Cyril A Hromnk
Crossfire
Commenting on the closure of the Kung (Bushman) diorama in the South African Museum (“Unmaking the San”, April 6 to 12), Pippa Skotnes writes: “The challenge is not to get rid of the diorama, but to alter it … to find ways to displace and replace the stereotype it perpetuates.”
She recommends “a recasting of the diorama and indeed of similar exhibits around the country”. And she warns ominously: “A failure to do this makes the closing of the diorama yet another act of dispossession, of casting the San [Bushmen] out of the contemporary political and historical debate.” Apparently, the existing exhibits are “miscasts”.
Nothing new! Pippa Skotnes presented her own “miscast” of these people six years ago, when she produced an exhibition under that title in the National Gallery (1996). In her Miscast the would-be recaster complained that “most South African museums include sections on the Bushmen”, but these allegedly “are usually devoted to revealing them as timeless, ahistorical hunter-gatherers, cast all but naked”. The alleged nakedness of the otherwise faithfully cast figurines of the Kung have been cited most frequently in the recent arguments that led to the closure of the Kung diorama. I have seen many museums and exhibitions in South Africa, but I never saw a naked “Bushman”. However, I saw many of them for the first time in Skotnes’ Miscast. The exhibition not only showed them naked, but focused on their genitals. I have no doubt that Skotnes’s Miscast is the main cause of the sad closure of the Kung diorama.
I watched three groups of coloured school boys and girls, whose ancestors the exhibit was showing, coming to see Skotnes’s Miscast. They were whisked by their teachers through the room along the left side that displayed ethnographic artefacts, carefully avoiding the offensive exhibition of the Bushman genitalia on the right. They missed nothing by skipping the stacks of empty storage boxes pretending to contain the “Khoisan” history of dispossession.
Dispossession was the major theme in Skotnes’s Miscast, but the so-called Khoisan were shown to be the first major dispossessors. They, according to Skotnes, moved into the country about 2000 years ago and dispossessed the indigenous Kung (Bushmen) of their land and game. Skotnes covered it up by miscasting them as somehow automatic brothers of the Bushmen. Skipping many centuries of history, Miscast placed the burden of dispossession solely on the shoulders of the late-coming “strangers” who “became the colonists”. However, if this is correct, then what happened in the post-1652 period is only a repetition of what had happened between 4BC and 1652: the Khoikhoi took from the Bushmen and the colonists took from the Khoikhoi. Who cares about the Bushmen?
This scenario works only in a miscast history where non-existent people called Khoikhoi are allowed to keep their genitalia covered, while those of the (by implication) inferior Bushmen are left exposed, drying in the sun.
Miscast admitted that on Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival in 1652 the indigenous people of the Cape called themselves Quena (pronounced Kena) and the Europeans called them Hottentots or Strandlopers, but thus identified people are too deeply rooted to be manipulated, hence they were miscast as Khoikhoi. Nobody is ever going to be upset by the mistreatment of the Khoikhoi or Khoisan, because nobody knows who they were or are. No dead Quena ever called themselves Khoikhoi, which means “man man”, as if they had ever doubted their own separateness from the animals, and every Bushman hated being called San or “piccaninny”, which was commonly done to them by the Quena.
The history of the coloured people will begin to make sense only if we base it on evidence. The evidence says their ancestors were the Quena people. The Quena never came to Africa or southern Africa. They were born here of Kung (Bushman) mothers and foreign, mostly Indian fathers, who came to Africa in search of gold. Their gold mines, factories and closely related stone structures, mostly temples, called litaku, litter the landscape of Africa. The Quena were not invaders or dispossessors, they were the mixed descendants and relatives of the indigenous Kung. That’s why they called themselves Otentottu, meaning “Mixed People” (corrupted by the Dutch into Hottentot). In time they became the dominant people south of the Zambezi.
From their mothers and their Kung relatives the Quena or Otentottu learned to understand the land, its fauna and flora. The lack of kama (or kam, kamma) or “water” was their main material concern and they called it by the Dravidian (Indian) name kam. They named their rivers Matsikamma, Tsitsikamma, Keiskamma, Gamka and Tarakamma. They prayed for rain to the Moon-God calling him Chan (from the Dravidian Chan) and they prayed to the Sun-God not to burn the land, calling him Suri (from the Dravidian Suriyan).
These names and these prayers leave no doubt that the Quena were of Indo-African or Indo-Kung origin and that they were not usurpers of the land. They were born in and from this land. In time the mixed Indo-Kung Quena people formed many tribes, such as the Attaqua, Gonaqua, Hessaqua, Outeniqua, Namaqua, Kochoqua, Karihuriqua (now Griqua) and Inqua.
The cast figures of the Kung in the now closed diorama represent an important record of the ancestors of both the Kung and the Quena peoples, as well as of their “coloured” descendants. Let us hope Skotnes will not get another chance to miscast them.
Dr Cyril A Hromnk is a historian and researcher