continuum of change in language. For small and micro vulnerable communities, it results in extinction often not only of the language but also of the cultural community of people. In southern Africa, genocide, dispossession of land and means of sustenance, de-Africanisation through assimilation into the ‘Coloured’ construct, and wars right up to the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF) wars in Namibia and Angola have all contributed to language destruction and the destruction of societies. Jones46 illustrates this reality by showing how as a result of the SADF wars, engagements with various peoples and migration to South Africa from Angola and Namibia, the !Xun and Khwe peoples, relatively small communities, were exposed to multilingualism that has impacted negatively on the !Xun and Khwedam languages. The example of language illustrates how identities and ethnicities also change over time and how societies do not remain static for thousands of years. For a long time there has been an erroneous view, now challenged by specialists in San and Khoe languages such as Menán du Plessis,47 that the suggested widespread borrowing from ‘Khoisan’ languages into the Nguni languages is supported by strong evidence. She argues that there are indications of influence in the reverse direction, and presents evidence, particularly with regard to the clicks used in Nguni languages being different from those that had been in the San languages.48 The clicks that occur in other Bantu languages to the north also present a challenge in that the cross-influences in language may have occurred much further back in time between forebear San and Bantu speakers outside of South Africa, given that San peoples resided as far north as Kenya, Zambia and northern Angola. In line with this book’s underlying theme of the story of ‘loss’, the point of these linguistic observations is to illustrate how assimilation and dominance negatively impacted language, leading to the loss of language, and contributing to marginalisation and discrimination. Du Plessis49 unpacks the extinction of Kora or !Ora, one of the original languages of the Western Cape Khoe and the 19th-century Korana revivalists, to show how the language became extinct over time as a result of wars, migration and generational changes, and was replaced by Afrikaans. Once, there were more languages of the Khoe peoples, who were spread throughout Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mpumalanga, KZN, Swaziland, Mozambique as well as right down to the Cape. These languages would have died out and joined with other languages as Khoe foundation peoples assimilated into new societies along with other groups. From a practical perspective, Nama or Khoekhoegowab, which was initially the language of the upper West Coast and Namibia, offers a language for Korana, Griqua and Cape Khoe revivalists as it has official status in Namibia and thrives in institutions of learning. Khoekhoegowab clearly links in to Kora and older languages that are now extinct. It may offer a restorative path for revival of a Khoe language for some in South Africa and should be recognised as an official language. As will be seen later on, some of the speakers of the Namib-Kgalagadi- Gariep languages are evidenced to have been part of the evolution of society that formed the multi-ethnic Mapungubwe state or kingdom as the beginning of an age of southern African kingdom formation – our southern African civilisation. We can only speculate as to which language or languages or language combinations were spoken or developed under these circumstances. There is a dialectical relationship between the formation of societies and language, but up to now this social history has largely been unknown to those looking at linguistics and genetics. Each of the different micro-communities developing in southern Africa between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE is likely to have moved along different paths of development, with some following migratory drifts and others not, some cultivating crops and others not, some keeping sheep and others not, and others practising various combinations of all three modes of living. Some engaged in mining, metallurgy and craftsmanship as well. There is clarity that various San peoples across southern Africa cannot be stereotyped as simply having been hunter-gatherers, living in isolation or as nomads, and then be treated as a species or ‘race’ with a completely separate lived reality from other Africans. There is also the notion that San people wandered about naked or near naked, which is debunked by Vibeke Viestad50 in her work on ‘dress as social relations’. Despite there being over twenty surviving San peoples in six countries, there are claims that all San people look alike, have a single culture and a single language, and are short in stature, have light skin colour and specific features as per race arguments. The book Voices of the San51 provides a photographic overview of the many San communities in southern Africa, including the photographs of the 17 San authors of the book, which demolishes this myth. There is also the mid-19th-century collection of portrait photographs by Gustav Fritsch52 that shows photos of San people who defy the stereotype. Prins53 and others peel back the curtain on the ‘Secret San’ of the Drakensberg among the Zulu people, known by a range of names from AbaTwa to ||Xegwi, where this community also does not fit the stereotype. This kind of racialising and colourising of San and Khoe social identities is deeply rooted in reaction to disparaging colonial paradigms of thinking related to ‘colourising’ identity and the rejection of a constructed ‘Coloured’ identity based on miscegenation, instead of a focus on social identity. In taking a position against ‘Coloured’ terminology, an equally colourist approach is adopted by some who created another colourist paradigm of ‘brown and black’ in response. Adhikari,54 also drawing on Zimitri Erasmus and Zoë Wicomb, points out in his paper on racial stereotyping: ‘Racial identities in South Africa became ever more reified during the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of Apartheid policies institutionalising these identities to an unprecedented degree.’ Vernon February55 further explores how the stereotyping of people classified as ‘Coloured’ is deeply rooted in the stereotyping of the San and the Khoe over the past 370 years. The negative product of this is that this ‘colourist’, ‘race- exclusivist’ culture and the primacy culture of ‘firstism’ have crept into many otherwise excellent academic papers that do not question this paradigm’s colonial and Verwoerdian apartheid roots. Voices of the San56 also strongly makes the following point: The San and the Khoekhoen are often identified as one group, and it will therefore be pertinent to this history of the San to include a note on this common misperception … in the early years of European settlement … the newcomers had much difficulty in telling the San and the Khoekhoen apart and thus many myths may have been wrongly attributed to either of the groups, owing to the observations and writings of short-term visitors, missionaries, hunters and explorers. Voices of the San57 raises several these points in sections entitled ‘Myths about the San’ and ‘Idealism and Romanticism’. Many of these myths have entered the academic arena without being subjected to due critique. As a result, wrong is presented as right and vice versa. As we will see in this chapter, also informed by Voices of the San and an array of archaelogists, rock art experts, linguists and geneticists, it is also clear that until at least 1200 CE those known today as Khoe did not have a presence in the southernmost reaches of South Africa, and that their society was different from San societies. In the post-650 CE period, as the Khoe and Xhosa evolved their pastoral and herding economy in the Eastern Cape and later from 1000 CE in the Western Cape, the San, except for small fishing groups, moved from the coastal areas to the hunting fields and mountains of the Central Cape. Within the oldest languages that we have knowledge of in southern Africa we can also see the relationship between language and social consciousness regarding the value of land and the sense of belonging between Africans and their land. The existence of particular words demonstrates a conscious human relationship to environment and place of abode, and thus challenges the suggestion of ignorance about belonging and of landownership that was attached to Africans by European colonialism. Ancient African consciousness is shown by words such as !hub (land) and |amma or |ammis (water), which links to !xaib (place) that can sustain human life, and which results in !’ãs (human settlement). The localities of settlement, and of different peoples coming together, are shown at sites that are near water. Archaeologists have found the richest deposits of markers of modern human habitat where land and fresh water come together, which makes sense because without water humans cannot survive or sustain themselves. When one looks at the Thõathõa Triangle and Thõathõa Circle, one is immediately struck by the abundance of water. It is around the waterways of southern Africa, from the Zambezi and Shashe-Limpopo basins to the Camissa in Table Bay, that diverse ethnicities came together in the peopling of southern Africa and gave birth to many new formations of peoples of the South – Mzansi. As a concluding thought on language, it is important to address three more reasons why the persistent usage of the term ‘Khoisan’ by some linguists must be confronted. The first reason, as we have seen, relates to the roles of Schultze and Bleek in the racial framing and race classification systems in South Africa and how the term is rooted in ‘racism’. The second issue is one that has been frequently raised by the San peoples in rejecting the term ‘Khoisan’. They argue that prefixing of San with Khoe plays into theories and practices of assimilating ‘Khoisan’ as one people, with San subjugated under Khoe. This is stated unequivocally in the only book to date written by a collective of San people, Voices of the San58. The 17 authors were supported by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa and Namibia (WIMSA), which has a governing board made up of 12 representatives of San communities from Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Angola, led by Colin Tsima (chairperson), Kagisano Molapsi (vice-chairperson) and Billies Pamo (secretary), as well as the Kuru Family of Organisations in Botswana. The book puts it as follows: ‘The term Khoesan (or Khoesaan) has not been used as the San object to being grouped together with the presently more powerful pastoralist KhoeKhoen for academic and linguistic reasons.’ The stand-alone term ‘San’, pronounced ‘Saahn’, was first adopted by San representatives in Namibia and then reiterated at successive WIMSA AGMs since 1997 as the least derogatory term in meaning and history.59 A third reason for not using the term ‘Khoisan’ and similar versions is that during the period 1716 to 1880, as covered by Adhikari,60 Penn,61 Szalay,62 Ross63 and other researchers, information presented among other notes on genocide against the San shows that collaborator Khoe who had survived conquest by the Dutch made up 60 per cent of the cavalry militia of the Dutch- led General Commando, and at other times had their own independent retaliatory commandos made up of 100 per cent Khoe militia that were effectively mobile killing squads. Some Khoe were forcibly conscripted into the commandos, but most were not. In fact, Khoe who refused to be conscripted into commandos formed well-known resister bands under the leadership of David Stuurman in the Eastern Cape or joined Orlam groups in the northwest Kai !Gariep district. Among the aberrations there were practices such as the taking of San women and girls as concubines by Khoe militia. The Orlam Khoe groups, Korana and Griqua who formed commandos totally independent of colonial rule to attack the San also have a well-recorded history of persecution, gratuitous violence, atrocities and extermination of various San peoples.64 This is also noted by the authors of the Voices of the San.65 In coming to grips with this period, it is important to point out that, while on the one side there were the collaborator Khoe who acted with great brutality against the San (also against Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and resister Khoe), on the other side were the resister Khoe who often made common cause with the San and fiercely resisted the European onslaught against the San. Likewise, the resister Khoe made common cause with the Xhosa. Inversely, independent collaborator Khoe supported the British and Boers against the Xhosa and resister Khoe. Among the resisters there were also small bands of Khoe refugees who temporarily became part of San communities. This division of collaborators and resisters continued well beyond 1880 right through to the apartheid era and into post-apartheid South Africa. It is important for us in purging the pain of the past, and for healing, to acknowledge the greatest imposition of colonialism on Africans – the transfer of a culture of violence and aberration of a kind previously unknown to the San and Khoe into the behaviours of significant sectors of our forebears. I will never forget how, on a visit to one of the largest slave-trading sites in Ghana, Cape Coast Castle, the guide started the sacred tour of the dungeons by asking us to take note that their society at Cape Coast ask the enslaved ancestors and their descendants for forgiveness for the role of African forebears in collaborating in the slave trade. It was a form of institutionalised cleansing ceremony before talking about the painful slavery experience and passing through the dungeons where the spirits of the enslaved forebears are visited by descendants. I believe that it is a fundamental part of our own healing to do the same. There is no sector of our African society in South Africa that was absolutely free of collabora