Published on Linkedin on November 20, 2016
Rian Malan, a Research Fellow of the Institute of Race Relations, has
written an erudite synopsis of our country’s turbulent past and
examines Julius Malema’s recent claim to all of the land in South
Africa. As usual young Julius is found to be long on fire and
brimstone and orator’s rhetoric but falls short on facts, logic and truth.
The synopsis is in the form of an open letter to our Julius and begs a
response. I look forward to the reply if published. Read ‘Bushmen
Rule’ an edited presentation of Mr Malan’s thought provoking article.
"We are here unashamedly to disturb the white man’s peace because we have never
known peace. We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man’s arrival
here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land
dispossession. Today, we are told don’t disturb them, even when they disturbed our
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peace. They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them! They slaughtered them,
like animals! We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now....
But 1994 means NOTHING without the land! Victory will only be victory if the land is
restored in the hands of rightful owners. And the rightful owners are unashamedly
black people. This is our continent, it belongs to us."- Economic Freedom Fighters
leader Julius Malema in a speech outside Newcastle Magistrates court last week.
Julius Malema must be exhausted. All the rabble rousing, all the chaos in parliament,
all the interviews and marches and threats won him just 98,000 more votes in the
August 3 local government elections than his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) won
in the general elections in 2014. He needs a million more votes to really make a
permanent mark on South African politics. What, he must often think, does he have
to do to get there? His remarks outside a court in Newcastle the other day, to the
effect that blacks won’t “slaughter” whites, “for now” are typical of the man when he
is under pressure. It’s the safest go-to in our politics. But it is a false premise, or
promise, even if he really meant it, which I doubt. Malema’s narrative is that whites
landed in this country and disturbed a peaceful indigenous population and then
slaughtered them.
But that is way too simplistic. The fact is that the life of black people in SA was, in the
words of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, a life of “... continual fear, and
danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
Life in SA in 1652, the year Jan van Riebeeck landed here and the year after Hobbes
published his most famous work, Leviathan, was just like that as tribes and clans
clashed constantly for territory and dominance. The fact that whites then added to
the violence doesn’t make the past go away. But it wasn’t just blacks who killed blacks
four centuries ago.
White tribes in Europe had been slaughtering each other for hundreds of years by
1652. The English slaughtered Scots. The Germans slaughtered Romans. The fact is
humans are inherently violent. The question to ask is whether tribalism, or at least the
formation of clans and tribes, promotes violence or whether they form as a response
to violence.
The liberal writer and thinker Rian Malan has written a forceful response to Malema’s
silly outburst in Newcastle. He takes his house in Johannesburg’s Emmarentia as a
starting point and wonders who walked in what is now his garden, in the distant past.
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Rian Malan responds:
Dear Mr Malema:
I am writing in response to your recent remarks calling for whites to return the land
to its rightful owners, failing which you may have to slaughter us. I think it’s good that
you have put this issue under the spotlight, and I would like to help resolve it.
I personally had nothing to do with what the EFF sees as the “mass butcher/slaughter
of black people” by white land thieves in the colonial era. On the other hand, I am an
Afrikaner with capitalist inclinations, so I am clearly guilty by association in your eyes.
Hey, that’s all right by me. I’m not here to argue. I am here to find a solution, and to
do that, it’s necessary for me to put my own land on the table and discuss what’s to
be done with it.
This land (about 1200 square meters) is in Emmarentia, Johannesburg, a good place
to ponder our history because it is located at the foot of the Melville Koppies, where
archaeologists have unearthed a great deal of evidence about previous owners. Their
findings can be summarized as follows:
1) Around 250,000 years ago, Emmarentia was inhabited by our hominid ancestors.
These creatures appear to have died out.
2) Around 100,000 years ago, the first humans made their appearance.
Unfortunately, I don’t know their names and their descendants have proved
untraceable.
3) Some twenty thousand years ago, the so-called San or Bushmen took up residence
in a cave in the kloof near where Beyers Naude Drive cuts through the Koppies. Among
the artefacts they left behind is a Stone Age device for making arrowheads. The
whereabouts of their descendants is unknown.
4) Around five hundred years ago, the first Tswana showed up. These were
sophisticated people who used Iron Age furnaces to work minerals mined nearby.
They also owned sheep and cattle and grew millet and sorghum along the banks of
the stream which flows past my house.
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On its face these Tswana would appear to be the only previous owners whose
descendants are still living in the area, so in theory I should give my land to them. But
when you look closely at the Tswana, a complicated picture emerges.
In the beginning, around 1700, almost all Tswana fell under the authority of the
Hurutshe, a powerful tribe that exacted tribute from lesser Tswana chiefs and kept
them in line.
Around 1750, things began to change. Nobody knows exactly why, but one suspected
cause is the mealie, which arrived here around that time. Mealies boosted crop yields.
More food led to population growth, which led to intensified competition for scarce
resources. The Hurutshe hegemony was challenged and overthrown. Without proper
supervision, minor chieftains started tooling up and making war on one another. The
Fokeng attacked the Kgatla. Kgatla attacked the Po. Pedi fought the Kwena, and so
on. According to the anthropologist Isaac Schapera, there were 26 civil wars in the
decades prior to 1820.
In response, Tswana kingdoms became increasingly militarized and autocratic, which
is to say, they moved from level 3 societies, which were chilled, to levels 4 and 5,
where kings and chiefs practiced an early form of capitalism, extracting labour and
tribute from weaker vassals. Since the vassals did not necessarily like this, the more
powerful Tswana chiefs began to concentrate their people in large towns, usually sited
on easily defensible hilltops and surrounded by stone walls.
This did not help much. An analysis made of Tswana praise poems and oral histories
indicate that being a chief in Emmarentia and surrounds was a very dangerous
occupation between 1700 and 1820. Of 71 chiefs mentioned in oral traditions, only 48
percent died in their beds. The rest were assassinated or killed in battle.
Because of these factors it has proved difficult to establish exactly which Tswana
grouping owned my land during this period of violence and confusion. Most likely,
ownership changed several times, and at some point, it was taken over by the Po, the
Nguni people who controlled the Witwatersrand from a headquarters located near
the Gillooly’s freeway interchange. Have you ever heard of these people? No, me
neither, but don’t worry, because they were soon swept away by the Mfecane.
Contrary to popular belief, it seems the Mfecane was not really caused by Shaka Zulu.
According to my readings, that man’s role has been exaggerated by Inkatha
supporters who love to depict Shaka as a black Napoleon who single-handedly
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invented the short stabbing spear and the horns-and-chest battle formation, thereby
overcoming all. More recent research holds that Shaka was just one of many southern
African kings who simultaneously embarked on a program of militarization and nation
building, thus leaping from level three to level five and in the process destabilizing
their neighbours included the Hlubi, the Ngwane and the Swazi. After Shaka came to
power around 1818, these people decided it would be wise to move onto the highveld
to get away from him. But the nearest parts of the highveld were already occupied by
the Phuting and Hlakwana, who lost their crops and cattle to the invaders and had to
flee westward, into territories controlled by various Tswana entities. This resulted in a
chain reaction that rolled on for years, turning the highveld into a zone of “persistent
raiding and displacement” that shattered African social structures and turned many
people into refugees.
Around 1824, Mzilikazi and the Ndebele arrived on the scene, also fleeing the Zulus.
Mzilikazi was by far the most efficient of the level-five autocrats. He ate up all the
tribes in his path, usually killing males and incorporating women and children into his
own ranks. One exception to this was the Po, who reportedly saved themselves by
submitting to Mzilikazi and joining his cause as “allies or slaves.”
One therefore assumes that the Po moved with Mzilikazi to Rustenburg district, where
the Ndebele made their capital. The king lived in the very centre of the new empire,
surrounded by loyal Ndebele commoners and swathes of pasture for the royal cattle.
Beyond the pasture was a ring of tribute-paying vassal chiefs and beyond them lay
the march – a vast area that had been cleared of all human inhabitants. Mzilikazi
trusted no-one, and wanted to make sure he could see his enemies coming.
I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I suspect Emmarentia was part of this so-called march.
Here’s why. In 1836, an aristocratic British sportsman named Robert Cornwallis-Harris
came this way to hunt big game. When he reached a range of hills which could have
been the Witwatersrand he began to see the ruins of “extensive villages,” deserted
save for a handful of “half-starved persons” hiding in the bushes. According to
Cornwallis-Harris, the abandoned villages were strewn with broken earthen vessels,
fragments of ostrich shell and game skins. And that’s almost exactly what
archaeologists find when they dig trenches on the koppie above my house.
Against this backdrop, your remarks about “peaceful Africans” strike me as somewhat
odd. The last person to make such an argument was Joe Slovo, whose seminal
“Colonialism of a Special Type” essay was riddled with black holes and omissions
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intended to present whites in the worst possible light. That’s because Slovo was
desperate to ingratiate himself with black people and become your leader, an ambition
which led directly to what you see as the great sell out of 1994. You surely know
better than to trust a white man, sir.
But anyway, our story has just begun. The first white settlers showed up in
Emmarentia a few months after the hunter Cornwallis-Harris. You seem to imagine
these Voortrekkers as an army of genocidaires using guns and horses to drive peaceful
Africans towards extinction. Not so. Mzilikazi opened the hostilities, massacring a party
of Trekkers near the Vaal River and then stripping the Boers of all their livestock at
Vegkop. At this point, the Tswana who’d previously dominated the area came out of
hiding and offered their support to the Boers, which led to Mzilikazi’s defeat at the
hands of multi-racial DA-style army at the battle of Mosega.
In the aftermath, Mzilikazi fled northwards across the Limpopo, and the Boers claimed
“his” land as their own. The suburb where I live became the farm Braamfontein,
property of the Bezuidenhout family. These were my people, but let me be the first to
admit that they did not behave like civilized white liberals.
Instead, they emulated the African kings who came before them, exacting tribute
(especially in labour) from subject chiefs and periodically raiding more distant
neighbours for cattle and captives. Some of those captives, especially the children,
became inboekelinge, or indentured servants, working on Boer farms for nothing until
they were 25.
Let’s face it -- this was a form of slavery, and we must answer for it. But the Fokeng
and the Kgatla must answer too, because they were our partners in crime, constantly
joining the Boers in “mutually beneficial” raids on surrounding tribes. As a result, the
Kgatla (who lived around Sun City) and Fokeng (near Hartebeestpoort) became rich
and powerful. According to historian Fred Morton, Kgatla chief Khamanyane (who
ruled from 1853 to 1875) acquired an astonishing fortune in wives (43) and cattle,
while many of his subjects “attained higher living standards than most Boers.”
This is not to say that the Boers and their Tswana allies had it all their own way. On
the contrary: the Boers were weak, and existed in a state of uneasy equilibrium with
surrounding African principalities. Gert Oosthuizen, baas of the farm where I now live,
would have been called out on commando at least 14 times in his first thirty-odd years
on the Highveld, but seldom returned home a victor.
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Most Boer military campaigns ended in stalemate, and they were defeated on at least
three occasions -- by the Pedi in 1852, the Sotho in 1858, and the Venda in 1861. By
1867, they were under such pressure that they had to abandon the Soutpansberg,
leaving behind a few stragglers who survived by paying tribute to their conquerors in
the African way.
After the discovery of diamonds, Africans began to acquire guns and push back even
harder. In 1870, the Boers abandoned Potgietersrus. In 1871, they lost another war
against the Pedi. By 1877, they seemed to be in an extremely precarious position,
which is why the British stepped in to annex the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek.
Beyond this point, your understanding of history becomes more tenable. Professional
soldiers sent by Queen Victoria crushed the Zulu and Pedi with considerable slaughter,
as they'd previously crushed the Xhosa and were soon to crush the Boers. Black
Africans wound up losing about two thirds of the land they'd held before 1652, and
for this whites must answer. Then again, the British army had African auxiliaries in al
its campaigns, so they must answer too.
But for what exactly? You keep saying “genocide.” I’m not sure that’s the right term.
In the 1980s, historians Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar published a
comparative study of the North American and South African frontiers. Someone stole
my copy of that book and the precise details are fading, but it claims there was
something like ten million “Red Indians” when the American frontier opened circa
1780, and only 250,000 left a century later. That’s genocide.
In SA, the numbers tell a different story. According to Thompson et al, there were
around two million Africans when our frontier opened, also in 1780, and roughly
double that number when it closed in 1880. Since then, the African population has
grown at a healthy rate, apartheid notwithstanding. That’s why whites are now so
heavily outnumbered, and why if you say, surrender your land, I have not much
choice.
But surrender it to whom? If we take the arrival of the first white settlers in 1836 as
our point of departure, I should give my house to the descendants of Mzilikazi. But
that won’t go down with the Tswana, who remember Mzilikazi as a bloody tyrant who
robbed them of their birthright.
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The Po might rematerialize and make a claim, and then there’s the Bushman to think
about. They were here long before anyone else, but vanished in the 1820s. Perhaps
they also ran for their lives when they saw Mzilikazi coming, and took refuge in the
Kalahari.
If so, this was a frying-pan-into-fire move, because the Tswana out there were short
of labour, and they turned Bushmen and other vassal races (the Kgalagadi and Yei)
into slaves who were exchanged for goods, passed on as heritable property and
“controlled with startling brutality” by their masters. According to historian Barry
Morton, slave herdsmen were “observed to live in an indescribable state of general
squalor.” Death from malnutrition was “not uncommon,” and slaves were “punished
and occasionally killed…for losing a single animal.”
According to Morton, evidence to back such claims lay hidden in plain sight in the
archives, ignored for decades by researchers swarming into the Kalahari to study one
of the world’s last hunter-gatherer populations. I can only surmise the researchers
were white liberals who didn’t want to spoil the plot, which holds that it was the Boers
who caused all the trouble in our history until they were overthrown by the saintly
Mandela, thus giving birth to the Rainbow Nation.
Judging by your speeches, you detest white liberals even more than I do, which is
why I have drawn all these complications to your attention. The fact of the matter,
sir, is that all our ancestors have blood on our hands. More blood on mine than yours,
at least at this point, but still: the only innocents in this story are the Bushman.
They were harmless level one people, with no chiefs and no material ambitions. Whites
hunted them like wild animals, but your people were little better. The first British
official to arrive at the royal court of the Xhosa (Sir John Barrow, c 1798) was told by
King Hintsa, “My people exist in a state of perpetual warfare with the
Bushmen.” Perhaps this helps us understand why the north-eastern portion of this
country is littered with the relics of Bushmen who vanished long before white settlers
came.
And so we come finally to the point of this letter. The victims and villains of history
are beyond my reach, but I am not without conscience. I am sorry about all the Zulu
who perished at the hands of Lord Chelmsford in 1879, and the Shona and Ndebele
slaughtered by Rhodes’ Gatling guns. But I am particularly sorry about the Bushmen
who used to live in the kloof above my house. They suffered greatly at the hands of
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people like us, and their claim to being the original and thus “rightful” owners of
Emmarentia looks unassailable.
I therefore think it might be best if I share my land with my friend Errol, an Afrikaans-
speaking colored person with at least a bit of Bushman blood in his veins. He’s not
black, strictly speaking, but at least he has an Afro. And his apartheid victim credentials
are impeccable. But before I go ahead, I would like to make sure this accords with
the fast-track land reform scheme you envisage. If I do the right thing by Errol, will
my life be spared?
Your swift reply is awaited.
Rian Malan
He is a Research Fellow of the Institute of Race Relations.