the wild
South Africas khoikhoi are not extinct, as popular belief would have it, but the languages that sustain them in a harsh existence are dying
Eddie Koch and Siven Maslamoney
On South Africas lonely frontier with Namibia, where the Orange River meanders through stony mountains and across the ochre sands of the Kalahari, live thousands of people who collectively defy one of South Africas most enduring ethnic myths: that the Khoikhoi are effectively dead.
The conventional wisdom finds its expression in many places. History books, the official census, school syllabuses, language atlases and even some of the most sympathetic anthropologists have colluded to declare that the Khoikhoi and their culture a people whose 2 000-year- existence has left a deep imprint on this countrys heritage are extinct.
Yet if you were to follow the river along its course, through the districts of Gordonia and the Richtersveld to the point where it flows into the Atlantic Ocean, you would meet real people, not ghosts, who live and speak much like the brown men and women who encountered Portuguese explorers when they first came to the Cape.
There, despite the legend of language death, thousands of people still speak a tongue which they call Khoekhoegowap (the peoples language) but is more popularly known as Nama. It is directly related to the family of Khoe languages which are said to have vanished. Even the correct term for South Africas first pastoral inhabitants, Khoekhoe which will replace Khoikhoi from now on in this article derives from Nama.
And, from interviews we conducted during a recent trip along the river to investigate the linguistic status of Khoe along the Orange River, it became clear that the survival of Khoekhoegowap has allowed elements of one of South Africas oldest cultures to survive in the harsh outback of the Kalahari.
The problem, though, is that the legend of doom is beginning to fulfill itself with devastating consequences for the self- esteem of the last descendants of South Africas Khoekhoe people.
One of our informants is Hendrik Stuurman. He lives in a village called Witbank (!Huri!haub or stone bank in his language) about 200km west of Upington. Stuurman and his people were vanquished in one of the many forced removals of the apartheid era. Three years ago they were given this wedge of rock and soil on the river in terms of the land restitution laws.
Through back-breaking work and an indefatigable spirit, they have made the desert bloom here. Fields have been ploughed and tracts of green lucerne flourish along the course of the river.
Stuurman, who chairs the local development committee, explained that although his community was beginning to make good economic progress there was a disturbing sense, a feeling deep inside me, that there was still something wrong.
It was during discussions with a linguist from Cape Town called Nigel Crawhall about the fate of his language that Stuurman discovered the source of his anxiety.
I feel, he says in an eloquent and colourful version of Afrikaans that is the lingua franca in these parts, that I have drunk the milk of a strange woman, that I grew up alongside another person. I feel like this because I do not speak my mothers language.
Riemvasmaak straddles the river, about 40km north of where it plunges over the Augrabies Falls. Willem Damarah, schoolteacher and chair of a local development trust, remarks on a paradox at play in his village.
We were forcibly removed by the Defence Force from our land here. Some of us went to live in Namibia. Others were scattered to the Eastern Cape. Now we have our land back. We are doing well with houses, schools and clinics.
We thought that with our land we would be able to heal the culture that is the soul of our people. But we find instead that our language is dying. At least while we were in exile we were able to read and speak our language (Nama is recognised in Namibia). We now realise that, in the act of regaining our land, we may have destroyed our culture.
Both men believe the only way there can be real development, a true form of restitution, in these communities is for their ailing language to be nourished. The prospects for achieving this are good. But it will require an act of will from the custodians of this countrys culture.
Nama is actively discouraged as a medium of instruction in schools in the Northern Cape. There is no institutional support for it to be used on radio, television, in print or to correctly name and spell places that have their titles from Khoe words. Farmers and employers threaten people who use Khoekhoegowap because, in a paranoia that is common to all oppressors, they believe the speakers are plotting subversion.
The result is a final act of language suicide: mothers and fathers have given up talking to their children in Khoekhoegowap because they know the young ones will carry it as a burden rather than a medium of enlightenment in their lives.
Crawhall, a linguist at the South African San Institute (Sasi), estimates that despite the threats the language faces, there are about 6 000 people who speak Nama.
This, for example, is the language that is used when, as a young girl comes of age, some residents crush the red rocks that surround them, mix it with the sap of the kameeldoring trees that grow in the desert, and smear it over her body to make it beautiful like that of a gemsbok, they say for her initiation ritual.
Occasionally, even in the townships of Upington, when residents celebrate a wedding they slaughter an animal, spread its blood and dung on the ground and dance over the offal in much the same way that Khoekhoe people did thousands of years ago. Early colonialists devised their derogatory name, Hottentot, from this dance and its associated chant which has a phonetic ring that sounds to the European ear like hotanot, hotanot.
There are old people in remote villages marked on the map as Witbank, Pella, Goodhouse and Khubus who pray to the moon because it is the physical manifestation of Tsui-//goab, the deity they see as the founding ancestor of the Khoekhoe and the creator, guardian of health, controller of rain and source of abundance.
It is not common but it still happens that some of the old woman tell their children folktales about the wild animals of the Kalahari. These stories, which are called !hau, combine the wisdom of the elders with veneration of the environment and the thrill of adventure needed to entertain children.
Some of these mothers live in houses made of woven thatch, matjieshuise (mat-houses), closely resembling the homes that Portuguese explorers found on the Cape shores when they first landed there.
A resident of Witbank called Ouma Anna Julies spoke to Crawhall for more than an hour about the names of plants that can be used to protect the skin and create tonics for good health: !gu, /nobo, !koba, /huri and a traditional drink like a milkshake called //hau.
Fiona Archer, an ethnobotanist working in the Richtersveld, has compiled a list of more than 120 plant species that are used by traditional healers in these villages.
These cultural activities are what enable them to cling to their desert environment albeit in ever-decreasing and diminishing form in an almost miraculous act of survival because Khoekhoegowap or Nama is still vibrant enough to transmit the heritage of the Khoekhoe people.
But there are signs that, despite the enormous importance of preserving this heritage, the tongue is slowly beginning to wither away in the arid confines of the Northern Cape.
When we visited Riemvasmaak, groups of elders could be heard chatting to each other outside their communal hall. When we approached, they stopped and switched to Afrikaans. Why?
The whites didnt like it when we spoke the language at work because they couldnt understand it. They thought we were making secret plans to steal, says Petrus Vaalbooi, a civic leader from the town of Rietfontein on the Namibian border.
There is a strict social hierarchy in these frontier towns, he explained, which places God at the head of the order followed by white men and women, coloured men and women (who arrived recently from the Cape), Basters (descendants of the colonial trekboers), Namas, and then Bushmen. People, as a result, prefer to hide their Namaness.
We are the people with the short hair. Those with longer hair are the Basters. Below them is the Hotnot the Nama and then the Bushman at the lowest level. A light skin Baster is higher than a dark one. Above the Basters, another step higher is another group (of coloureds) which we call in the old language afnaaitjies (a term which translates literally as those who are made from screwing). They come out of the Boers. These are our bosses. Above them are the whites. We had to call the white farmers baas, explained Vaalbooi.
When we prayed we were taught that God was to be called Grootbaas, not God or Here. I had an uncle. They called him Kort Hotnot. He was in church one day when a long-haired child (a Baster) came in. He had to leave his seat on the bench so that the child could sit. I saw this.
Tony Traill, professor of linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, says language death follows the same pattern around the world.
First there is intense social, political and economic pressure on people to speak another language. This is followed by a period of bilingualism. Then the parents, out of shame or a feeling that the mother tongue no longer serves a useful function, stop transmitting it to their children.
This is the critical stage when death can come rapidly, even within a decade, if nothing is done. Nama is probably now at this point in its history.
South Africas new Constitution states, in article 6 (2), that recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of the languages.
A Pan South African Language Board has been set up to create conditions for the use and development of South African languages that are near extinction.
Yet Nama is still not taught in schools. Little is being done to correct the spelling of place names that derive from Khoekhoegowap. There is no radio or television programme in Nama. And the language is certainly not recognised as one of the 11 official tongues of South Africa.
In one of the most eloquent tributes that have been written to South Africas Khoekhoe people, historian Noel Mostert describes their languages inscribed in the names of mountains, rivers, forests, springs and towns of our country as being among the most beautiful in the world.
They seem to resound always with the very nature, the poetic character of the lands where they were used. The cadences of the wild, of water and earth, rock and grass, roll onomatopoeically along the tongue, says Mostert in his book, Frontiers.
Khoikhoi words … crack and softly rustle, and click. The sand and dry heat and empty distance of the semi-arid lands where the Khoikhoi originated are embedded in them. But so is softness, greenness. They run together like the very passage of their olden days.
A Nama-speaking informant from the town of Lekkersing in the Northern Cape told Crawhall that, despite the innate beauty of her language, it is like a step-taal, like a step-child, not fully loved or wanted.
Unless her words are heard, and the voices of the others we spoke to on the banks of the Orange River, South Africas oldest living language will shortly die.
Siven Maslamoney is a director of Ulwazi Educational Radio, which is making a radio documentary for the BBC on South Africas indigenous languages
CAPTION – On a stony shore: The women of Witbank still speak their language, but their grandchildren wont. photo: ruth motau