CULTURALLY TEACHING

THE INVASION

DISPLACEMENT OF THE KHOIKHOI

The people who lived in South Africa before the European invasion can be divided into two
language families, the Khoikhoi (or Khoisan) and the Bantu. During the time of white
domination, the differences between the many tribes of South Africa were exaggerated for
political reasons. There are however, cultural differences between the inhabitants and it
remains a culturally diverse nation.

The Khoikhoi is a general term to describe the hunter-gatherers, also called 'bushmen' or
the San, who were the earliest inhabitants of Africa. There were probably about 120,000
living in South Africa around 1500. They were still there when black Bantu-speaking
farmers and finally the white settlers who came later.

The whites saw the Khoikhoi as little better than wild animals. When the blacks resisted
white intrusion into their hunting grounds, the whites sent out killing squads. They usually
killed the adults and captured the children to work on their farms. The Khoikhoi were driven
to remote mountainous and desert lands which were not attractive to the white settlers.
Many died upon contact with the Europeans because their resistance to the white diseases
was low. Between disease, the killing squads and the inhospitable conditions in the new
lands, the numbers of the Khoisan dwindled. There are few living in South Africa today.

A German traveler in the 18th century, O.F. Mentzel, observed:

By nature they are not savage or cruel, but the persecution of Europeans who shoot them
like dogs, and the bitter hunger when they have nothing to eat, make them audacious and
desperate so they risk their lives and become bloodthirsty.
Joseph Campbell, a Scottish missionary traveling in the Cape in 1813 described the
displacement of the Khoikhoi:
We came to a Hottentot (a common Dutch term for the Khoikhoi) kraal (encampment)
where we would have halted for the night, but their fountain was all dried up...From their
own account they had once had a better place, but a Boor (Boer) asked permission first
to sow a little corn, then to erect a mill, they allowed it; after which he applied for a grant from
the government for the whole place, which they were promised, not knowing that the
Hottentots possessed it; of course they were driven from it. An old Hottentot told us that he
remembered the time when the boors were within five days journey of Cape Town and the
country was full of Hottentot kraals, but they have gradually been driven up the country to
make room for white people

http://www.historywiz.com/khoisan.htm
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