Of Khoisan Statues and Other Things
The news cycle moves at such breakneck speed these days that if you’re not paying attention you will quickly fall behind.
Take our new sports, arts and culture minister Gayton McKenzie.
It seems like he tweets or posts a new TikTok every couple of hours, each time making some important pronouncement that shocks or surprises everyone.
Most recently he has promised to cut the funding that’s been flying Bafana Bafana’s superfans to watch them play overseas, and he’s also called on Khoisan leaders to meet with him to discuss how the government can finally give them proper recognition as South Africa’s First Peoples, possibly by erecting statues and other monuments in public spaces.
I’m not a big fan of soccer, so I don’t give a hoot about the superfans.
However, having had a great-grandmother of Khoisan descent, I wanna talk about the second thing.
I think it’s a good thing to put up a couple of statues, maybe a monument to the Battle of Salt River that took place on 1 March 1510 when the Khoi defeated the Portuguese sea captain Francisco de Almeida and his cowardly men, or maybe one for Louis van Mauritius and his cronies who in October 1808 led a rebellion of 300+ slaves against the Cape Administration and got hanged for their troubles.
But that would be enough.
You see, if the good minister is really serious about helping people of Khoisan descent, he must lobby his Cabinet colleagues to get serious about the land issue as it pertains to South Africa’s First Peoples.
Of course some ignorant historians would like you to believe that Khoisan peoples were nomadic, running around half-naked in the bush with no sense of place or property.
Or that even if they did settle down in one place, they had no concept of land ownership in the form of title deeds.
Now besides the fact that these ideas are rooted in the same Roman-Dutch arrogance that reduced indigenous people to vermin on the land where they were born and lived, the subject of colonial hunting parties that paid hunters per scalp, it also erases hundreds of years of settled small-scale agriculture in the area that later came to be known as the Cape Colony.
For Khoisan peoples, having even a small piece of land meant having a place to grow your own food and feed your family, to practice your cultural rituals and traditions, to heal yourself when you got sick, to live out the meaning of your culture.
However, those early Dutch soldiers and peasant farmers, seeing the massive estates erected by colonial governors like Simon van der Stel, wanted the same for themselves, and began annexing ancestral Khoisan lands they had no rightful claim to.
It was as simple as putting pegs in the ground to mark the boundaries of your supposed land, then getting the administration to send out a ‘veldkornet’ to come ‘verify’ your claim, which then gave you the right to shoot anyone who said otherwise.
And if things got a bit hairy with the natives, you could always call on the colonial army to send out a unit to come and sort them out, much like has been happening in Occupied Palestine for the past 50+ years.
The Christian missionaries were no better.
While Khoisan labourers worked the wine and wheat farms, they built schools that taught their kids that the cultural practices of their elders — food, clothing, dress, music — were primitive and backward, that they shouldn’t focus on the material things of this world, but instead dream of a better life in some heavenly hereafter.
This is how thousands of hectares of ancestral Khoisan lands came to be under the control of white clergymen sitting in European capitals, right until today.
This is how the Cape was won: through deadly violence and religious brainwashing, and the traces of these historical injustices can be seen everywhere if you just care to look: they are written in the broken lives of alcoholic farmworkers and their children in Grabouw; the blood of gang victims shot dead in the streets of Manenberg, Lavender Hill, Mitchell’s Plain and Delft; the flies flitting across the faces of kids confined to corrugated iron ‘resettlement camps’ like Blikkiesdorp; the Stepin Fetchit dances of car guards looking to score a quick buck off the hordes of tourists that visit the Old Biscuit Mill every weekend; and the bergies lying splayed under the bridges of the Cape Town CBD.
Yes, a few statues and monuments would be good, but only if we can also start talking about how the wealthy descendants of those greedy and violent European colonisers are today making millions of rands a year showing off ‘Bushman’ cave paintings discovered on their wine estates to gawping tourists while many of the descendants of those same ‘Bushmen’ live in degradation and squalor all over the Cape.
My Ouma’s name was Maria Crouster and in the 1930s the government kicked her off her farm in Kraaifontein so they could build houses for white people on it.
Like many others before her, she grew all kinds of things there — vegetables, chickens, fruit, and herbs for healing.
She was not nomadic, she was not vermin to be hunted, she was the central ancestor of a large group of ‘Coloured’ people who today live all across the Western Cape and even abroad.
She was a funny and feisty old woman when I knew her as a child growing up in the 1970s and, like many other ancestors now deceased, I don’t think she’d want a mere statue as a monument to her life, her people and everything that they lost.
Ryan Fortune is a journalist, film and television screenwriter, podcast host, amongst others. You can find out more about him by visiting his website here.
