Traveling anywhere in Africa, you can’t help but notice the effects of colonization. It’s an eerie thing to see, especially if you’ve traveled to countries in Europe who took hobby in colonizing. I’d seen a brief hint of colonization in being part native, and knowing that what was once estimated as a population of 1-10 million in the United States before the Europeans arrived, now makes up 1% of the population. However, the effects of colonization are much more prominent in African countries.
Similar to the United States, South Africa also had a native people known as the Khoikhoi or the Khoisan. Also similar to the native tribes of North America, the Khoi lived off the land, were primarily nomadic, knew the land better than the back of their hands, and defended themselves with instruments like bows and arrows rather than guns. True to colonizing form, the Dutch-when deciding to finally settle some people in Cape Town (they’d originally just used the area as a place to stop, restock and regroup on the way to India) they made friends with the Khoi, traded their goods, learned their ways of the land, and then brutally murdered all of them.
There remains a small population of Khoi left in the Southern section of Africa- that being South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. However, even the more modern population of Khoi got the short end of the stick in government policy.The Native Land Act of 1913 aimed itself at “regulating” the acquisition of land by “natives”, or as the rest of the world calls them, blacks. It was the first and arguably most destructive first step in introducing a formal apartheid system- as remember the actual implementation of what we know as “apartheid” didn’t actually happen until 1948.
The Native Land Act stated that only certain lands could be owned by blacks, and by certain lands, they meant 10% of the land in South Africa. Keep in mind, white’s at the time only made up less than 20% of the population, and yet were declaring 90% of the land their own. Imagine this from a practical standpoint. It’s like when packing up my college dorm room, I attempt to, instead of scattering my various things in separate boxes, cramming everything I own into one tiny box. It doesn’t work. People were forcibly removed from their land, and considering many blacks made a living off of farming, their one source of income was taken away. Additionally, the land they were given was so overoccupied and overfarmed that land quickly lost it’s lushness, causing food supply to slowly diminish and people to starve.
But going back to the Khoi- they too lost the land that was so vital to their culture and lifestyle. Between hunting, migrating, and teaching their youth the intricacies of nature and the wild, these things weren’t possible anymore.
A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to go to what might be called a Khoi-reservation, though Khoi don’t actually live there. Rather, it’s Khoi land and one gets to see where, in concept,they would be, and how, in concept, they would have done things like hunt and make clothing and build a fire, etc. I assume this visit would be much like visiting a Native American reservation in a place like North Dakota or Washington, where as enthusiastic your native tour-guide is about their culture and the jokes they tell and the culture they share, you can’t help but feel like it’s a mask for an unfairly dying culture. Our tour guide, as I have no better term for it, seemed to be the single person there who was able to recall the traditional ceremonies, way of dress, and how to hunt. His counterparts were learning as he did things, and the clothes, tools, and instruments were passed around with care and returned to saddles afterwards as they were some of the only left.
It made me sad and slightly uncomfortable to stand there and not think about the elephant in the room. In the years after apartheid law ended, and land restitution act has come forth to give back land to those who lived on it previous to apartheid laws being enacted. Despite the Khoi receiving land back, it’s too late and things won’t be the same when you wait about a hundred years to give a group their land back. It’s a great gesture, but it’s just that, a gesture. It makes me wonder whether populations like this losing their culture or even disappearing constitutes itself as a natural part of the world evolving and moving. Can these populations survive in modern days and live side by side to industrialization? I don’t know.
On a funny note, our guide told us how the Khoi ask someone to marry them. In this case, the male gets a little arrow that almost looks like it’s for a toddler Robin Hood, and they stalk the girl they are interested in before eventually hiding in a bush. They then shoot the girl in the butt with an arrow and if she’s nice but doesn’t like you, she will politely pick up the arrow and hand it back to you. If she’s mean and doesn’t like you she will break the arrow over her knee. If she wants to indicate yes, then she will pick up the arrow and place it over her heart. We proceeded to ask him how many broken arrows he had, of which we got no answer.