The story of Sarah Bartmann teaches nothing if it does not teach you who you are. Researching her life and talking to people about her I found out that I would remain a brown woman, no matter how many strings of degrees I trailed around behind my name. My race and my gender followed me, even into my academic work. Simply put, my experiences of being black and a woman writing about Sarah Bartmann have proved to be germane to a study of her historiography. Thus, this chapter deals with my relationship with the academic world of knowledge surrounding the Sarah Bartmann story. In the first half of the essay I deconstruct the uses and abuses of Sarah Bartmann in current academic discourse. I then move on to a discussion of my experience teaching this material in racially mixed settings at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The chapter ends with a discussion of my quest for self-understanding and self-retrieval from the obscurities of a language not created for my benefit. My intention is to produce a turn-around polemic against the racist and sexist cultural texts that silenced me through their animosity, and thus contribute towards the communal project of creating a more hospitable mental environment for African creativity. It expresses my human need to understand, come to terms with, and move on from, the dominant Bartmann historiography.

The article seeks to situate issues of sexuality and gender orientation in an ecological perspective. It is well known that most plant species are not two-gendered, although a few trees are like the human species: male, female and intersex. Some animal species, such as snails, are fully intersex. Moreover, over 450 animal species has been observed exhibiting homosexual behaviour. Yet only one species has been observed to exhibit homophobia. As such, what requires explaining is why the human species is so ill at ease with what is a perfectly normal variation which can be observed throughout nature. This paper locates species diversity in a in a pan-Africanist discourse which argues that the true cultural import is homophobia.

In deconstructing the notion of human beings as living ‘outside’ nature, Glazebrook tells the following story: “Humans are animals, and embodiment entails natural processes. At a recent conference, a speaker who urged the audience to ‘get back to nature’ was quickly challenged: when had he left? He had been seen eating breakfast.” Climate change is a big reminder of this reality. Thinking of ourselves as outside nature allowed us to not take notice of where our waste went, or to see how limited the ability of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases was, and global warming is important in reminding us that in fact we never left. Unfortunately, it takes time for our dominant knowledge systems to catch up with that reality. The assumption that we can abstract from nature sufficiently to pursue a neat and tidy experimental method still underlies much development work. However, with climate change, we are increasingly being forced to accept that such an approach is not useful. Instead we are better off conceding the principle of uncertainty: not only can we not know everything we need to know, we also will never be sure quite how much we do not know. Throughout this essay, I will be using food supply as a practical example, since it is not only a deeply gendered process, but also a timely reminder of the fact that we never left nature behind. This essay looks at how to apply the principle of uncertainty to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of gender and climate change work. It is necessary to pay analytical attention to this problem, since M&E of climate change adaptation is widely agreed to be different from previous development work. It has been observed that best way to approach the issue is to negotiate principles of M&E in the initial stage of project planning. However, so far it has not been possible to do this for the simple reason that the first few projects did not know what to expect. Now, however, we are in a better position to begin to develop a gender-specific methodology for climate change adaptation. This will come in handy for people planning future projects.

The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages for the promotion of language development, peace, and reconciliation. One of the stated aims of the awareness campaign is the integration of indigenous languages into standard settings, bringing about empowerment through capacity building and through the elaboration of new knowledge. The San tsî Khoen Digital Languages Application & Archive is a project based in the San & Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Established in 2020 and funded by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, it is informed by a co-design digital curation process with the community. The project archives the endangered and erased languages of the indigenous San and Khoi communities of southern Africa, with an initial focus on N|uu and Khoekhoegowab. To obtain this, the project integrates decolonial scholarship within a digital environment of human languages technologies that creates a visibility of not only erased and endangered languages but also indigenous African feminist knowledges that have been lacking in scholarship. The digital archive hopes to provide support for the case for these languages to become South African official languages. With this purpose in mind, its co-design digital curation process challenges the insular and fragmented nature of academic output, thereby allowing for a greater degree of critical analysis. This action research and digital curation process is not without its challenges, as co-creating knowledge in an attempted decolonial framework that aims to foreground African indigenous feminist knowledge (such as that of last fluent Nluu speaker, Ouma Katrina Esau) in a region of historical linguicide that was subjected to epistemic violence, as a consequence of colonialism and neo-colonialism, is in itself not without its various contestations. This paper critically discusses this collaborative research and co-design knowledge production process engaged with over a process of forty research workshops, over the past two years. The analysis and discussion in this paper are derived from a thematic analysis of this co-design digital curation process facilitated by the San & Khoi Centre between 2020 and 2022. We provide a critical perspective on how the San tsî Khoen Archive was developed from the unique point of view of the women project members (as senior researcher and curation research interns on the project) and their consideration of decolonial imperatives in addressing the complex challenges for co-design processes in feminist indigenous digital archive language restoration.

In this book, eminent scholars explore the term 'Bushmen' and the relationships that gave rise to it, from the perspectives of anthropology, archaeology, comparative religion, literary studies, art history and musicology. Topics as diverse as trophy heads and museums, to the destruction of the Cape San, and appraisals of 19th-century photographic practices are examined. A parallel text runs thoroughout the book and provides a counter narrative to the central discourses. The book is richly illustrated with previously unpublished photographs and documents from many archives and museums.

This dictionary features two dialects of the N|uu language (Eastern and Western), as well as Nama, Afrikaans and South African English. This dictionary was not simply translated in standard varieties of Nama and Afrikaans, but was based on fieldwork conducted with speakers of these languages living in previously N|uu-speaking areas, i.e., South African Nama and 'Onse Afrikaans'. These languages and dialects show evidence of their influence on one another over time.

This is a selection of tales gathered in Afrikaans from present-day Karoo storytellers. They animate the harsh but beautiful landscape with lively characters like cunning Jackal, silly Hyena, dangerous Water Snake and the sinister Foot-Eyes. Such tales were first documented among |xam hunter-gatherers in the 1870s by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Unexpectedly they have survived, affirming a strong and continuing tradition of oral storytelling in South Africa. They’re presented here with English translation.

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This book critically opens new pathways for de-colonial scholarship and the reclamation of indigenous self-definition by women scholars. Indigenous peoples around the world are often socially egalitarian and gender equal, matricentric, matrifocal, matrilineal, less violent, beyond heteronormative, ecologically sensitive, and with feminine or two-gender deities or spirits, and more. Bernedette Muthien has contributed to several publications over the years, while June Bam has made numerous key contributions in the field of rethinking and rewriting the African past more generally. In this book, indigenous women write their own herstory, define their own contemporary cultural and socio-economic conditions, and ideate future visions based on their lived realities. All chapters herstoricise the accepted 'histories' and theories of how we have come to understand the African past, how to problematise and rethink that discourse, and provide new and different herstorical lenses, philosophies, epistemologies, methodologies and interpretations. In a first of its kind in Africa and the world, this collection of essays is written by, with and for indigenous southern African women from matricentric societies. Contents Foreword / Lungisile Ntsebeza -- I've come to take you home : a tribute to Sarah Baartman / Diana Ferrus -- Introduction / June Bam and Bernedette Muthien -- 1. Writing ourselves back into history : the liberating narrative of who we are / Sylvia Vollenhoven -- 2. Rematriation : reclaiming indigenous matricentric egalitarianism / Bernedette Muthien -- green kalahari / Bernedette Muthien -- 3. Gendering social science : Ukubuiswa of maternal legacies of knowledge for balanced social science studies in South Africa / Babalwa Magoqwana -- 4. Feminism-cide and epistemicide of Cape herstoriography through the lens of the ecology of indigenous plants / June Bam -- The bones / Diana Ferrus -- Camissa / Khadija Tracey Carmelita Heeger -- call to art / Shelley Barry -- 5. Valuing the increased and invisible workload : indigenous women, labour and the COVID-19 pandemic / Sharon Groenmeyer -- 6. Decolonising the representation of indigenous women at the Cape during Covid-19 / June Bam and Robyn Humphreys -- 7. Repositioning !uiki Ilnaosa/aia/ / gertrude fester-wicomb -- 8. Ancestral letter to unborn descendants / Sarah Malotane Henkeman -- 9. The falling sky : some notes about originary peoples in Brazil / Ana Lígia Leite e Aguiar -- Conclusion / June Bam and Bernedette Muthien -- one & many / Bernedette Muthien.

Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter provides fascinating insights into life at the Cape over several centuries, the indigenous inhabitants and their accumulated knowledge, and how attempts were made to systematically erase this knowledge during the colonial and apartheid eras. Yet the wisdom of the ages still resides with the Ausidi, the female, intergenerational knowledge-keepers who are revered for the central role they played in Rondevlei, Hardevlei and other communities on the Cape Flats before the forced removals from the 1960s onwards changed the landscape forever. The book delves into many of the untold stories of the Cape, challenging various scholarly assumptions about the origins and enduring influence of the Khoi and San in the languages and cultures of southern Africa. The meticulously well-researched text is also skilfully interwoven with stories from current and former residents of the Cape Flats who speak candidly about their childhood experiences, the vast expanses of plants and flowers that used to more than satisfy local communities’ food and medicinal requirements, and the Ausidi – the formidable yet selfless family matriarchs, many of whom refused to be cowed by the apartheid regime’s forced removal policy and fought to protect their cherished livestock and land. Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter serves as a reminder that popular history is not unassailable; it should be regularly questioned and, where necessary, challenged. The book makes a powerful case for a decolonised approach to exploring and interpreting southern Africa’s neglected past – in which the stories, dreams, visions and rituals passed down through the generations are recognised once more as critical sources of scholarly knowledge and physical and emotional wellbeing.

Originally planned as a fact-based book on the pre-colonial history of the Eastern Cape in the true tradition of history, this ground-breaking book focuses on epistemological and foundational questions about the writing of history and whose history counts. Whose History Counts challenges the very concept of "pre-colonial" and explores methodologies on researching and writing history. The reason for this dramatic change of focus is attributed in the introduction of the book to the student-led rebellion that erupted following the #RhodesMustFall campaign which started at the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015. Key to the rebellion was the students' opposition to what they dubbed "colonial" education and a clamour for, among others, a "decolonised curriculum". This book is a direct response to this clarion call.

Too much of South Africa’s history has been lost and suppressed, leaving a void for many South Africans. Sylvia Vollenhoven brings together her life and that of a long-ago ancestor, Kabbo, a respected Khoisan storyteller. She writes of her experience as being “too black” for her coloured schoolmates, working as one of the early female journalists in the misogynistic environment of the 70s, and of the constant impact on her life of her background – including her ancestors. To learn more about this resource read: http://www.thejournalist.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Keeper-of-the-Kumm-Aug-2014.pdf

This volume contains the information derived from the second of phase of the authors research project on Khoikhoi topographical names. It provides further insights into the motivations behind Khoikhoi place naming conventions.

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This volume provides readers with a list of place and farm names through the lens of the Khoi people. Included with each entry is descriptive information as documentary evidence of that the Khoi place names existed. This specific volume contains the entries from H-Z.

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This volume provides readers with a list of place and farm names through the lens of the Khoi people. Included with each entry is descriptive information as documentary evidence of that the Khoi place names existed. This specific volume contains the entries from A-G.

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Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. Building from the examinations of San myth and contemporary culture in Volume I, Volume II considers the experiential implications of a cosmology in which ontological mutability—ambiguity and inconstancy—hold sway. As he considers how people experience ontological mutability and deal with profound identity issues mentally and affectively, Guenther explores three primary areas: general receptiveness to ontological ambiguity; the impact of the experience of transformation (both virtual/vicarious and actual/direct); and the intersection of the mythic, spirit world with reality. Through a comparative consideration of animistic cosmology amongst the San, Bantu-speakers and the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic, alongside a discussion of animistic currents in Western humanities and ethology, Guenther clearly paints the relative strengths and weaknesses of New Animism discourse, particularly in relation to San ontology and cosmology, but with overarching relevance

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Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. In Volume I, therianthropes and transformations, two manifestations of ontological mutability that are conceptually and phenomenologically linked, are contextualized in broader San myth. Guenther explores the pervasiveness of human-animal hybridity and transformation in San expressive culture (myth, stories and storytelling, ludic dancing and art, ancestral rock art and contemporary easel art), ritual (trance dance curing, female and male rites of passage) and hunting. Transformation is shown to be experienced by humans, particularly via rituals and dancing that evoke animal identity mergers, but also by hunters who may engage with their prey animals in terms of sympathy and inter-subjectivity, particularly through the use of “hunting medicines.”

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South Africa's settler-colonial past is widely acknowledged. And yet, commonplace understandings of the post-apartheid era and a focus on the end of segregation make an appraisal of settler colonialism in present-day South Africa difficult and controversial. Nonetheless, we argue that an understanding of South Africa's "settler-colonial present" is urgent and needed. We suggest that settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination survives apartheid. In particular, we focus on the recent revival and political mobilisation of indigenous Khoisan identity and cultural heritage to show that settler colonialism and apartheid should be understood as distinct yet overlapping modes of domination. A settler-colonial mode of governance aiming at "the elimination of the native" in two interrelated domains, dispossession and transfer, characterises past and present South Africa. An understanding of this continuity offers opportunities for an original interpretation of both Khoisan revivalism and contemporary South African society.

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There has been a long-standing debate about the roles of San in the militaries of southern Africa and the prevalence of violence among the Ju/'hoansi and other San people. The evolutionary anthropology and social anthropological debates over the contexts in which violence and warfare occurs among hunters and gatherers are considered, as is the "tribal zone theory" of warfare between states and indigenous people. This paper assesses the issues that arise from these discussions, drawing on data from San in Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. Utilizing cases of how San have been affected by military forces and wildlife conservation agencies in what became protected areas in southern Africa, this article shows that indigenous peoples have been treated differentially by state and nongovernmental organizations involved in anti-poaching, shoot-to-kill, and forced resettlement policies. Particular emphasis is placed on the !Xun and Khwe San of southern Angola and northern Namibia and the Tshwa San of western Zimbabwe and northern Botswana, who have been impacted by militarization and coercive conservation efforts since the late nineteenth century. Principal conclusions are that conservation and militarization efforts have led to a reduction in land and resources available to indigenous people, higher levels of poverty, increased socioeconomic stratification, and lower levels of physical well-being. San have responded to these trends by engaging in social activism, forming community-based institutions, and pursuing legal actions aimed at obtaining human rights and equitable treatment.

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The Afrocentric method is derived from the Afrocentric paradigm which deals with the question of African identity from the perspective of African people as centred, located, oriented, and grounded. The Afrocentric philosophy is based on the principles of inclusivity, cultural specificity, critical awareness, committedness and political awareness. The Nama Stap is the Namas’ entertainment form used as a social, cultural and educational tool by the Nama-Khoisan people. The purpose of this paper is to [re]claim the Nama Stap as a dance of identity, culture and indigenous knowledge by showing ways in which an Afrocentric-ubuntu-based research approach can be used to research indigenous culture. Data were collected through oral history, field notes and stories. A case is argued for using the Nama Stap as Khoisan cultural heritage tool to promote nation building.

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"Of Ruins and Revival" is a chapter in the "Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s)". This chapter deals with the reclaiming of the Khoisan religion and identity post-Apartheid. The author critical reflects and discusses the Khoisan protest of 22 September 2015. It explores the theme of public symbols of indigenous heritage being seem as public means of humilation and the right of the Khoisan community to determine for themselves how their heritage is included into the mainstream society.

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Improvisations of Empire offers a historical, biographical and literary study of the life and writings of Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), the son of a Lowland tenant farmer in Scotland. It examines his Scottish journalistic and literary career, his emigration to the Cape Colony as the head of a party of Scottish settlers and his subsequent relocation to London where he gained prominence as the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and the editor of a popular annual, Friendship’s Offering. The central concern of the book is with Pringle’s poetry and his affiliated prose, and how these writings reflect the negotiation of his deeply conflicted colonial experience from the perspectives of his Scottish background, his shifting colonial locations and his subsequent period of residence in London.

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The term Khoisan, alternatively spelled “Khoesan,” is used by contemporary linguists as a convenient blanket term for the non-Bantu and non-Cushitic click-using languages of Africa and does not imply the existence of any familial relationships between the member groups. Some scholars include two isolate click languages of Tanzania, namely, Hadza and Sandawe, within the scope of a so-called “Macro-Khoisan,” although there is little evidence to suggest that these two languages are related even to each other, let alone to any of the southern African languages. This chapter begins by setting out the shifting speaker numbers and distributions of the diverse and often trans-nationally located Khoisan languages of southern Africa, as far as these have been reliably estimated for the present day on the basis of population surveys, and as far as they can be reasonably projected for the relatively recent, largely colonial period on the basis of historical records. The discussion then draws on comparative linguistic evidence (in both a narrow and wider sense) to assess various popular beliefs concerning the older, undocumented past of the Khoisan languages, which are often romantically imagined to be the last vestiges of some primordial African substrate – and the possibility of an alternative scenario is briefly sketched. The chapter concludes with a few brief notes on the uncertain future of these highly endangered African languages in an era of conflicting economic, political, and social-cultural demands.

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Recent years have seen a rise of KhoeSan revivalism in South Africa as identity politics in the country reach fever pitch. Using Stuart Hall's notion of articulation and his conceptualisation of cultural identity as either essentialist or reproductive, we explore revivalist articulations as they relate to language and culture. Specifically, we focus on attempts by those who claim KhoeSan descent to revive KhoeSan languages, and on the reclamation of Afrikaans as a language immersed in KhoeSan history. Central to the concept of articulation is that of ensemble, cultural forms that can be coupled and uncoupled in multiple ways, albeit constrained by their moment in history. We argue that ensembles offer a richness to revivalist vocalisations that, while at times controversial, merit embracing.

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The "Case study: N/uu / N//ng" is a chapter in "Language Endangerment" edited by David Bradley and Maya Bradley. The book address the topic language endangerment through the lens of the disastrous consequence of reducing the variety of human knowledge and thought. It shows why it matters, why and how it happens, and what communities and scholars can do about it. The "Case study: N/uu / N//ng" is the book's third chapter and focusses on the #Komani people and their N!uu language which is close to extinction. Publisher Summary: Ethical research is not just a moral obligation, inappropriate behaviour is unacceptable. It can have bad consequences for a community and for later researchers; no one welcomes the eleventh nerd. Communities and individuals within them have priorities, and they usually do not include spending time with an outsider whose future intentions and use of the material collected are unknown. They often suspect that researchers wish to benefit financially from what is collected; and in truth nearly all researchers do wish to benefit, at least in terms of advancing their academic discipline and their own career. It is wise to have a truthful and understandable reason why you want to do your research in a particular place which you can explain to people.

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In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, embarked on a remarkable public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid. The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala, Mda Mda and members of the famed Gool and Abdurahman families, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based. By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. Among these were former minister of justice, Dullah Omar, academic Hosea Jaffe, educationist Neville Alexander and author Richard Rive. This book is a testament to how the NEF was at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala and Mda Mda, embarked on a public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping black people of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid. The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based. By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. The Cape Radicals is a testament to the NEF’s position at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.

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Post-1994, South Africa's traditional leaders have fought for recognition, and positioned themselves as major players in the South African political landscape. Yet their role in a democracy is contested, with leaders often accused of abusing power, disregarding human rights, expropriating resources and promoting tribalism. Some argue that democracy and traditional leadership are irredeemably opposed and cannot co-exist. Meanwhile, shifts in the political economy of the former bantustans - the introduction of platinum mining in particular - have attracted new interests and conflicts to these areas, with chiefs often designated as custodians of community interests. This edited volume explores how chieftancy is practised, experienced and contested in contemporary South Africa. It includes case studies of how those living under the authority of chiefs, in a modern democracy, negotiate or resist this authority in their respective areas. Chapters in this book are organised around three major sites of contest: leadership, land and law.

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Chapter 1. The linguistic classification of Kora. 1.1 Divisions and distributions of the Khoisan languages - a general overview - 1.2. General characteristics of the JU and TUU families - 1.3. General characteristics of the KHOE family. 1.3.1. The Kalahari and Khoekhoe branches of the KHOE - 13.2. The Khoekhoe branches of the KHOE - 1.4. Hypotheses concerning relationships between languages of the KHOE family and various other languages of Africa. 1.4.1. Mooted relations between the KHOE languages and languages of northern or eastern Africa - 1.4.2. Relations between the KHOE languages and other Khoisan languages - 1.4.3. Relations between the KHOE languages and local languages of the BANTU family - 1.4.4. Relations between the KHOE languages and varieties of Afrikaans. Chapter 2. Sources of the Cape Khoekhoe and Kora records: vocabularies, language data and texts. 2.1 Records of the Cape Khoekhoe: from the period prior to and after Dutch settlement (17th to late 18th centuries) - 2.2 Records of the Kora. 2.2.1. From the end of the Dutch period - 2.2.2. From the early period of British colonization in the first half of the 19th century - 2.2.3. From the later part of the 19th century - 2.2.4. From the 20th century - 2.2.5. Kora speakers in the 21st century. Chapter 3. The sounds of Kora. 3.1. Vowels and diphthongs. 3.1.1. Vowels - 3.1.2. Diphthongs - 3.2. The ordinary (or egressive) consonants of Kora. 3.2.1. Stops - 3.2.2. Nasals - 3.2.3. Fricatives - 3.2.4. Affricates - 3.2.5. Approximants - 3.2.6. Trill - 3.3. The clicks, or ingressive consonants of Kora. 3.3.1. The four basic (or 'radical') clicks of the Kora, identified by place - 3.3.2. The accompaniments of the Kora clicks - 3.4. The Kora system of tone melodies. 3.4.1. The citation melodies of Kora - 3.4.2. The two classes of alternative tone melodies used in particular contexts - 3.4.3. The theory of tonogenesis in Khoekhoe. Chapter 4. The structures of Kora. 4.1. The noun phrase. 4.1.1. Nominal expressions - 4.1.2. Qualifying expressions - 4.2. The adpositional phrase - 4.3. The verb phrase. 4.3.1. Verbs - 4.3.2. Adverbs - 4.4 The Kora sentence, part 1. 4.4.1. Action verbs in Kora, and the expression of tense, aspect and mood - 4.4.2. Process verbs - 4.4.3. Non-verbal predictions in Kora - 4.5. The Kora sentence, part 2. 4.5.1. Negatives - 4.5.2. Interrogatives - 4.5.3. Commands and polite requests - 4.5.4. Coordination - 4.5.5. Discourse connectives - 4.5.6. Phrasal adjectives, phrasal nominals, and phrasal adverbs - 4.6. Miscellaneous. Chapter 5. The heritage texts of the Korana people. 5.1. Collective and personal histories, and private commentaries - 5.2. Social and economic histories, and accounts of crafts and manufactures in earlier times - 5.3. Oratory, lyrics and folktales (or language-based arts). 5.3.1. The praise - 5.3.2. The funeral lament - 5.3.3. Lyrics - 5.3.4. Word games - 5.3.5. Animal stories. Chapter 6. A Kora-English dictionary, with Kora-English index - Kora-English - English-Kora index - Specialist list 1: Names of the Korana clans - Specialist list 2. Korana names 2: Korana names for animals, birds and smaller creatures - Specialist list 3: Korana names for plants and plant products.

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Indigenous significances of nineteenth-century |Xam San folktales are hard to determine from narrative structure alone. When verbatim, original-language records are available, meaning can be elicited by probing beneath the narrative and exploring the connotations of highly significant words and phrases that imply meanings and associations that narrators take for granted but that nonetheless contextualize the tales. Analyses of this kind show that three selected |Xam tales deal with a form of spiritual conflict that has social implications. Like numerous |Xam myths, these tales concern conflict between people and living or dead malevolent shamans. Using their supernatural potency, benign shamans transcend the levels of the San cosmos in order to deal with social conflict and to protect material resources. As a result, benign shamans enjoy a measure of respect that sets them apart from ordinary people.

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This book presents a long-term study of the activist campaign that contested the Botswana government's much-publicized removal of the San and Bakgalagadi people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Sapignoli's multiple points of observation and analysis range from rural Botswana to the nation's High Court, and a variety of United Nations agencies in their Headquarters, focusing on rights claimants and officials from NGOs, states and the United Nations as they acted on the grievances of those who had been displaced. In offering a comprehensive discussion of the San people and their claims-making through formal institutions, this book maintains a consistent focus on the increased recourse to law and the everyday experience of those who are asserting their rights in response to the encroachments of the state and the opportunities inherent in new indigenous advocacy networks.

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While the military features of historic forts usually receive the most attention from researchers, this volume focuses instead on the people who met and interacted in these sites. Contributors to British Forts and Their Communities look beyond the defensive architecture, physical landscapes, and armed conflicts to explore the complex social diversity that arose in the outposts of the British Empire. The forts investigated here operated at the empire's peak in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, protecting British colonial settlements and trading enclaves scattered across the globe. Locations in this volume include New York State, Michigan, the St. Lawrence River, and Vancouver, as well as sites in the Caribbean and in Africa. Using archaeological and archival evidence, these case studies show how forts brought together people of many different origins, ethnicities, identities, and social roles, from European soldiers to indigenous traders to African slaves. Characterized by shifting networks of people, commodities, and ideas, these fort populations were microcosms of the emerging modern world. This volume reveals how important it is to move past the conventional emphasis on the armed might of the colonizer in order to better understand the messy, entangled nature of British colonialism and the new era it helped usher in.

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This chapter presents an introduction to the glossonyms of the language; to its genetic classification in the context of Khoe languages; to the main dialects constituting the continuum; to the geographic distribution of the main ethnicities Damara, Nama, Haiǁom and ǂAakhoe; to demographic figures; to multilingualism of the speakers; to the history of codification and production of dictionaries, grammars and school literature; to status and language planning concerning Khoekhoegowab; and to the political significance. Shortly after Namibia’s attainment of independence in 1990, the forgotten glossonym ‘Khoekhoegowab’ was officially reintroduced for the language that had become known as ‘Nama’ or ‘Nama/Damara’. Khoekhoegowab is the last surviving language of the Khoekhoe branch of the Khoe languages; it is spoken almost exclusively in Namibia and consists of a dialect continuum with Nama as southernmost and Damara, Haiǁom and ǂAakhoe as northernmost dialect clusters. The popular claim that the ethnically distinct Damara have adopted the language from the Nama has been disproved. With just under 12 per cent, Khoekhoegowab is the second largest language group in Namibia; yet it has little esteem among its speakers as vehicle of upward mobility. It has received comparatively much attention by external facilitators in literary development and is one of the local languages selected for language planning purposes. Currently it is one of three Namibian languages offered as major undergraduate subject for degree purposes.

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N||ng is a moribund language complex that is a member of the Tuu family and used to be spoken widely across the southern portion of the Kalahari in the north of South Africa. While its modern linguistic remnants have been studied intensively, there are nevertheless many gaps in our knowledge about Nññng. This article surveys the older records that began to be collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these can inform our modern analysis of the linguistic and nonlinguistic data and complement our overall perception of this extinct ethnolinguistic group and its wider geographical and historical context.

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The indigenous people — known for their click languages — are the first in Africa to draft guidelines for researchers.

Article

Of the Same Breath opens the door to a better understanding of why and how the animals and places of southern Africa have been given the names they have today. The vast reaches of the information provided in this book have been drawn together to create a veritable cornucopia of answers to the old question of how names originated. In this linguistically thought-provoking book, readers will be guided through the origins of animal names and toponyms, from the coastline of South Africa to the northern border of Namibia, and from the mighty elephant to the humble grasshopper. “The vast empty spaces of South Africa and Namibia are suffused with codes to the past. To the casual traveller, the -laagtes and -leegtes flash and roll past our windows, unexplained and undiscovered, but to the informed, these ancient names unfurl a history as old as man himself. This is Simon Schama’s “topography of cultural identity”, which started with the San, and continues to this day. Lucie Möller’s glorious exploration of these animal origins stands proud, with the work of Bleek, as reminder and tribute to voices now silent.” – Dave Pepler

Book

This chapter describes the "Writing for Speaking" project which aims to establish a shallow orthography that allows students who are non-native speakers of NIuu to read and pronounce new NIuu words, even those they have never heard before.

Chapter

This article forms part of the Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on the subject of Khoisan Languages and Linguistics held on July 11–13, 2011 at Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal. This paper describes the ǂHoan linguistic forms used while hunting, and for talking about hunting. Spoken language is avoided during hunting, but a set of conventionalised gestures is used. Thus, both oral and manual lexical forms are presented here. In addition to providing new data on ǂHoan, the authors hope to show how the use of a Kalahari-specific lexical elicitation guide can be an important aid in short-term fieldwork. Due to constraints of space and time, this paper does not discuss vocabulary related to plants and the gathering of plant and animal foods; the distinction between hunting and gathering implied here is an artificial one.

Conference Proceedings

In this article we provide a discussion of present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people whose heritage is complex: their history can be traced back to the early days of the colonial settlement, reflecting the interactions and cohabitation of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves and the European settlers. Currently, their main languages are English and Afrikaans; yet, efforts are also made by activists to learn Khoekhoegwab. In discussing the Khoisan resurgence we draw on a wide range of sources. The data include: in-depth interviews with language activists; video and audio recordings of ceremonies and other cultural events; discussions and performance of language and identity on blogs and tweets; newspapers; linguistic landscapes; and, finally, artistic performances (with particular focus on the hiphop opera Afrikaaps). We argue that Khoisan activism expresses a deep-seated desire for an identity – linguistic, political and cultural – that is both historically rooted and meaningfully created in the present. Khoisan activism is not only a political program but also an aesthetic-artistic as well as heteroglossic performance, and as such allows for new ways of conceptualizing language revitalization.

Article

Contents: A tribute to Anthony T. Traill / Tim Couzens ; Introduction ; Some puzzles in !X⯥o kinship terminology / Alan Barnard ; What we seem to know about the Lexicon of early cape Dutch Pidgin (and always were afraid to question) / Hans den Besten ; Language development and community development in a San community / Megan Biesele ; The !X⯥o-English-Setswana trilingual dictionary in preparation: an experience / Andy Chebanne ; Doing what (you think) is right in the field: problematizing the documentation of endangered languages / G. Tucker Childs ; Odour terminology in !X⯥o / Didier Demolin, Anthony Traill, Gilles Sicard & Jean-Marie Hombert ; Tonal patterns in Khwe verb conjugation / Edward D. Elderkin ; African languages in the African century: extinction or revival? Patterns, trends and strategies / Rosalie Finlayson & Sarah Slabbert ; Phonological regularities of consonant systems in genetic lineages of Khoisan / Tom G赬dermann ; From 17th century Cape Khoekhoe to 20th century !Gora and Namibian Khoekhoe / Wilfrid H.G. Haacke ; Gender assignment rules in Jul'hoan and !X⯥o / Henry Honken ; Verb-final Glottalisation, tone and passivity in Tangale / Hermann Jungraithmayr ; Evidentials in !Xun / Christa K诮ig ; Naming mathematical concepts in Rumanyo, a Bantu language of Northern Namibia / Wilhelm J.G. M诨lig ; Khoisan phonotactics: a case study from Glui / Hirosi Nakagawa ; The Phoneme inventory of Taa (West !Xoon dialect ) / Christfried Naumann ; A comparison of kinship terminologies of West Kalahari Khoe: Haba, Tshila, Glui, Gllana, and Naro / Hitomi Ono ; Interpreting Hadza data / Bonny Sands -- Reflections on J.H. Wilhelm's "Hukwe" wordlist / Rainer Vossen ; Evidence for a multi-lingual community in the Tsodilo Hills, Botswana (ca. CE 700-900) / Edwin N. Wilmsen ; Anthony Traill (1939-2007): list of publications.

Book

This chapter is found within Lone Tree - Scholarship in the Service of the Koon: Essays in memory of Anthony T. Traill.

Chapter

The present book continues the series on South Africa's 'invisible' earliest people with the Hessequa, who pastured their cattle along the south-east Cape coast -- all the way from the present town of Swellendam to Albertinia, and even beyond -- long before the European colonists arrived. They may be better described as a "Khoekhoe community", rather than what the early history books pejoratively called "Hottentots". In the current dynamic debate in South Africa about the rights of cultural and linguistic minorities, however, the voices of their descendants are not being heard, nor are they appropriately acknowledged by the powers that be. By writing about them and taking up their cause, Mike de Jongh opens a window on their history, their current lives, and their rightful place in the present-day Republic of South Africa.

Book

Conference Proceedings

Current political negotiations in South Africa which explore the possibility of pre-1913 land claims and the recognition of Khoisan traditional authorities have spurred the growth of the “Khoisan revival”: the phenomenon of people identifying as Khoisan and asserting indigenous rights. Based on fieldwork conducted in Cape Town in 2014 and 2015, this paper discusses the motivations and strategies of several Khoisan activists. After outlining the political context of the Khoisan revival, I show how activists make claims and demands through the use of popular imagery and a global indigenous rights discourse. While producing valuable insights, this “strategic essentialist” approach inadequately addresses motivations for claiming land. Based on a discussion of several case studies, I argue that claiming land functions not so much as a means of procuring physical or economic spaces, but as a way for activists to express grievances regarding coloured identity, history and healing. This symbolic interpretation prompts the reconceptualisation of land claims within the restitution paradigm and policy negotiations.

Article

Conference Proceedings

This chapter is an extract of a book titled "Political Economy of Post-apartheid South Africa". In this chapter the author examines the precolonial African communities such as the San, Khoi, Nguni, Sotho and Tswana managed their socio-economic and political systems. It also gives a brief background explanation on how South Africa’s pre-colonial history was manipulated in order to misrepresent the fact that African peoples/communities did in fact have vibrant and functional pre-colonial interactions and societies.

Chapter

This paper examines academic debates about the nomenclature of the San in light of recent ethnographic data. Academic debates centre around two aspects: the apparent complicity of the term ''bushman'' in construing the San as lower on the hierarchy of race and class; and the construction of the San as being in close contact with animals and nature. Academics have sought to resolve this dilemma of complicity by adopting self-referential terms, which would allow them to overcome the effacement of cultural and linguistic variation. Critically, the paper argues that this turn to self-referential terms is problematic in the case of the Khomani San of the southern Kalahari because the San themselves claim ''bushman'' as their identity. The analysis suggests that the Khomani San claim this name for themselves in a context of developmental needs. Thus, Khomani San chose the name ''Bushman'' for themselves because it can be commoditised.

Article

In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre's Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape's Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts

Article

The San or Bushmen of southern Africa have exerted a fascination over generations of writers and scholars, from novelists and anarchists to ethnologists and geneticists, and also occupy a special place in the popular imagination as the First People and the contemporary remnant of spiritual and natural man. The ways in which particular groups of people from southern Africa have been traditionally categorised and positioned as objects of scrutiny by a range of academic disciplines is increasingly being contested and questioned. There is a growing awareness of the cultural, economic and genetic entanglement of the peoples of the region. This book examines how San and Khoe people are represented, by others, as well as by those who identify as San or Khoe. It interrogates the ways in which disciplines, through their methodologies and ways of authorising knowledge, not only "discover" or "reveal" knowledge but produce it in ways that involve complex and often ambiguous relationships with power structures and forms of intellectual, symbolic and cultural capital. One major trend that emerges is that the San and Khoe can no longer be seen as people of the past but have to be acknowledged as contemporary and socially situated individuals and communities who are increasingly contesting the representations which others have imposed on them. This book was originally published as two special issues of Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

Book

Greenberg’s (1954) concept of a ‘Khoisan’ language family, while heartily embraced by non-specialists, has been harshly criticized by linguists working on these languages. Evidence for Greenberg's hypothesis has proved to be seriously insufficient and little progress has been made in the intervening years in substantiating his claim by means of the standard comparative method. This volume goes beyond “Khoisan” in the linguistic sense by exploring a more complex history that includes multiple and widespread events of language contact in southern Africa epitomized in the areal concept ‘Kalahari Basin’. The papers contained herein present new data on languages from all three relevant lineages, Tuu, Kx’a and Khoe-Kwadi, complemented by non-linguistic research from molecular and cultural anthropology. A recurrent theme is to disentangle genealogical and areal historical relations ― a major challenge for historical linguistics in general. The multi-disciplinary approach reflected in this volume strengthens the hypothesis that Greenberg’s “Southern African Khoisan” is better explained in terms of complex linguistic, cultural and genetic convergence.

Book

The present paper concentrates on placenames that are regarded as originating in European or African languages, but are in fact of Bushman or San origin. From their placenames a great deal can be deduced about the identity of the San, and the things that make their placenames unique, e.g. the click sounds and various other aspects of their language. Some San words that are used as components of placenames reflect their environment, describing natural features and the character of their surroundings, and referring to animals and plants so essential to their survival, to the cosmetic and aesthetic use of natural pigments, and perhaps even to their deity. Many of these things have been recorded by anthropologists, linguists, Khoisanologists and others. But from a study of the vast corpus of placenames, many new facts may emerge, and above all, the original San placenames may be reconstructed by reversing the processes of adaptation, and recognised as the original indigenous toponyms of South Africa. This paper forms Chapter 21 in the Book Indigenous and Minority Placenames.

Chapter

This paper investigates the genetic affiliation of the three northernmost dialects of Namibian Khoekhoegowab, viz. ǂAakhoe, Haiǁom and Sesfontein Damara, on the strength of serial verb formation. The paper proceeds from Güldemann’s hypothesis that these and other lects developed through Khoekhoeisation by ‘Nama’. The claim that Khoe-Kwadi languages do not employ verb serialisation is refuted by data from Khoekhoe as well as from Kalahari Khoe, and it is shown that ǂAakhoe in particular employs a juncture a in serialisation in ways similar to those of Naro and Gǀui. The use of this juncture is argued to be strong evidence of a close genetic link of ǂAakhoe (and, to a lesser extent Haiǁom) to West Kalahari Khoe. The evidence is offered in support of my hypothesis that the Damara (with the ǂAakhoe and Haiǁom) already became Khoe speakers before they encountered the Nama.

Article