culture
Eddie Koch
Khoekhoe languages, although thought to be on the verge of extinction, have left an indelible print on many facets of South African culture.
Apart from place names, ranging from Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma in the Cape to Gudaus (now translated as Goodhouse) in the far north, many words have been imported from Khoe into English and Afrikaans.
These include gogga (insect), koedoe (antelope), kwagga (zebra), boegoe (a plant known as agathosma), dagga (marijuana), kierie (stick) and karos (cloak).
The complex click systems of isiXhosa in the Eastern Cape, where Khoekhoe and Africans intermixed in a myriad of ways, and Zulu in KwaZulu-Natal, where the linguistic impact of Khoekhoe has not been fully studied, come straight out of these languages.
Some linguists have argued that modern Afrikaans owes as much to the pidgin form of Khoe-Dutch that was devised by Khoekhoe servants and slaves as a lingua franca in the Cape as it does to its links with Dutch and German.
Studies have shown that many of the linguistic features of Afrikaans such as the double negative (ons wil nie skool to gaan nie) and the absence of conjugation are features that are unheard of in European languages. They derive directly from Khoekhoe syntax.
The cosmologies of Xhosa, Sotho and Zulu societies were deeply influenced by Khoe spiritual powers and beliefs. Historians have noted that the tendency by these African powers to incorporate Khoe people as servants and underlings was counterbalanced by a powerful form of respect that was accorded to their spiritual beliefs and leaders.
The spirit of the Khoekhoe has shaped the culture of South Africa despite some of the harshest oppression experienced by this countrys original inhabitants.
In the early 17th century, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape, there were 11 close and similar Khoe languages being spoken by between 100 000 and 200 000 people along the coast and its hinterland.
Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests these were the descendants of aboriginal hunter-gatherers (Bushmen or San) who acquired sheep and developed a pastoral lifestyle in the areas of southern Botswana before migrating some 2 000 years ago down to the Cape in search of pastures to sustain their new lifestyle.
Sixty years after Jan van Riebeecks landing, traditional Khoekhoe economy and social structure had collapsed under the colonisers military force, land expropriations and smallpox epidemics of 1713, 1735 and 1767 which decimated the local populations.
According to Tony Traill, professor of linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand: Within 100 years of 1652, the western Cape Khoe language had begun to disappear, gradually being replaced by Khoe-Dutch, and the eastern varieties had been absorbed by Xhosa through political incorporation of the Khoekhoe chiefdoms …
To add to the social, economic and physical onslaught on the Khoekhoe, their language itself faced two intimidating problems. The first was extreme linguistic prejudice: from the first contacts between Europeans and Khoekhoe there had been a persistent attitude on the part of the Europeans that the language was utterly bizarre, unpleasant and not human.
The vitriol heaped upon the Khoekhoe by the Portuguese and Dutch has been described as the first manifestation of a European outlook on Africa that depicted its ethnic groups as subhuman. According to historian Noel Mostert the Khoekhoe were the first people to be branded the children of Ham, a stereotype subsequently applied to all the dark people of the continent.
To this day the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary notes the word Hottentot is used to describe a person of inferior intellect and culture.
The bigotry was enhanced because their language sounded like no other like the clucking of hens or the clucking of turkeys, according to one observer. Or, as Jean-Baptiste Tavernier put it in 1649, When they speak they fart with their tongues in their mouths.
This story of persecution and discrimination explains why the symbol of South Africas military prowess, the Fort, is probably the most appropriate of our cultural emblems that derive from the Khoekhoe.
Early records show that Jan van Riebeeck ordered the Fort be built because he did not trust the Khoekhoe chiefs and predicted that relations between them and the Dutch colony would degenerate into open warfare which it did.