posted 12 May 2005 09:29 PM            

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written by South African, Mandisi Majavu

About 3 million people live in Cape Town, and out of that 3 million, according to the city economic development and tourism directorate, only 867 052 people are “formally” employed. In this city, people of colour are divided into two opposing groups: coloureds and blacks. Just like the French had done in Haiti before the Haitian revolution of 1791, the apartheid regime operated according to a wicked racial hierarchy whereby the coloured people had a favoured status and blacks were at the lowest of the scale. This stupidity that parades as reasoning (i.e. “light black, therefore better than dark black and closer to white”) was observed with reverence during apartheid years, in the post-apartheid little has changed. There still exists between the two groups mistrust, if not an outright hostility, that is perpetuated by white political organisations through using slogans like: “swaart gevaar” (beware of the black).

Fearing the black does not bring the coloured much though, at the end of the day they both run around serving white-folks, both live in poverty, the townships they live in are infested with gangsters, drug peddlers and both live at the far edges of the city – some townships are 40km away from the city. White-folks stay in huge mansions in the city and in the west and north of the city close to the beaches and the famous Table Mountain, protected by high walls, with electric fences and big vicious-looking dogs.

Let me start from the beginning.

Historians when telling the South African story always begin from 1652 when Jan Van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape, this is their first mistake. These historians will go further to tell you that when Mr Van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape the first people he encountered were the Khoisan people, however, one is always given the impression that the Khoisan were not really Black or African, their second mistake. Khoisan were a Black people who had been living in the Southern Africa for more than 8 000 years before the Dutch arrived in the Cape. The Khoisan were made up of two tribes: the Khoikhoi and the San.

Some history books, like the one I did in high school in 1995, made it clear that when Jan Van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape there were no black people, only the Khoisan. The fact that other Blacks have similar physical features as the Khoisan was irrelevant to these so-called scholars and historians.

The fact that Xhosa-speaking people, of which I happen to be one of them, use the same click-sounds in their speech as the Khoisan and the fact that Xhosas share the same religious belief system with the Khoisan is still a source of confusion for many historians.

However, Jan Van Riebeeck was not exactly a sociologist who would find such information fascinating, his only worry was to make enough profits for the Dutch East India Company (DEIC). The DEIC was one of the most profitable multinationals of the seventeen century, and from the start it perceived the Cape as its commercial property. The company was involved in slave trading among many of its shady deals.

The minute these businessmen set foot on the African shores, they went to work – meaning they went to war with the Khoisan, raped their women, stole their land and brought in slaves from India, Indonesia and Madagascar.

Interaction between slaves took place, while at the same time the rape of slaves by slave-masters became a norm. And one fine morning, the slave-masters decided to name the children born out of these circumstances coloured.

For 180 years before slavery was abolished the slaves worked hard and lived in miserable conditions building the economy of the Cape, so that the whites could live a luxurious lifestyle that they still maintain to this day.

SA - Khoisan

SA Deputy President Jacob Zuma - Zulu.

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posted 12 May 2005 09:53 PM            

San people are indigenous Africans, closely related to other African people. Haplogroup A, the typical San haplogroup has a Pan-African spread that probably predates human occupation in Europe.

posted 12 May 2005 09:54 PM            

These features can also be traced back in the anthropological record to such a degree that it is impossible to catagorise as 'Khoisan' or 'Negro'.

The position of the Nazlet Khater specimen among prehistoric and modern African and Levantine populations.

Pinhasi R., Semal P.

Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 13, (2000), pp. 269-288

Nazlet Khater falls closer to the Late Palaeolithic Nubian samples . . . . If an ancestral descendant relationship existed between Nazlet Khater and the Late Palaeolithic Nubian specimens, then regional continuity persisted among the Upper/Late Pleistocene populations of the Upper Nile region.

Similarly in Border Cave in South Africa 60,000 year old remains have been found that have affinities with both modern Bantu and San South Africans.

Africa has always had great physical diversity.

posted 12 May 2005 10:05 PM            

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Originally posted by Thought2:
Thought Writes:

San people are indigenous Africans, closely related to other African people. Haplogroup A, the typical San haplogroup has a Pan-African spread that probably predates human occupation in Europe.

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Hence the maddening paradox 'caucazoid race fantacists' find themselves in when they are forced to cite the prescene of ancient Haplogroups in Africans [such as the Tutsi or Oromo] as 'causal' of their being Black (as opposed to?), then turn right around and assert that Black-Africans are a recent biological invention, genetically deleneated by more recent Haplogroups.

posted 12 May 2005 11:44 PM            

Actually, one of the earliest fallacies of anthropology is they classified Khoikhoi people and other Khoisans into the caucasoid category. Some even believed the early Khoisan were Hamites or lost tribes of people from Israel that went into Southern Africa. I suspect the Afrikanners right to the land might have lead to this revision.

Here is something from a book on Southern African history that illustrates this:

One San group that did domesticate livestock was the Khoikhoi pastoralists, called Hottentots by the Europeans. Khoikhoi were not caucasoid as once though, but negriod like the San-- and therefore Africans. A common dictum of South Africa's former white rulers was that the Khoikhoi and San were not ''Africans.'' At this extreme, this view denied Khoikhoi and San humanity by considereing them as little more than animals. More commonly it justified white seizure of Khoikhoi and San territory because the land was not considered to be owned,''Africans,'' in the language of apartheid, were the Bantu-speaking ''agri-pastoralists[those who praticed both agritculture and pastoralism]. Both Khoikhoi and San generally had lighter skin pigementation than the agri-pastoralists and were physically smaller. These traits lead early European vistors at the Cape to develop extravagant theories regarding Khoikhoi origins: from Jewish lost tribes , to ''Hamitic'' immigrants from north Africa, to pastoralists from the region between Eastern African lakes. Theories of Khoikhoi origins in north or east Africa are know discredited by south African scholars. The Khoikhoi were a San hunter-gather group who domesticated livestock. Over time they took the name Khoikhoi, meaning ''the real people'' or ''men of men,'' to distinguish themselves from those who did not own livestock and were therefore deemed inferior. The Khoikhoi called these people San. The Khoikhoi probably began keep domesticated sheep and cattle,acquired from pastoralist groups further north as early as 2,500 years ago. The Khoikhoi were somewhat larger in stature than the San, a dissimilarity that is know attributed more to the benefits attributed more to the benefits of a richer diet,particulary regular acess to milk and meat, that to genetic differences. They spoke a language closely related to the San dialect known as Tshu-khwe that included click sounds, and the two-shared a common religious tradition.

The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations

The History of South Africa

Roger R. Beck

posted 13 May 2005 12:27 AM            

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Originally posted by Mike the Hellene:

Yeah, that's just plum crazy. I can understand confusing Ainu for Caucasians, or Polynesians for Caucasians, but the Khoisan? They're about as extremely non-Caucasian as it gets!

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posted 13 May 2005 04:03 PM            

It is possible that pygmies of the forest belt and some group of Ethiopians and East Africans are related to them.

But they are the ancestors of all us.

posted 13 May 2005 06:13 PM            

I read an article years ago, don't ask me which cuz I totally forgot but according to that article The Haratin are probably the aboriginal people of North Africa long before Afrasian speakers spread to that region. The evidence is that Haratin look distinct from other Berber groups like the Tuareg or the Siwa, and some of their features bear a striking resemblence to Khoisan while other features suggest Pygmies. DNA tests indicate that the populations they are most closesly related to are some Pygmies, while Khoisan are second in relation.

posted 13 May 2005 07:03 PM            

Djehuti, the fossil I am speaking about are the Metcha-Aflou people. People have claimed these fossils are everything from Khoisanoids down to Cro-magnoid. You also have the Capsian industry whose remains were sometimes called Mediterranean,and even sometimes negriod.

As far as the Haratin some ABO bloodtyping found a close connection between them and pgymies. Yes, this is what I read from the Living Races of the Sahara by Cabbot Briggs.

Contrary to what people publish, the Haratin are not slaves of the Tuareg people. When the Tuaregs ran into certain groups they never enslaved them but incorporated them into a certain caste. The black-smith[Imadan] caste is conprised primarily of Sahelian Africans.

The term Haratin itself means agritcultural farmers much like the Arabic fellahin. Not really associated with a type of slave caste.

posted 13 May 2005 07:41 PM            

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Djehuti, the fossil I am speaking about are the Metcha-Aflou people. People have claimed these fossils are everything from Khoisanoids down to Cro-magnoid...

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Yes I am aware of the Metcha-Aflou culture.

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You also have the Capsian industry whose remains were sometimes called Mediterranean,and even sometimes negriod.

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The term Haratin itself means agritcultural farmers much like the Arabic fellahin. Not really associated with a type of slave caste.

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