Anatomy of a South African Genocide

4. A Case of Genocide?

4 A case of genocide? In recent years, there has been a growing corpus of scholarly literature that has interpreted colonial exterminations of indigenous peoples as genocide. Much of this writing has focused on the nature of settler colonialism, especially in Australia and the United States, and there has been a distinct tendency to view settler colonialism as highly prone to, if not inherently, genocidal.1 This discussion has not yet included the Cape San, partly because few South African scholars have worked within the field of genocide studies or systematically applied its insights to local mass killings, and partly because of the marginality of San society. The relatively small size of the scholarly community involved in South African historical research, its tendency to focus on clashes between European settlers and Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists, a distinct dearth of historians who regard themselves as being of Khoisan descent and the effects of apartheid-era isolation on South African historiography may all be seen as having contributed to this situation. 1 I disagree with the idea that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal, unless the concept is so loosely defined as to equate the cultural and economic changes that inevitably accompanies such colonisation with genocide. South Africa provides a good case study for refuting such claims. In the case of the San, and perhaps less clearly that of the Khoikhoi, colonial rule was indeed genocidal, but with regard to Bantu-speaking communities it manifestly was not—except perhaps for isolated incidents such as the Makapansgat Cave siege of 1854, in which commandos from the Transvaal Republic exterminated the greater part of the Ndebele-speaking Mokopane chiefdom (Hofmeyr, 1993: 105–21; Naidoo, 1989: 120–32; Esterhuysen, 2006). Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism as ‘animated by a logic of elimination which is not invariably genocidal’ is persuasive (Wolfe, 2006: 385). A case of genocide? 79 Until relatively recently, their marginality was clearly reflected in SouthAfricanhistoriographyinthatthecolonialexperienceoftheCape San was relegated to little more than a footnote to the grand narrative of conflict with Nguni- and Sotho-Tswana-speaking peoples in the establishment of white dominion. In accounts focusing on the VOC period, hostilities with the San often appear as a sideshow to Dutch interaction with the Khoikhoi.2 Sometimes the distinct experience of hunter-gatherer societies is glossed over, with the term ‘Khoisan’ being used mainly to refer to the Khoikhoi. Notable exceptions are G.W. Stow’s Native Races of South Africa, which comments extensively on settler annihilation of the San, P.J. van der Merwe’s Die Noordwaardse Beweging van die Boere Voor die Groot Trek, which analyses trekboer conflict with the San at some length, and J.S. Marais’s The Cape Coloured People, 1652-1937, which reviews hostilities between San and settler because he sees ‘Bushmen’ as constituting an ‘appreciable strain’ in the making of the coloured people (Marais, 1968: xi, 30–31). In the last decade and a half, some semblance of balance has been restored by a few seminal studies that have addressed the killing of the Cape San peoples with sensitivity and insight. Chief among these are books by historians Susan Newton-King and Nigel Penn, and Professor of Fine Art Pippa Skotnes (Newton-King, 1999; Penn, 2005; Skotnes, 1991; 1996; 2007). None of the works that deal with the destruction of San society explicitlyanalyseitasaninstanceofgenocide.Thereisnoconsideration of precisely what genocide means, or systematic application of relevant criteria of a particular definition, competing conceptualisations or theoretical considerations to this case. This does not mean that authors do not recognise these killings as genocide or the Cape San peoples as having been exterminated. Several do so very explicitly but do not raise phenomenological, ontological or hermeneutical questions around the concept of genocide or the example of the Cape San. For those writing before the word ‘genocide’ was coined by Rafael Lemkin 2 Elphick & Giliomee (1989a) is a good example. Compare its index entries for Khoikhoi with those for San and Bushmen. In this book, Khoisan refers mainly to Khoikhoi. The anatomy of a South African genocide 80 in 1944,3 or before it entered popular usage in the 1980s, the terms ‘extermination’, ‘extirpation’ and ‘extinction’ are commonly applied to the Cape San in ways that imply what would later be called genocide. The first significant attempt at historical analysis of the destruction of Cape San society is to be found in John Philip’s pioneering Researches in South Africa, published in 1828 and written with the express purpose of...