5.1 Khoikoi

5.1 Khoikhoi

by Peter Snyders in association with Unison Music and Literary Publications.

Quote from Francisco d’Almeida, 1510 p10 of Before van Riebeeck: “And they (the Portuguese) came, and were already some way from the village, bringing some cattle, and some children which they had found in the houses.” The text continues, “the blacks... began to come down... like men who go to risk death to save their sons. ... And although some of our folk began to let the children go ... the blacks came on so furiously into the body of our men, taking back the oxen.”

Here the European writer says why the Blacks become intensely angry: it is when their children are seized for slavery and their possessions (livestock) are seized without paying for them. So, they became brutes, animals, but they killed 100 Portuguese despite not having swords and guns. Could animals do the same to the ‘flower’ of the army?

We said that under the Dutchman, Cornelius de Houtman, 1595, there was mention made of cannibalism under the Khoisan (who have no, or very little livestock) and the Khoikhoi, (herders of large quantities of livestock). After the writer, Franck van der Does, had stated that the Khoikhoi speech was nothing more than the clucking and whistling of a number of turkeys, he immediately thereafter says, ‘And indeed it looked as if they would have eaten some of us, since they made little ado of eating raw guts, from which they had a little scraped out the dung with a finger.”

That is all.  The Khoikhoi ate raw guts so they must be cannibals. What utterly ignorant suppositions. Under Houtman we have, “Some natives came near our boats, but they passed by us as we returned, without our being aware of them, so cleverly can they pass through the bushes.” Cannibals are beastlike because they cannot hunt their own food. They are therefore unlike the subtle Khoi of whom the writer says that they will not let them know where their kraals were.

Mention is also made of how the Khoikhoi made dried meat (biltong) “hanging around their necks.” p.18. What is the big deal? Many people are consuming dried meat. The guts of animals were used by those ‘modern’ people into which meat and fat was pushed and so they bought sausages and boerewors which were covered by raw guts.

These so-called ‘cannibals’, it is mentioned that they had ‘under their feet ... pieces of skin in lieu of shoes,’ and that their spears had wide iron points. The melting point of iron is 1 5350C.

This is about fifteen times higher than the boiling point of water, 1000C. They must have known how to smelt the iron in a heated enclosure and let it dry on the tips of their lances. This is why iron was so precious to them.

One final thing to show that they were not cannibals: in their journal the callers at the Cape say ‘[first meeting with the natives] they laid down their weapons and came to us.’ Would cannibals do so?

Thomas Herbert, 1627, on page 120 of Before van Riebeeck takes the trouble to learn a little of the Kora language. We can forgive him for not being able to use the clicks of Kora, the Cape and Orange River language of the Khoikhoi. He, however, is mistaken when he says that after ten “and further they could not number,” probably because he called them cannibals.

The Khoikhoi ‘cannibals’ had a system like the Europeans for counting. |ui stood for one. |kx’a means plus ten. So, |ui|kx’a meant one plus ten equal eleven. Two was |am, so what was twelve? |am|kx’a.  ||xaisi is eight. What is eighteen? Ten is disi which has an alternative tjisi meaning multiplied by 10. Therefore 20 is |amtjisi. If seven is hãukx’ũ what is seventy? 100 is |kx’arutjisi. Surely if the Khoikhoi had so many livestock, they would, whether they were truly cannibals or not, devise a system to count their possessions. Source: Kora (A Lost Khoisan Language of the Early Cape and the Gariep) by Menán du Plessis in: Kora to English Dictionary

Something that we will make much mention of is the brutal thuggery of the Dutch. Thomas Herbert speaks of the Dutch as “our emulous [jealous] Neighbour the Dutch, after some disgust given [to] the Natives, [their] ships rode with our Colours.” (p120). He goes on to tell how the Dutch butchered Coree, a Khoikhoi the English had taken to England in 1613 to learn the English language and be the go-between the English and the Khoikhoi of great herds of livestock.

Let us wrap up by looking at what two Dutchmen, Janssen and Proot, who had been stranded at the Cape for a whole year, together with 62 persons of the crew, had to say. They wrote a Remonstrante (1649) wherein they argued for a halfway station to be erected at the Cape to service all the Dutch ships. Let us only concentrate with what they had to say about the conditions at the Cape between the Khoisan and the Dutch.

‘Others will say that the natives are brutish and cannibals, from whom nothing good is to be expected, and that we shall have to be on our guard continually; but this is only sailors’ yarn [een Jan Hagels praetjen] as shall be more closely shown and denied. It is not to be denied that they are without laws or government like many Indians, and it is indeed true, that some sailors and soldiers have been killed by them; but the reason for this is always left unspoken by our folk, to excuse themselves for having been the cause of it, since we firmly believe that the peasants of this country [Holland], if their cattle were to be shot down and taken without payment, would not show themselves a whit better then these natives, had they not to fear the law.’

They go on that the Khoikhoi came daily, in all friendliness to barter cattle and sheep. They said that the Chief Mate, the Carpenter, and the Corporal from the wrecked ship, Haerlem, went as far as the houses of the natives and were amicably received and entertained. They could have easily been killed had they been cannibals (as is asserted by some), ‘so that without any doubt the killing of our folk is rather in revenge for the taking of their cattle, than for eating them.’

While the twelve ships under the Hon. Wollebrant Geleinsz were anchored, instead of giving the natives a reward for the polite treatment shown to the stranded Haerlem crew, ‘7 or 8 of their cattle were shot down and taken without payment.’ Geleinsz has it that it was ‘15 or 16 cows, shot without orders.’

We need say nothing more. When we go deeper into the character of the Khoikhoi and Khoisan, we will find that they were in fact living in the Kingdom of God. They did not need the laws of politics or any government. All we must do is look at the MP’s and MEC’s and many people politically connected like Presidents and Prime Ministers. Many of them are blatantly corrupt, rigging elections and then killing off those who dare to protest. A lot more about this later.

30.7.2024    23.7.2026    31.8.2026 G