“Our Khoi and San culture and languages is on the brink of extinction, and we are valiantly fighting for recognition from the government as our stories has been hidden; deliberately left of our country’s history and school curriculums.”
This was the response of Khoi leader Captain Edmund Wayne Stuurman (above) who recently gave an online presentation for a global online workshop series titled ‘Researching Race’.
The series is being hosted by the Anti-Racism Lab Anti-Racism Lab at the University of Alberta and the Borderline Research Collective Borderlines Research Collective at Queen Mary University of London.
Stuurman, who is based in Bethelsdorp, Nelson Mandela Bay, is the Senior Khoi Leader of the House of Klaas and Dawid Stuurman and the representative of the Gamtouer Ethnic Community in South Africa.
His presentation was titled ‘The Inalienable Right and Disconnected Umbilical Cord in South Africa’. He explained that inalienable rights “are rights that cannot be taken away by legislation as they are beyond the rights of any government”. The disconnected umbilical cord refers to the environment in which “life substances” are conveyed.
“For the indigenous Khoi and San people these life substances were all the elements of the natural environment – the land, the sea, the mountains, the water, the air, the sky and the stars,” Stuurman explained. This is expressed through the rock art in many parts of South Africa dating back thousands of years. The many images of animals included the eland and praying mantis, regarded as sacred.
“As the Khoi and San, we occupied vast lands in southern Africa until our ancestors were forced out by the Dutch, Portuguese and British invaders who regarded other people as inferior to themselves,” said Stuurman, adding that the invaders did not see the natural environment as their life substances, “but rather spices, weapons, ivory, amber, precious stones, gold, bronze and silver by which they stood great store”.
In the process they sought dominion over the land in what came to be South Africa, and, convinced of the righteousness of their version of Christianity, sought to crush what they saw as the “savage customs of the indigenous” and to enslave or obliterate them.
While some historical accounts from the early 1500s speak of friendly exchanges with the Khoi and San, other accounts speak of violent clashes. “In 1510 Portuguese explorer Franciso de Almeida and his crew were defeated by the Khoi and San in one of the most humiliating battles in the history of Portugal against ‘savages with assegais and stones’. An account of the battle recorded at the time said the Portuguese were killed by ‘bestial negroes’.”
However, as Stuurman explained, the colonists kept coming and increasingly overpowered the Khoi and San, taking their land. Records from 1612 state that the indigenous people of the Cape were seen as subhuman, “likened to apes and baboons who were unworthy of their land, described as having good soil and wholesome air - a paradise and the Biblical garden of Eden”. By 1652 at the time of the arrival of Dutch colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck from the Netherlands, the land in the Cape was being called “no man’s land”.
“The 5 May 1660 is a very important date in Khoi and San history because on this date approximately 100 of our leaders met with van Riebeeck and a Dutch contingent at the fort of van Riebeeck,” said Stuurman. “It was supposed to be a meeting about mutual respect and peace, but, instead, the Dutch used the occasion to articulate their theory of conquest – stating that the indigenous people had lost the land as a result of war – and insisted this was a legitimate reason for their land grab.”
In van Riebeeck’s journal it describes the indigenous leaders’ response. They said the colonists had misappropriated their land and asked whether they would be allowed to do such a thing to the Dutch in Holland. In response, the Dutch stated that the land was not big enough for both, to which the indigenous people replied: ‘who should rather give way in justice, the rightful owner of the land or the foreign intruder?’.
Stuurman explained that from that moment onwards, the Khoi and San were subjected to systematic cultural genocide, centuries of discrimination, and dispossession of their ancestral lands and identity.
Stuurman’s ancestor, Dawid Stuurman, for example, was forced at age 5 to be an indentured labourer for a Dutch farmer, and incarcerated three times on Robben Island for defending and protecting his people’s rights and land. “He twice escaped (the only person in history to do so), and was ultimately banished to Australia, along with other indigenous activists, who were subsequently forced to fight against the Aboriginal people there,” Stuurman explained.
“We need people to know about our history and we need our history books and online archives to be re-written to reflect the truth about our identity for South Africa and the rest of the world to know. We demand that our indigenous, First Nation and African status is recognised by the South African government so that we can start the process of accessing the land that was stolen from us. Only when this happens will our umbilical cord be made whole again.”
Asked why the South African government has not yet recognised them as indigenous or First Nation people, Stuurman replied:
“Under the so-called democracy of the current South Africa, we have been categorised, not as indigenous Khoi and San people, but as coloured people. In that lies many of our problems as in South Africa coloured people are seen as black, but not as Africans. So, when it comes to development opportunities and the issue of identity, we as Khoi and San now have to go through a lengthy process of asserting our own identity and demanding that policies around us be amended and established.
The Gamtouer Ethnic Community has managed to put together documentary proof and genealogy lines. “I am the 8th generation of Chief Dawid Stuurman but there are other Khoi and San communities who don’t have their history documented,” Stuurman explained. “Much of it was oral and the documentation that does exist is not accessible to most Khoi and San communities as it is stored in universities and state archives.
“I am fortunate to have access to archives in Pretoria and the Western Cape through the partnership with Nelson Mandela University. We have since delivered our community’s documentation to the Commission on KhoiSan matters in Pretoria, but we haven’t been given any feedback on the commission’s work and how much knowledge they have in terms of Khoi and San customary law. We have to wait and see, and we do not know how long it will take for the Act to be passed.”
He added that they are also advocating for the Khoi language to become the 13th official language to keep the language alive.
“Urgent action is required to restore the dignity of our people because when we look at what is happening now, we are almost deliberately being covertly silenced and this is a covert form of genocide,” he said.
“As things stand, I don’t see the difference between apartheid and democracy, as the whole idea of being free is only on paper. In the meantime our people are starving and dying. But we won’t give up the fight to be recognised by law, even if we have to fight this out in the Constitutional Court under the UN Declaration of Rights for indigenous people.”