By Mario Olckers
With the hype surrounding South Africa’s “rainbow nation” and the subsequent disillusionment with the blatant kleptocracy of a small, parasitic black elite, what has been conveniently forgotten and deliberately ignored is the slow genocide of the indigenous San peoples and their descendants in Southern Africa.
Also referred to as Bushmen, after the Dutch bosjesmans, these people have been roaming Southern Africa as hunter-gatherers for more than 70 000 years. Archaeological records and anthropological research from legitimate international scientific sources paint the picture of a culture in tune with nature, natural cycles and close communion with Great Spirit.
Southern African rock art of Bushmen have formed the subject of many books, articles, films and doctoral theses but apart from their academic and anthropological significance, nobody pays any attention to the plight of the last remaining few Bushmen or their descendants, the coloured people, surviving in tragic socio-economic conditions.
South Africa’s coloured population, mostly concentrated in the Western Cape province, has DNA that is almost 80% derived from their San forefathers who were forcibly intermixed with Dutch European settlers and Bantu tribes migrating southward in search of land for their pastoralist lifestyle.
It is a sad tale, repeated in so many places around the world, most notably the Australian aboriginal peoples and the Native American peoples. A tale of dominant cultures invading and obliterating all traces of the original, indigenous population. In the quest for territory, scarce resources, mineral wealth and an ideology of cultural supremacy, every available mechanism is utilised to desecrate, humiliate and ultimately fade out of memory and conscience, the idea of the people who went before. In the absence of their freedom to follow wild animals around, the sacred places of cultural significance destroyed by invader cultures and their own cultural practices made out to be unacceptable, these “conquered” peoples enter a psychological state of depression, desperation; many listlessly, aimlessly roaming around, as if waiting for death to come, taking misguided solace in substance abuse, readily supplied and profited from by the dominant invader culture(s).
In colonial South Africa, in the wake of organised hunting parties to hunt these “cattle thieves” like vermin and in the face of imminent extinction in the wild, many Bushmen came in from the wild and onto the Dutch settler farms as slave labourers. They necessarily adopted the language, religion and many more cultural artefacts of their new “masters”. This fact would count heavily against them in a new South Africa, where the new black supremacists have made them pay for their European cultural affinity without being white European.
We see this dynamic playing out in the Western Cape today, where disastrous economic and political policies are continually working against and literally wiping out the coloured community. Business owners are forced, through government legislation, to employ black Africans in most available job openings, traditional industries supplying the lifeblood to coloured communities are obliterated by outsourcing cheap, Chinese imports eg textiles and clothing, big supermarket chains in coloured towns and neighbourhoods are forced to employ migrant black labourers travelling in from far away, all while the local coloured population starve a slow, tragic death through malign neglect and reckless indifference to their plight.
In the absence of any economic, political, social prospects, devoid of dignity, self-respect, many lose themselves in a desperate cycle of tik (crystal meth), mandrax, alcohol, physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Insult is added to injury with stereotypical denigration in the media, as evidenced by the recent brouhaha in local traditional and social media channels. ANC government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi referring to an “oversupply of coloureds in the Western Cape” and proposed amendments to the Employment Equity Act as well as the tirade of columnist Kuli Roberts making denigrating racist comments using unfortunate coloured stereotypes.
In South Africa, white supremacist apartheid ideology was replaced with African supremacist populism, tyranny of the majority, which finds expression in blind obedience and loyalty of the majority black people to a criminally corrupt and incompetent African National Congress government and its communist inspired trade union coalition partners Cosatu and the SACP. No amount of reason and rational debate can sway these “loyal cadres for life” from their genocidal tidal wave akin to a biblical plague of locusts swarming over and devouring all available resources in their path.
Once again, in the struggle for prime real estate in South Africa, it is the new black African elite, wresting political and economic power away from the European settlers’ descendants and distributing it among their own organised criminal clique. Of course in this titanic struggle for supremacy between black and white, the Western Cape has become the last outpost, pocket of resistance against total domination by the ANC. All attention is thus focused here, flame-bait media circuses are created to divert attention away from 17 years of destructive incompetence and looting following Nelson Mandela’s release and hope-inspiring rhetoric.
It is in the light of these dynamics that coloured people are making a last desperate stand; fighting for the last shred of dignity and a place in the Southern African sun, trying to save themselves from complete annihilation. It is the last remaining descendants of the indigenous San peoples asserting the moral right to claim their birthright back from the later arriving Bantu tribes and European settlers.
Mario Olckers is a social change activist wondering when truth and justice for marginalised indigenous peoples will happen and is actively working to try and make it so. Find him at http://twitter.com/marioOlckers
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The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the International Criminal Court, transnational NGOs like Survival International and networking with other First Nation groups and indigenous activists are some of the activities the author chooses as his contribution to the survival of his community.
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