>Nangolo, N
>Subject: FW: Coloureds consolidating African Unity in Khoisan
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>---------------------------------
>
>Coloureds of southern Africa consolidating African Unity in Khoisan
>
>Namibia has quite a number of people who refer to themselves as Coloureds or
>Basters. In fact history has until today never managed to separate the
>difference between a Bantu, a Khoisan or a Nama, to mention just a few.
>Pigmentation has been dismissed as a criteria to determine culture.
>Therefore, understanding our history will eliminate artificial hatred
>created by a historic process. Neville de Bryn transcribes.
>
>A radio interview/discussion braodcasted on Bush-Radio in Capetown 07/11/02,
>did not only turn out to be constructive and lively, but it was emotional
>and aggressive on one side and heated on the academic side. Cape Town-based
>Khoisan Activist, Zenzile Khoisan of Garib Communications went to seek some
>answers from Professor Kwesi K. Prah of the Centre for Advanced Studies of
>African Society, CASAS, in Cape Town.
>
>Zenzile: I'm trying to find out what is the meaning of Khoisan today. Is it
>separate from a broader cultural movement throughout the continent? The
>Khoisan issue has come up in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa (SA),
>creating a firm ground for Khoisan Consciousness. So what is your reading?
>
>Prah: I'm happy that this problems are arising now because they have been
>buried for too long especially in the case of SA and Namibia largely because
>of the apartheid system. Remember that nowhere on the African continent was
>there an encounter of europeans with Africans as traumatic in effect on the
>Africans as in SA, Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe. But I often say apartheid
>was a very successful system in a sense that it manage, not only to keep
>people apart, but it managed to affect the psychology of the various tribal
>groups in southern Africa to such a degree that they got a lot people to
>stay the way they wanted them to think. In the first instance African
>languages were used to divide them up into socalled, quote and quote nations
>or ethnic groups, divided on the basis of the most perilous criteria in
>order to prove the myth that all Africans are different and therefore there
>is no majority in African situation. But beyond that, the first groups they
>encounter in the Cape were basically the Khoisan people of southern Africa.
>But remember the Khoisan stretch to the rest of Africa, the most
>northeasterly groups, in Tanzania, in Angola and the socalled pygmies - the
>people of the Congo Basin, and they are also basically similar groups which
>have adopted differently to different environments in the forests of that
>part of Africa. Basically the Khoisan speaking peoples are just like any
>other African group on the continent, they were not separated from other
>Africans. The differences lies more in cultural behavior, cultural habits
>and adaptations to different environmental conditions. If you move in
>Botswana, there is no way where you can distinguish a Khoisan as different
>from the Tswana, it doesn't exist, especially where the two cultural groups
>live close together. I lived in Botswana for five years and if you go to the
>hinterland of Botswana, there's no cultural difference basically between a
>Khoisan and a Tswana or Bantu speaking person, is just a difference in
>language, in certain customs and certain adaptations to their environments.
>If you look at the southern most boundaries of Botswana, you have the Xhosa,
>the Sotho, the Zulu, the Ndebele and so on. Particularly amongst the Xhosas,
>you will find that there were lots of Capers and the Xhosa varieties which
>shows the extend of inter-penetration. The cultural difference between the
>two groups are totally non-existent. The myth was created under apartheid
>that the descendants of the Khoisan, who in this part of Africa, have
>largely been taken advantage of by the cultural impositions of the
>westerners and the erosion of the cultural belongings of the Khoisan people
>has gone to such a profound grief that a good number lost their language and
>their customs. But the Dutch did not only destroy their language, they also
>took advantage of the African women, hence the concentration of the socalled
>Colored children in the western Cape. It was not a case of accepted
>legitimized marriages which went on there, it was rape, to create the
>genesis of the Coloreds. We know for a fact that in 1658 when the first
>group of slaves arrived here, they were all from west Africa. We know that
>slaves were brought in from the Malay archipelago, Indonesian and Malaysia,
>we know that some slaves were brought in from India and we know that they
>all become servants and slaves of the Dutch settlers. But we also know that
>a mixture took place and that mixture has gone on uninterruptedly to the
>present day. But the greatest contributing substructure to all of these, has
>been the Khoisan people, suffering most grievously with the cultural
>denationalisation of the Khoisan's peoples' culture. There was also an added
>tendency by the settlers to create the myth that the Khoisan were different
>from other Africans and the sadness of the situation is that the descendants
>of the Khoisan came to believe that lie. I have myself seen many books,
>stories, told to that effect and I will show you one, Knowledge In Black and
>White, a history book which was first published in 1958 for secondary school
>pupils in SA. The author wrote and I quote; "The bushmen, little yellow skin
>people barely 153 centimetres in heights, the second inhabitants of SA,
>probably having been compelled to migrate from central-southern Asia.
>According to one theory one section went .... southeast, occupying the Malay
>Peninsula, the Phillipines and Australia. Another section travelling west
>entered Spain, while a third traveled its way into Africa where they
>gradually push south back. They were gradually pushed south by stronger
>Hamites occupying the Nile region. In succession other races entered Africa
>from the east. The Hottentots, the people a little bigger and a little
>darker than the Bushmen, probably originated in Somaliland as a result of
>adversaries between the Bushmen and Hamites. According to the generally
>accepted theory, they migrated southwest to the region of the Great Lakes,
>where they remain for several centuries and then followed the Atlantic Coast
>and eventually crossed the Orange river. By the 16th century they were to be
>found along the banks of the Orange River. The Europeans in the Cape did not
>come into close contact with the Bantu speaking people until the 18th
>century, for they, like the Europeans, where .... into southern Africa. In
>all probability their original home was central Asia. They are believed to
>have entered Africa in large numbers". This is from these book. Anybody with
>any serious familiarity with the history and organisation of African society
>would marvel at such .... falsehood of such historiography. Millions of
>South Africans were educationally .... indoctrinated in an unquestionable
>end on such falsehood sucked out of the thumb. So it is not surprising when
>I say apartheid was so successful that we have a situation here where the
>descendants of the Khoisan deny that they are Africans. So why is it
>important? Its important because it means that the clock is beginning to
>turn in the proper direction now that people's awareness is beginning to
>reemerge, people's proper urgent sense of historical and cultural identity
>is beginning to become properly rekindled and awaken and these in my view
>must be welcome. But we must be careful that it doesn't very soon become
>some sort of a rear guard action of Colortism again. Coloreds were kept
>separate, they felt themselves separate from other Africans. Now there are
>some people who wants to use these emerging (Khoisan Consciousness) movement
>to say again "we are the original inhabitants and the others do not belong
>here". In other words they want to replay their apartheid game again on
>exclusivism by turning the other way round. There are lots of people who
>still don't want to accept that they are just part and parcel of the general
>African history. And the difference between the Khoisan and other Africans
>is not in terms of lightness of skin or anything like that, it is more a
>difference in cultural habits and adaptations to their environments. If you
>travel around Africa, Africans are of different types. You find Ethiopian
>types who look different from what you find along the neck of the Nile
>(river) further south and when you come into the Rwanda/Burundi area, you
>find another physical type. If you go westwards into the Congo you'll find
>different types, you come south you'll find slightly but variants of types.
>But it doesn't mean that they are not Africans, we are all Africans. We
>speak different languages, sometimes looking different but we are Africans,
>they are all Africans.
>
>Zenzile: The people's heritage, for those calling themselves different from
>the San or the Bantu - Coloureds, Basters, Oorlamse Nama or Griqua, has been
>lost. Their culture has been stolen and distorted even in an anachronistic
>proportion as you quoted from the book. What makes us who we are? There are
>people who have identified the need to return, as our brother Amilcar Gabral
>calls it, "to the source", as an act of survival, preservation and historic
>duty. The western-Cape for example, the land of the socalled Coloureds, is
>one of the greatest obstacles to the establishment of African nationalism in
>SA. A place has been prepared there, they don't even know that they are
>allowed to sit at that table. There are people who have come now and say the
>the actual Khoisan has the right to sit the table, even though we don't know
>our heritage, even though our language was banned and our traditions and
>large parts of our culture have been laid to waste by a historical process.
>Now, anthropologists have reconfigured, reconnected and re-net something to
>hold on to and it has come out as a Khoisan Renaissance or Khoisan
>Consciousness. In all this, the Coloured of southern Africa seem to be most
>affected.
>
>Prah: What is happening to the African in this part of Africa is not
>fundamentally different from what is happening to the Africans everywhere
>else. Its only a matter of degree that this part is the most extreme case of
>cultural denationalisation of the Africans, but it has happened everywhere
>with Africans oppressed, not only by the westerners but also by others. You
>must remember that in the history of Africa until imperialism, the first
>imperialists who denationalise the African cultures were Arab imperialists,
>started at least 1500 years ago before western imperialism started. And what
>we are blaming is not changing color, because Africans changed too much. If
>you go for example to the northern parts of Africa, the people who look like
>South Africans in terms of color and the African language .... you will find
>some of them as black as me in the Sudan, who although is an Arab is black,
>because culture which is the key is not the biology which determines color.
>He will go and catch another black, who is culturally on the other side and
>calls that one an African and would sell that one. The enslavement of
>Africans is still going on to the present day in the Afro-Arab-world. But
>the problem in SA have for so long been saddled in this color thing that for
>too many people it is still a reference point. If you go to a place like
>Ghana, remember that the last person does not look different from you in
>terms of color. If he comes here (SA) they will call him a Coloured, but if
>you call him a Coloured he will probably shoot you, because he doesn't see
>himself as different from the other people there. He speaks the same
>language, they eat the same type of food, he likes the same type of music,
>he goes to the same church. Nowhere on the African continent will you find
>any group calling itself Coloured than in Angola, Namibia, SA and to a
>dminishing-extend Zimbabwe, and yet it doesn't mean that there are no people
>in SA who will not be called Coloureds in other parts of Africa, there are
>millions. That shows that it is a social construct created by the historical
>forces of oppression in southern Africa. So I think that this movement which
>has started is a great thing to reclaim their belonging, culturally,
>historically and finding a place within the African framework.
>
>Zenzile: Will the Africanisation of the Coloureds into Khoisan succeed?
>
>Prah: Strategically that is inevitable in my view. But its not going to be
>just a smooth one track process. There are going to be setbacks, there are
>going to be others who'll say "we don't want to have anything to do with
>that", but their numbers will increasingly diminish and I have made the
>argument that very soon you'll have more and more people who would be
>describe themselves as Coloureds or Baster, but who would be speaking Xhosa,
>Zulu and Sotho, Nama, Damara, Silozi, Oshiwambo... and who would be part of
>those groups. When you go to places like Botswana or Swaziland you will see
>those type of people and a small number of them are in Angola and Zimbabwe.
>Its not going to stop. But this is not a problem exclusive for SA. In west
>Africa you will find lots of people like that, they don't speak any African
>language, and don't know some of the traditional cultural behaviors, but
>they are part of the struggle to recoup and regain, to claim their belonging
>in total. But when we do that I think its important also to remember that we
>must reclaim ourselves as well, and do things with a mind towards openness
>and not exclusivity.
>
>Zenzile: A lot of the people who currently speak Khoi-Khoi-gowab
>(Damara/Nama), which is one of the Khoi languages, are homeless in northern
>SA. There are some small pockets of people, who still follow the old ways of
>medicine, who still do the old things, how you make the fire, how you sit
>around the fire, how you welcome visitors in your house, how do you build
>your house etc. But here in the Western Cape and in Windhoek you find an
>urbanised grouping of people, who have lived in walls and who are somewhat
>gone shy of this "Africa". They know they have nowhere to go as the only
>chance for the socalled Coloured is to rid mentacide from their future
>sibblings. They must teach their children that they had a language here and
>they did not just come here five minutes ago. There is rock paintings which
>are the present of our ancestors. What is happening in various parts of the
>subeconomic townships, people are taking removing colonial statues of the
>Portuguese, the Dutch, the Germans and Irish which they though is their
>ancestry and they are wearing little bracelets and stuff like that, and they
>say "I'm a Khoisan, I'm a Khoikhoi, I'm not a Coloured anymore". Now
>somebody say you don't circumcise, you don't know your villages. It seems
>that History and African Science is mostly known by an elite onlyand does
>not get through to the people who need it, like the Coloureds. But how do
>you think the Khoisan Renaissance Movement can gain a sense of consciousness
>to go and get the cultural belonging back, to bring it to the table at the
>people who have not been in a privileged position?. How do we prevent the
>situation where the cultural belongings become located in a small arena
>where a specific group of people, an elite goes and finds it then interprets
>it and present it to a person like you rather than to the common people and
>how do we bring Khoisan consciousness in a shortest possible time rather
>than waiting for the next two-hundred years?
>
>Prah: The questions you are asking are not questions which are only valid
>for Coloureds just a smaller group of Africans, but to the whole of
>Africans. I was recently in west Africa, where I came across lots of people,
>man, woman and children speaking English when in fact the father and mother
>speak an African language, but choose to speak English to their children
>.... and they speak English to each other in public. So you ask yourself, in
>SA and Namibia this was forced by the jackboots down the throats of others
>over centuries to denationalise the cultures of the Khoisan people, who
>today call themselves Coloureds. But it is the elite's who are carrying out
>that process to reverse the cultural imperialism of arts, African science
>and languages. On whose behalf? Its obvious. Unfortunately it has been a
>hard task to convince them. There are more parts of the western culture in
>them than the culture of the masses. The questions you are asking has one
>simple answer and that's the work we are doing here, to find a language
>which carries the collective historical memory of the Khoi people. People
>say the Khoisan languages are all gone. Fortunately they are not all gone
>but they are facing great pressure. After centuries of pressure they are
>under great siege. The KhoiKhoi-gowab for example is very widely spoken in
>Namibia and other parts of southern Africa. The question of what sort of
>privilege or what sort of status do they have in the society, you can say
>the same thing to all the African languages. What sort of status do they
>have? The elite is doing it for the grassroots so that activist like
>yourself can work on the development and use of African languages. The elite
>are not just here for the problem of the Khoisan, or the Khoisan Renaissance
>Movement, but they for the whole of Africa and its diaspora. We are facing
>the same problem of the dominance and preference of western cultural usage
>by Africans. What is happening here is part of a wider African process. But
>in SA, there were peculiarities of extreme oppression, cultural oppression
>of the Africans in a way which we didn't see in other parts of Africa. You
>see the extend of the destruction apartheid caused in the former settler
>societies of Namibia, SA, Zimbabwe, Algeria etc. But elsewhere, the same
>thing went on and later on, the process was carried out willingly by
>Africans doing the work which the colonialists were doing first.
>We need to get there in order for Africans to be emancipated. We can't be
>emancipated on the basis of English, Arabic, French or Portuguese. We'll
>only be emancipated when we are into our languages, into history and into
>our cultures to construct our future on the basis of our belonging just like
>everybody else in the world does.
>
>Zenzile: WE are failing to retain integrity in the process of searching for
>the identity for the socalled Coloured. Probably the most widely spoken
>language in SA and by a small group in namibia, is Afrikaans because if you
>can go to any taxi-rank, the linguafranca, no matter the reflection, as
>always, is Afrikaans and that's the language transporting people around.
>
>Prah: You can say that Afrikaans is borrowed Dutch, which is being twisted
>around and so forth. But remember it is a language that was created by the
>servants and the slaves of the Dutch. It was not the Dutch themselves who
>created it. It was created the way Pidgin, Creole or Fanakalo was created.
>The slaves and the servants used to speak to their masters and later the
>master appropriated it at a certain stage and claim it to be their own and
>then sort of wave a certain variety of it to superiority above the other
>varieties and uses Dutch to entrench themselves culturally. The Coloureds
>can start Africanising the difrent versions of Afrikaans they are speaking,
>and there nothing wrong with that. What the Afrikaans situation would
>create in future, is the emergence of increasing people who will see
>themselves as Africans more and more. It will happen although not very fast,
>lets say in one generation. Iit would come to pass because if the Coloureds
>(or even the white Afrikaanersif they so wish) live for another two hundred
>years here in southern Africa, they will definately become part of Africa.
>
>Zenzile: But some Coloureds think that they are white and they follow the
>culture of the white Afrikaaners. Some will ask, why should we return to our
>cultural roots if we are fulfilled by our color?
>
>Prah: Cultures are not sealed, they mix, they absorb things from others. To
>move forward in space, although you accept things and you input things into
>what you have, culture must be build on the basis of what you have. You
>don't abandon what you have. There was an Afrikaaner General .... in the
>twentieth century who said "die taal van die onderdrukker in die mond van
>die onderdrukt is die taal van slawe", meaning "The language of the
>oppressor in the mouth of the oppressed is a language of slaves", and he was
>right in reference to their fight against the English (anglo-boer war).
>
>Zenzile: There also this notion of being the "first nations" initially
>propagated by european anthroplogists, who refused to call the same people
>as Khoisan but still falsely claim today that the San people are the first
>people in southern Africa. Now these sentiments is being expressed by some
>Coloureds who have returned to their Khoisan roots here in the western Cape,
>claiming that they are the first nation in the region and believing the lie
>of the initial european anthroplogists. How should do we solve these
>problem, already manifesting itself in the movement for Khoisan
>consciousness at this early age?.
>
>Prah: I call them rear-guards Coloureds. Again separation is foolish because
>most of the people who would describe themselves to be Coloured are not
>different from the Khoisan. In the end you'll have wrong people claiming
>that they are the first nation, its a bit foolish. I think the real
>transformation will start when more and more of the socalled Coloured people
>become African language speaking. The more you get that, the more ridiculous
>those who do not speak any African language will become. Lets work forward
>despite that there are those who are destructive. The emancipation of
>people, the freedom of people, the ability of the people to control the
>destiny of their lives should increase and not just here in the western Cape
>or in Africa but the whole world. Our freedom cannot be against the freedom
>of somebody else's freedom. The reason why our freedom is so important is
>that it is so suppressed. Our freedom will mean a gain for humanity as a
>whole, but if we adopt any type of struggle, which is against "them" or
>"us", the progress will stall. But you must again remember that this
>struggle is not unique to the Coloureds or the Khoisan in southern Africa
>only. You'll find it all over Africa - in Kenya, Ghana and in Rwanda and
>Burundi which is part of the reason why we have so much conflict in that
>part of the world. There are certain stratificational problems based on
>ethnicity. Today you have ethnic and cultural groupings also becoming a
>class groupings. Its a dangerous situation and it can explode. You find
>situations right now in the Ivory Coast, where people are chasing after
>others because they say they don't belong to another ethnic group. Then you
>have what you find sometimes in Nigeria, Liberia and what you see in Sierra
>Leone. So what I'm saying is that in all of this we must always situate our
>thinking and our sense of belonging within Africa for our victory.
>Nonetheless we must keep our cultures democratic, ensure democratic
>expressions, we must not sweep our cultrures under the carpet, we must not
>pretend that they don't exist, but we must respect them in their diversity
>our cultures. We must challenge our governments to what is right in this
>respects and adapt to democratic principles to our own historical and
>cultural conditions and enforced them steadily to deliver the direction.
>Remember these exclusiveness "you look different than us, this one is
>different", is not always correct.
>
>Namib-drum
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