The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

INTRODUCTION: SOME MOMENTS, FIGURES, AND THEMES IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY

INTRODUCTION SOME MOMENTS, FIGURES, AND THEMES IN SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY Wandering through the rural countryside of South Africa, I came upon a rocky outcrop, undistinguished from a distance: grass and bushes, and a few isolated trees marked the spot, and rondavel-style homes punctuated the farmlands that ringed the area. A sparse grove of stunted trees cloaked the slate of rock, but as I ventured around the trees, I could see shadowed behind them a concave wall of smooth rock. Then I knew where I was: here was an ancient art trove, a magisterial museum containing representations imagined an eon ago. Here, painted and engraved on dusky walls, were works of art ten thousand years old and more, mute testimony to one of the most venerable aesthetic traditions known to man, creations of the San, the first inhabitants of this refulgent, tormented country. The paintings that I saw were luminous red and yellow figures, with animals shaded in whites and blacks, artists' renderings of hunters and their quarry of sleek elands and fleet antelopes. And hovering in the background , often masked, were the distant but not uninterested figures of the gods: human activities unfolded within a mythic context, with gods and humans and animals decisively bonded in a cosmic unity frozen along the walls of this outdoor museum for all time by masterful San painters and engravers. BEGINNINGS: THE KHOI AND THE SAN The story of South Africa1 is a story of the land-for hundreds of years, that story centered on the cultivation of the surface of the land; then, in the past one hundred years, there was a frenzied, rapacious focus on the excavation of what was under the land. The story of South Africa has to do with that land, luxuriated in for hundreds of years by Africans, then controlled for generations by whites. A romance of the sharing of the land shifted to a story of conquest, and the working of that land by a black underclass. Before Western conquest, the San were farmers, hunters, and fishers, and their fellow South Africans were the Khoi, pastoralists. Together, they shared the agrarian plenitude of the southwestern part of the continent. The San and the Khoi, called Bushmen and Hottentots by those whose predatory history required that they impugn those whom they enslaved, 3 .' Ethnic Groups --' '- ...., in theTranskei .. __.. ~ '-J Bhaca Xesibe Mpondomise \.. Mpcmdo Thembu Thembu Mpondo Thembu Mfmgu Gcale~ Gcale1al Mf~X}l/ GcaltKJl Ngqib/ Zululand • Mahlabatini ./ • Nkandla ' . . @Pretoria Soweto •• Johannesburg , _ ~ Sharpeville " .. " ' ...... . Transvaal • Bulhoek .." • King William's Town Orange Free State , . .. " .... ~ ... ,.' Transkei .............. 2a~bmtata) .............r-; , , I I I , .I ' , , ' " .... ' " I , , , , I "', .. , CJ """ ~ ~ ~. ~~ ~be,.. Kimberley •.: I Cape Province " ., ., .'. ~ Map of South Africa Introduction 5 were the creators of the first known civilizations of what was to become South Africa, and they were to be the first Africans to experience the pillaging drives of the West. In the meantime, moving south in leaps and starts from the great lakes area of the eastern part of the continent, Africans who spoke Bantu languages settled in southeastern Africa as early as 300 A.D. These were the Nguni and the Sotho people, along with the Venda and Tsonga. Among the Nguni were people who would become known as the Bomvana, Gcaleka, Mfengu, Mpondo, Mpondomise, Thembu, Xesibe, Xhosa, and further north, the Zulu. These were farming people, cattle-raisers, seeking land for planting and pastures for grazing, and they shared the land and intermarried with the Khoi and the San. Then, in 1652, the Dutch intruded. A Dutch East India Company fleet arrived, headed by the Dutch merchant, Jan van Riebeeck. He sailed on the ship Drommedaris, reaching Table Mountain at the lowest reaches of the African continent on April 5, 1652. His people built a fortress, the Fort of Good Hope, in fulfillment of their charge by the Company to establish a refreshment station to provide Company ships on their way to Indian Ocean countries with fresh vegetables and livestock. Immediately , the Dutch set about to dispossess the original inhabitants, the Khoi, of their land. There had been earlier European arrivals. "In 1626 a very large number of Dutch ships had visited Table Bay, and during that year the Khoikhoi traded generously with the English but not with the Dutch, because of 'their ill euill useadge of the blackes.' "2 And from the start, race was on the minds of the interlopers. From the beginning, an immorality act...