Last Saturday I visited a Khoisan group, who have been staging a civil disobedience protest at the foot of the Nelson Mandela Statue at the Union Buildings in Pretoria since November 2018. Theirs is a peaceful non-violent protest against government not recognising their dignified right to the land. At Saturday’s discussions with King Khoisan SA, his advisor, Chief Aùtshumatoe!, explained that they were protesting as a minority who had been on the land (as Late Stone Age people) long before the Bantu-speaking Iron Age people migrated towards southern Africa a mere 1700 years ago. Aùtshumatoe! said they had witnessed the arrival of the dark skinned people, as well as that of the Europeans along the South African coastline since the 15th century.
Anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of late Stone Age Homo sapiens in southern Africa report that today’s Khoisan ancestors had been resident in the region for about 45 000 years. Archaeologists recently found traces of spearfishing hunters in canoes hunting fish in lakes on the lower to middle grass plains of the Lesotho Drakensberg between 30 000 and 24 000 years ago.
About 1 300 years ago pastoralists would have frequented the plains seeking seasonal grazing for their livestock following significant climate change patterns since 10 000 years ago. Some Bushmen (San), became servants of the Bantu-speaking peoples and learnt the craft of pastoral farming. They were the Khoi section of today’s Khoisan people.
Both hunter-gatherer and foraging San and their Khoi (pastoral) relatives, were constantly on the move, in search of hunting lands, nutritious veld plants and grazing areas. Their travel routes were in or close to southern Africa’s rivers and their immediate catchments. These literally were super highways for seasonal migrations throughout southern Africa.
The Vaal River has never been a perennial river – at least not over the past 10 000 years. Close to water there were always small animals to hunt, but also large ones like the eland, elephant and red hartebeest in what is today’s Vaal River Barrage area. We know that from rock engravings sites on the banks of today’s Barrage near the Ascot Bridge and close to where the Klip River flows into the Vaal in Vereeniging.
Following the discovery and subsequent extensive mining of diamonds in Griqualand West (Kimberley) since the late 1860s, the Griqua-speaking Khoisan were advised to move by the British colonial authorities, to migrate to Griqualand East, in today’s Eastern Cape Province. Many Griqua people then dispersed into parts of the Free State as well. Some remained ever-migrating communities. Others later settled in towns like Parys, on the banks of the Vaal. Their descendants today still live in Parys.
The current Khoisan peaceful civil disobedience protest at the Union Buildings, speaks to the brutal reality of them not being ‘white enough’ for the previous government. Now they are, ironically, not ‘black enough’ for the current government. King Khoisan SA explained this hard truth. In addition, his advisor explained, President Mandela in the 1990s became aware of the precarious situation of South Africa’s ‘coloured’ people. He apologised and promised them, government would address the matter.
Although some measures had been taken, subsequent presidents have seldom been more responsive to Khoisan pleas. Theirs is a protest, not filled with hatred and violent intent. They merely want the restoration of their human dignity and their symbolic historical rights to the land. As a typical first nation people, like in North and South America, as well as the Innuit people in the polar regions of the arctic countries, southern Africa’s Khoisan aspirations deserve to be listened to, when we extend festive wishes of joy and peace, at the end of an extraordinary year.
- The author is an extraordinary professor in the Humanities at North-West University’s Vanderbijlpark campus
