Nothing gets my goat more than the nasty habit many South Africans have of discriminating between people by race, language, religion or culture.
In my youth you had to be a white Afrikaner to sit on top of the heap, from which one descended in class to the lowest of the low, that were the original settlers who are the San. At one stage they were not even regarded as human and were hunted by everyone else. Nowadays the roles are reversed, with the people of predominantly Bantu descent sitting on top of the heap, in far too many cases claiming to be special on the grounds of “indigenous”.
But their claim to being indigenous is just as farcical as any white person’s claim to have an inherent right to lord it over everyone else. Indigenous means native to a geopolitical area, such as a country, for example. Native means that your species originated naturally in the area without human intervention.
Now, while it is true that all humans are descended from the earlier hominid that is H heidelbergensis, who were native to what we now call South Africa, this is not true of our species, Homo sapiens. The modern human is a mixture of one or more of three descendants of Homo heidelbergensis, namely H sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and their relative, Denisova hominins. H sapiens are native to the great lakes region, while H neanderthalensis is native to Germany and Denisova to Siberia.
It is also a mistake to assume that the Bantu from whom the majority of South Africans are descended are pure bred H sapiens. Recent genetic research has shown that H Sapiens who migrated out of Africa and interbred with H neanderthalensis returned to and interbred with their African cousins. Consequently, people of Bantu descent have ancient H neanderthalensis DNA in addition to that picked up by more recent interactions with the non-Bantu world.
We also know that the Bantu first migrated to within the borders of what is now South Africa around 300 AD. Iron age sites in Pongola show that they were in the area in 450 AD and in the Transkei by 600 AD. Interestingly they were fish eaters, which distinguishes them from the later migration of Bantu pastoralists that took place in the 15th Century. This explains early European accounts of fish traps in Durban Bay and Francois Le Valliant’s accounts of fish traps in the Umgazana river in the 1720s.
Ancestors
But, as we know, they were not the first to arrive. The earliest H sapiens arrived here between 160,000 and 240,000 years ago. These are the ancestors of the San. The Khoikhoi reached the Cape about 2,000 years ago and sometimes mixed with the San, hence the modern term, Khoisan (which I cannot abide).
When Van Riebeeck arrived he found three distinct populations, The elusive San, who had an irritating habit of hunting your livestock, and you, with poison-tipped arrows; pastoral Khoikhoi, who had cattle and sheep but disliked trading in them and tried to cheat you when they did, and the remnants of Khoekhoe Strandloper beachcombers represented famously by Henry the Strandloper. Inter-racial mixing outside the Khoikhoi was rare at that time due to the simple expedient of removing the left testicle of all young men and labelling any woman a slut who consorted with a bi-testicular male. I kid you not. This practice is documented by Peter Kolb, who undertook anthropological research in the Cape in the early 18th century.
Another fascinating story is that of the Xhosa. The first migration I mentioned earlier merged with Khoikhoi, hence the clicks that one finds in modern Xhosa today. These people were racially distinct from both the Khoikhoi and the Bantu, according to the journals of shipwrecked sailors who headed north for Delagoa Bay. The survivors of the Santo Alberto, that was wrecked off the Umtata River mouth in 1593, fared better than most because they headed inland to what is now Umtata, where they were entertained by what was described as the “Hottentot” chief. And so they were passed from “Hottentot” chief to chief until they crossed the Umzimvubu, where they encountered the darker-skinned Bantu who impressed them much more. These were most probably Tshawe’s people, who were moving eastwards into the Transkei at the time. They in turn assimilated the tribes they found in the Transkei, laying the foundations of the modern Xhosa people.
Incidentally, a number of shipwrecked survivors who reached Port Natal found the place so convivial that they chose to stay. Such were the numbers living there that Simon van der Stel referred to it as the English Colony. And, of course, these survivors who hailed from across the known world took wives and assimilated with the local population. Sadly, the amiable resident tribe, the Amathuli, were all but wiped out by Shaka. and its remnants fled south.
Modern vintage
The Zulu nation, as we know it today, is of a much more modern vintage. Shaka, who, albeit mad, I regard as one of the world’s great military geniuses, used the disruption that was caused by the introduction of drought-sensitive maize and the three-year winter that resulted from the Mount Tambora volcano erupting in 1815, to introduce tribes in KwaZulu-Natal to the hitherto unknown ideology that is Zuly despotism. And, let’s face it, it would have gone the way of the Huns had Theopolis Shepstone not believed that Zulu despotism was a wonderful way to control an otherwise unruly bunch of warring tribes … provided, of course, the British Queen was the despot. Put bluntly, the Zulu nation is as much a colonial construct as it is a pre-colonial one.
And then of course the Europeans came from all over Europe bringing with them the bittereinders of the Dutch East India Company’s clashes with Indonesians and the consequent enslavement and exile of the hardest cases to the Cape. This is the proud history of South Africa’s Cape Malay people. One would be wise to treat them with respect.
And, yes, all of this intra- and extra-racial mixing, and the undoing of racial, class language and cultural divides in a way that had previously been impossible has contributed beneficially to the country we have today. Apartheid slowed this down, but I suggest only temporarily when viewed against the wider backdrop of history.
And let’s not forget the Jews, and my personal hero, Sammy Marks. He was South Africa’s first industrialist, whose breadth of entrepreneurial vision puts even Musk to shame. But for him, we might not have had SA Breweries, ISCOR or ESKOM.
The point of all of this is to demonstrate how diverse our history is and how ridiculous it is for any South African to claim that they are indigenous, or worse still that others do not really belong.
Abject failure
When I was a child we were taught that the South African Party’s attempt to unify English- and Afrikaans-speakers failed as a result of the rise of Afrikaner nationalism. That turns out to have been an abject failure as is evidenced by Apartheid and the explosion in Afrikaner ingenuity post-Apartheid.
It would be a tragedy if those in power continue to amplify divisions rather than amplifying the fact that we are all South Africans. It is already obvious that this is going down the same path Afrikaner nationalism so ruinously took the country.
The truth is we are all settlers or descended from settlers. No one is indigenous to South Africa as the term is properly used. Some are descended from earlier arrivals than others but that is as far as it goes. It’s not a basis to discriminate – not, that is, if you want to build a successful nation. That requires that we identify first and foremost as South Africans.
Hence our constitutional aim of finding unity in our diversity.
Is it not time that we all realised that we are all in this boat together?
[Image: Miroslaw Miras from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend