By Amelia Faircloth
The Khoi and San people have inhabited South Africa for centuries, yet academics have consistently misrepresented them, even writing them out of history altogether, says Indigenous activist Attaqua Ethel Williams Herandien. In a recent Research Focus Group talk jointly hosted by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Africa Center, Herandien stressed the importance of reframing history from an Indigenous perspective to "speak [the Khoi and San] people out of extinction."
"Teaching about the history and culture of Indigenous people in settler societies can serve as a balancer to the dominant European narrative," Herandien said to the audience over Zoom. "Yet the inclusion of these stories is met with resistance."
Attaqua Ethel Williams Herandien, a South African Indigenous social justice activist, explored colonial stereotyping of the Khoi and San people and the importance of reframing South African history to include Indigenous voices.
Born in District Six, an inner-city neighborhood of Cape Town, South Africa, Herandien was forced to move after the apartheid government declared the district “whites only” in 1966, displacing African and mixed-race residents and bulldozing their former homes. Herandien fled to Europe, where she noticed pervasive stereotyping of her people, the Khoi, from an early age.
"In the city where I lived, I was being conditioned to think that my people were hunter-gatherers and did nothing more than hunt, gather, drink, have sex, and be villainous," Herandien said. "This was mind-boggling, as it was absolutely absent from my lived experience in our Khoi village."
This stereotyping of Indigenous populations is not a modern invention, but rather, it is rooted in a long history of colonization, which has perpetuated the prevailing xenophobic thinking and practices of South Africa, she said.
The Khoi and San people are two ethnically different groups of people indigenous to the South Africa region. Ancestors of the Khoi and San have been found to have been in the region as early as 260,000 years ago, but they do not enter the historical record until the 15th century, when Portuguese explorers landed in the Cape.
When Dutch settlers arrived in 1652, the indigenous Khoi and San people were reduced to second-class citizens in the eyes of the European settlers. This settlement of the Cape "saw the beginning of the golden age for the Dutch, but started a 369 year, six month, and three week period of untold misery and trauma for Indigenous people," Herandien told the UCSB audience.
The European settlers established racial hierarchies, in which "colonial natives" of European descent were at the top and African natives at the bottom. According to Herandien, this division of the settlers and natives, known as the "divide and rule" strategy, ensured that "non-Africans [received] preferential treatment to promote anti-African xenophobia." As a result, African natives were ordered into domestic servitude and forced to abandon their religious and traditional practices.
The atrocities continued well into the 1800s, even after the abolishment of slavery in 1807. Herandien offered a graphic example of how Europeans dehumanized the South African natives: "In the 1800s, approximately 35,000 African women and children and men were in European zoos performing exotic spectacles six days a week," she said. "These exhibitions gave rise to racist politics and cultural beliefs about wild savages... promoting the assertion of [European] moral and intellectual superiority."
Indigenous people have been present throughout the history of South Africa but are still chronically overlooked, she said. "[We] are rarely represented in the media, the arts, or positions of power in the government or the private sector," Herandien said. "Our invisibility makes it easy to create oversexualized and violent caricatures of our women and men, in everything from fashion to Halloween costumes." As a result, Khoi and San people are still stereotyped as stone-age hunter-gatherers.
Indigenous social justice activist Attaqua Ethel Williams Herandien told a UCSB Zoom audience that one way to reframe South African history is to uplift Indigenous voices in media and scholarship.
According to Herandien, misconceptions perpetuated through the education system do some of the most harm to the image of Indigenous South Africans. "Stereotypes of the vertically extinct savages of South Africa are pervasive," she said. "South African learners and students learn some of the most harmful misconceptions and biases, with no mention of ongoing conflict over land, water, and sovereignty."
Herandien criticized academic scholarship for excluding Indigenous voices when representing the Khoi and San people. In 2020, the publication of a book entitled "Rethinking Africa: Indigenous women re-interpret Southern African pasts," sparked outrage within the Indigenous community, because not a single contributing author was Indigenous, she said.
Herandien says the way to counteract historical inaccuracies and move the Khoi and San out of the extinction of ‘invisibility’ is by letting Indigenous people tell their own histories, in scholarship as well as media. "European and Western academics don't speak to us. They speak to other academics who are responsible for writing us into extinction," she said. Instead of praising non-Indigenous academics for their research, Herandien says students and faculty should deny non-Indigenous scholars platforms for their papers. "Their papers are invariably trying to erase us. Our stories have not been told," she asserted.
Amelia Faircloth is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.