Posted on February 25, 2012
Growing up on the Cape Flats of South Africa, I was mistakenly stereotyped a 'amalawu', a Xhosa term roughly depicting people with no culture and no language of their own, the bastard children of Jan van Riebeeck, the pirate so-called 'Coloureds'. In 2009 during a Khoikhoi ceremony in Cape Town, Cochoqua Chief Basil Coetzee commented, 'Even a Rottweiler has a name, have you ever heard of 'Rottweiler'. Why are you that was created by the spoken Word of God a so-called 'Coloured'? If a dog has an identity, why not us? Japanese are proudly Japanese because they come from Japan and speak Japanese; a 'Coloured' can only be a proud 'Coloured' only if they come from 'Colour' and speak 'Coloured'. Today, after many years of oppression under an enforced slave label 'Coloured', I can finally rid myself of this label and free myself from mental enslavement by saying I am a proud Khoikhoi (man par excellence).
Recent statistics indicate that for every 1 100 inmates in South African prisons, 647 are 'Coloureds'; 40-50 are Whites and Indians, while the remaining 403-413 are black African. While I was growing up during years of Apartheid, general notions expressed views that Xhosa young boys went to the bush for initiation rites into adulthood (a practice still maintained), while the Whites went to the Army. But the 'Coloureds' went and to this day still flock to prisons for 'manhood'.
I also remember ever so clearly during my childhood my mother returning home tired and somewhat bothered one day after work. She shared a story of how a white Afrikaner scoffed at her, calling her a 'Hotnot' in a demeaning manner. This identity was transmitted to me in the process of my mother's story-telling: I thought if she was called by that name, then the same applied for me. On account of the Khoikhoi people's language having click-sounds, 'vowel-nasaling', 'tonation' and harsh faucal sounds, the Dutch settlers called them Hottentots, a tem referring to a stutterer. Not knowing what to make of such an unheard-of-language, the Dutchmen viewed it as more akin to the chat of a parrot than to human speech calling it Hottentot, a mere gibberish. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1649 remarked, “When they speak they fart with their tongues in their mouths" Augustin de Beaulieu observed in 1620, "Their usual greeting on meeting us is to dance a song, of which the beginning, the middle, and the end are ‘hautitou’.”
In everyday speech today in the Cape, one often hears, 'moenie jou Oorlams hou nie' (which loosely translates as 'Don't be a Mr. Smarty-pants'). Historically the term 'Oorlams' was adopted to refer to the dispossessed and enslaved, but very resourceful descendants of the Southern Cape Khoikhoi peoples who once lived in and around Cape Town. Interestingly, 'Oorlamsche Hottentotten' can be traced back to the Malay words 'orang lama' meaning 'experienced people' who had contact with Europeans. Then again in school, the most rowdy children were often labeled as 'Gam se kinders' ('children of Ham'), portraying the lowest and most degenerate stratum amongst the Cape Flats communities. Meanwhile the Khoekhoegowab (Khoikhoi language) word 'xam' similar in pronunciation as the Afrikaans word 'gam', actually means lion! The labeling of some as inferior and degenerate persists: 'You can take the man out of the bush, but you can never take the bush out of the man', is often used to describe these 'degenerates'.
In time, needless to say, all this name-calling and confused identities left lasting inferiority complexes and impressions on the psyche of the honey-skinned people of South Africa, deeply connected to notions of inadequacy to function as a valued and respected citizens. Having no apparent traditional rooting, no process where age-old civilizing morals and values were transmitted from generation to another, leaves people prone to immoral behavior as a result of having no binding cultural anchoring.
Local traditions were not recorded by early European travelers. Migrations out of the South Western Cape led to the later disappearance during the rapid decline of independent Khoikhoi societies in the region. Under Apartheid, people in the western part of South Africa were forced to adopt Afrikaans as their primary language as the use of Khoikhoi and San languages was suppressed. Even long before apartheid, indigenous (aboriginal) identities and languages were devalued. The assimilation of people into settler cultures resulted in the loss of most indigenous peoples' languages. The majority of indigenous groups adopted Afrikaans as the language of communication, apart from a few indigenous peoples situated in very rural and remote places.
Khoikhoi, who were living in coastal areas of the southwest in the seventeenth century, have mostly been assimilated into other cultures, and many so-called 'Coloureds' can trace their ancestry through the Khoikhoi. Even as much as 90% of the slaves brought to the Cape were men and took local indigenous women as wives. By taking up an enforced identity, indigenous people classified 'Coloured', one could argue, were masking memories of pain.
History teaches us that in 1613, Coree, a local Khoikhoi in Cape Town was kidnapped and taken to England for a year to learn English for bartering purposes. Autshumato, who was known to the Europeans as Hadah, Adda, or Haddot and after 1652, as Harry, was similarly taken around 1631-32 to the Javanese port of Bantamand and taught the essentials of the English language. Krotoa, who was the first Christian baptized Khoikhoi and Doman (Nommoa) during the time of Van Riebeeck, were further instances of Khoikhoi who adopted European languages to facilitate translation and trading. This, furthermore, indicates how the European tongue over time firmly settled into local ways of communication. After almost 400 years of language shift, the pendulum now again is swinging the other way as language revitalisation begins to be carried out.
One has to accept the fact that there are still people clinging to the shackles of 'Coloured' identity, but I think Marcus Garvey was right when he said, 'People without knowledge of their past, history and culture, are like a tree without roots.' For me, as the seasons of time went their course, I started hearing the calling of the voices in the winds of time, calling me to seek further, to peer deeper.
On 2 November 2008, I stood along the ancestral graves of the /Khowese Nama people in Gibeon, Namibia along the banks of the Great Fish River in Greater Namaqualand, North of the !Garib (Orange) river. The /Khowese Heroes Day Festival is a commemoration held on the day King Hendrik Witbooi (3rd King of the /Khowese) died in battle against the German authorities who occupied Namibia from the late 1800s. Oral traditions among these Nama people of Greater Namaqualand indicate that they once lived in and around the Cape, about 17-18 generations ago, still calling Cape Town by its ancestral name //Hui !Gaeb. Moments before I delivered my speech I felt a lump in my throat as I soon realized how historic and momentous this event truly was. For there I was, in a community that still retained their ancestral Khoikhoi tongue! I stood there addressing the Father of the Nation, the late Paramount King Dr. Rev. Hendrik Witbooi and other Chieftains, as a descendant of the Great Red Nation. My genetic ancestry testing traced my Mitochondrial DNA to the L0d haplogroup which is thought to be the oldest of the L0 clans, common to Khoi-San populations of Southern Africa. Yet coming from an urban background, I had lost the ability to communicate in my ancestral language.
The general charge against liberal democracy is that although it gives equal rights to all individuals in a multicultural society, it does not give significant recognition to distinctive groups for their survival and preservation of their identities. The South African experience is a case in point: to counterbalance the mass influx of foreign influence, it is important to preserve what is left of our indigenous languages and accompanying cultures. How much has to date already been lost? The blood in my veins started calling to preserve what was left our linguistic heritage. After searching far and long, I found a Khoikhoi language workshop programme by the Language Commission in Western Cape Cultural Affairs Department spearheaded by Pedro Dausab, which has set the process in motion to attain my indigenous ancestral tongue, to speak in the language of my ancestors.
Bradley van Sitters writes in his personal capacity
