In the 19th century, San women and children were being murdered by farmers turned commandos in the then Bushmanland (in what is now the Northern Cape) who were intent on the “systematic destruction of a race of men”, wrote Louis Anthing, a commissioner in the Cape Colony.
“They surrounded the place during the night, spying the Bushmen’s fires. At daybreak the firing commenced, and it lasted until the sun was up a little way. The commando party loaded and fired, reloaded … A great many (women and children) were killed that day … The women threw up their arms, crying for mercy, but no mercy was shown them,” Anthing wrote in 1861, recording an eyewitness’s account of the massacres, who described it as a “great sin”.
Dr José Manuel de Prada-Samper, a research associate in the archaeology department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), says: “This is the first time that genocide was officially documented. This was not the first time that genocide happened … but that it was reported in a letter to a superior.”
Hundreds of |Xam San people were shot dead, out of a population of about 5,000 people, says Prada-Samper, author of The forgotten killing fields: “San” genocide and Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, 1862–1863.
The ongoing slaughter of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is a “genocide unfolding before our eyes”, wrote senior UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber last month before resigning in protest at the UN’s failure to stop it.
In Sudan, hundreds of “non-Arabs” are being targeted and killed in Darfur, while thousands more are being forced to flee, said medical and refugee agencies this week.
The world, as Mokhiber warned, is failing to stop these atrocities.
Standing up Against Genocide
Back in 1861 Anthing not only raised the alarm about the massacres of |Xam San communities, he exceeded his powers in efforts to stop them, and largely succeeded. For this he won the trust of |Xam leader !Ki ||k’’atten tu, who was directing reprisals against the commandos at the time.
I never asked about identity because in some areas there is stigma but people would say: ‘My grandfather was Bushman’
— UCT research associate Dr José Manuel de Prada-Samper
Even the magistrate who succeeded Anthing, a racist Darwinian who believed San populations were weaker than others and would naturally perish, felt obligated to uphold the rule of law.
Prada-Samper says Anthing’s correspondence reflects his mission to stop the genocide and treat everyone as equals.
The academic and folklorist was easy to identify in the bookstore where we were meeting for an interview about his research. Wearing a peak cap, he had the books Lost on the Map: A Memoir of Colonial Illusions and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins in one hand, and a trekking pole in the other.
But why talk about a forgotten history? To learn lessons from the past and debunk myths about the |Xam San, says Prada-Samper, who has a “connection to memory and survival, ethics and aesthetics, in traditional narratives”.
The |Xam San are not extinct
Chief Toetie Dow, who was a representative of the |Xam San on the National Khoisan Council, says one myth is that this population is extinct. They are not.
The descendants (“afstammelinge”) of the |Xam San still live in many places, mainly the Karoo, and especially around Colesberg, he says. “You also find them among the karretjie people and in those townships.
“Tests show my DNA is from 1,200 years ago,” says Dow, noting it is distinct from the San communities in the Kalahari and beyond. “In the Kouga mountains, they found a Bushman mummy 2,000 years old.”
UCT emeritus professor and archaeologist John Parkington says the |Xam San are “culturally nearly extinct, though genetically very much alive”.
Dow disputes the claim that the communities of the Kalahari represent the San populations south of the Orange River.
The|Xam words ‘ǃke e꞉ ǀxarra ǁke’, from the phrases ‘people who are different’ and ‘come together’, are on the South African coat of arms and can be translated as ‘diverse people unite’
— |XAM ON SA COAT OF ARMS
The genocidal attacks on the |Xam San were terrible, says Dow, referring to the San and Khoi Genocide Memorial (1702-1809), erected on the outskirts of Graaff-Reinet to commemorate the process.
Challenging the decision to erect a joint monument, he says: “The Khoi were part and parcel of killing the San people. They joined certain groups of commandos but they do not want to accept that history.”
Evidently dates on the plaque are inaccurate — as Anthing’s letters show, the |Xam San were being massacred late into the 19th century.
Moreover, Dow notes: “The Pretoria government issued the last permit to hunt [Bushmen] in 1936.”
What does extinction mean?
The relentless persecution and killings of the |Xam San did destroy their independence, lifestyle and language, while an unknown number of surviving women and children were forced into servitude by their persecutors.
When asked about extinction of the |Xam San, archaeologist Janette Deacon says it depends how it is defined.
“The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is no longer possible, the ǀXam language is no longer spoken and, to my knowledge, there are no communities who self-identify as ǀXam in the Northern Cape,” says Deacon, who has been engaged with |Xam San research for nearly 40 years and is affiliated to the Wits Rock Art Research Institute.
She adds, however: “José and others have indeed found people in Karoo villages who remember stories that are very similar to those recorded in the 19th century by Bleek and Lloyd in ǀXam and translated into English.”
Linguists Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd learnt |Xam from former prisoners and recorded stories from them in the 1870s.
Some 150 years later, Prada-Samper heard the same obscure stories from individuals he met at Brandvlei and other Upper Karoo towns. |Xam San rock art reflects some of these themes.
He says: “I never asked about identity because in some areas there is stigma, but people would say: ‘My grandfather was Bushman.’”
The 120,000km² region, where the “astronomy reserve” of the Square Kilometre Array is found, “coincides almost exactly with a region described by |Xam prisoners of the mid-19th century as |Xam-ka! au, their homeland,” write Parkington, Prada-Samper and another researcher.
Prada-Samper has published a book of contemporary |Xam San stories, The Man Who Cursed the Wind and Other Stories From the Karoo, with photographs of the narrators. He is also working on a book of Anthing’s letters and reports to officials in the Cape Colony from 1861 to 1863.
Speaking truth to power
Anthing, a British official turned human rights activist, was a man ahead of his time who compromised his career to protect |Xam San communities, says Prada-Samper.
He uncovered the immense scale of the killings after he was appointed the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Springbokfontein (now Springbok) in Namaqualand. A |Xam man accused of murder told Anthing that his whole family had been killed.
Anthing then wrote to the liberal attorney-general of the Cape Colony, William Porter, about these hideous violations and was sent to investigate them.
He found that commandos of frontier farmers composed “of Bastards, Europeans and their Hottentot servants” were conducting lethal attacks on the |Xam, says Prada-Samper. Anthing suggested sending troops, says Prada-Samper, given that almost every farmer in the area was involved.
An ambiguous response from the governor — conveyed by the colonial secretary — arrived months after Anthing sent his first reports.
In 1862, Anthing established the town of Kenhardt as a magistracy, in the heart of the conflict, and frontier farmers had to stop their raids or face the might of the law.
Fortunately, due to miscommunication Anthing missed his first meeting with |Xam leader !Ki ||k’’atten tu, known as Hercules or Herklaas by officials; the leader had planned to kill him.
After meetings between them, !Ki ||k’’atten tu and his comrades decided to surrender to Anthing, who they trusted to ensure they got equal treatment before the law in Cape Town — and a chance to expose the massacres in a public trial. Ultimately the case was dropped, and the leader and another of his sons walked free.
Anthing subsequently got into trouble for “overspending” and overstepping his mandate by putting the safety of the nomadic hunter-gatherers above the interests of the colony.
His actions, and his interactions with the |Xam San, were attempts to protect them — yet he could not secure their independence.
In field reports and a letter to the House of Assembly, he challenged the stereotype that hunter-gatherers were “thieves born to cattle rustling”. Hunger forced them into theft, he said, because they would rather be shot than starve.
Anthing, writes Prada-Samper, documented how farmers had taken their country and “driven them to stock theft because the farmers had deprived them of their means of subsistence, having exterminated the game, appropriated the waterholes and destroyed with their herds the grass and other plant foods on which their subsistence depended”.
Even after the magistrate was officially recalled, he stayed on in Kenhardt to make sure the |Xam San did not starve before the September migration of the springbok. He set up a trading post to exchange items like ostrich feathers and leather skins for food.
Stigtingboom, a living monument
Anthing’s struggle for the rights of the |Xam people was based in Kenhardt, a remote place in the then Bushmanland (about 120km south of Upington), which he chose for an ancient camelthorn tree that stood out from the desolate landscape.
Southwest of Kenhardt, on the farm Katkop, Deacon says she heard the |Xam language spoken. “In 1985, I recorded a few words by an old man by the name of Hendrik Goud, who was then in his 80s and lived on the farm Katkop. He said it was what he could remember in the ǀXam language and translated the words as ‘Hier kom die Boere, ons moet weghardloop’.
“The late Dr Tony Traill, a linguist at Wits, confirmed that the words could indeed be …translated as ‘The Boers are coming, we must run away’.”
The Herculean efforts to end the farmers’ genocide by |Xam San champions like Anthing and leaders like !Ki ||k’’atten tu should be commemorated in Kenhardt, says Prada-Samper.
The camelthorn tree has a plaque on it commemorating a colonial official who succeeded Anthing without distinguishing himself, but it is neglected and surrounded by litter. Prada-Samper says the tree should be watered and the plaque replaced with the names of the champions of |Xam San rights.
What better living monument to the |Xam San history than an ancient tree in their ancestral lands, he says, suggesting it should be protected as a symbol of human rights.
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