Long before the coming of the conquistadores from Europe to South Africa this country was peopled and worked by the three main South African tribal or primitive-communal systems: the !Ke, the Khoi-Khoin and the Bantu. These people lived in the same tribal way as did the ancient inhabitants of old England, old India or old China.
The equalitarianism of this tribalism, embracing first everyone and later only the men, was due to backwardness of productive techniques. There had to be equality because one person's labour could not then support both himself and a non-producer. Exploitation was thus impossible, for all were engaged in the struggle with nature, all had to work or die.
In the absence of exploitation, private property was of no material advantage. In the absence of an incentive - to live or gain from the exploitation of another's labour - the very notion of private property could not arise. Technical backwardness hence excluded not only exploitation but also private property. And so the land, the rivers, forests, minerals, the fruits of the earth and, in the early stages of "tribalism", as with the !Ke (Batwa, "Bushmen"), even the animals belonged to the people in common. Equality in ownership sprang out of backwardness, yet ensured the very physical existence of the primitive societies. For since the means of production belonged not to individuals but to all, none died of want in the midst of plenty. The diet of the !Ke - of meat, milk, fruit, nuts and vegetables - their shelters, their "clothes", all these necessities were as free as the air itself. At the same time these prime necessities had to be fought for all the time, with all the energies of all the people. There was literally no time for exploitation.
The major struggle then was between man and his natural environment, not between man and his fellow-man. But in the very evolution of this struggle tribalism had to destroy itself. For as man gained dominion over nature, by improving his implements and methods of production (including his hunting weapons and methods), he thereby began to gain the possibility of dominion first over women and then over his fellow-man. The advanced tools and methods now made it possible for one person to produce enough for himself and a non-producer. As tribalism developed from the !Ke to the Khoi-Khoin and Bantu level, women became exploited and subjected. Communal or group or temporary monogamous families changed into polygynous families, where many women were able to produce enough surplus to support one male. There is a sexual division of labour. Private property in cattle emerges. The clan or gens has a male line of descent, a male "ancestor". Men form armies to fight for land, for their cattle, their crops. Men form tribal councils and women become "disfranchised". The evolution of tribalism, to the stage where the women were exploited and reduced in status, where tribal equalitarianism meant equality between men, but inferiority for women - this stage has already been reached in the Khoi-Khoin and Bantu tribal societies. At the time of the coming of the Europeans, tribalism was on the threshold of the development from the enslavement of women by men to the enslavement of men by men. This transformation of the struggle against nature into the struggle against women and, later, men themselves was inherent in every tribal society.
Tribalism was neither idyllic nor permanent. It was a prolonged but developing stage in the unfolding of human civilization, a stage back to which no return is possible, imaginable or desirable.
The impact of Europe on Africa immensely accelerated and transformed the self-development of tribalism into slavery and other exploiting societies. The domestic enslavement of women was augmented by the enslavement of the tribe as a whole, both men and women. The European invasion arrested the internal social differentiation of the male section of the tribe and hence of the tribal families, and converted all tribalists into slaves, serfs or wage-workers. Tribalism was destroyed from without, not from within, catastrophically and suddenly, not "peacefully" and gradually.
This tear-soaked, blood-stained process has to be understood, not mourned. The passing of tribalism was inevitable, however devastating the manner of its demise, however brutal the conquerors, however glorious the resistance of the conquered.
The oldest of the ancient inhabitants of South Africa were the !Ke or Batwa, whom the Europeans called "Bushmen". The early !Ke belonged to the Capsian stone-working peoples of Natal, the Cape, Uganda, Syria, Ceylon, Spain and Italy. They left relics in East London, in Natal, the Transvaal and Spain. They peopled many lands and the whole of Africa was their home.
They had long forgotten and emerged from the millions of years during which man evolved from the origin of his species, which may have been the Lake Districts of East Africa. For as far back as fifteen million years ago human-like beings were already living in the Transvaal, similar to those early beings of India, Java and China, and the evolution of the ancestors of the human race had already gone on for ages before even that time. In the Transvaal lie skulls, with brains larger than those of "Bismarck or Sir Walter Scott", which Broome blasted from the bowels of the earth, exclaiming that these were the probable forerunners of the "Bushmen". Dynamite revealed skulls at Taungs and elsewhere showing that their owners had lived in caves, hunted and used digging tools. From such beginnings arose the human race, which reached its manhood through using and making tools. For
"Man, renouncing his bodily faculties, develops his tools, and for this purpose, to have his hands free, adopts the upright gait."
Millions of years after this primeval development, the !Ke began to weave the fabric of civilization. They recorded for posterity, through their paintings in the Transvaal and in Spain, how they spent their lives, how they ensured that the human species would reign supreme for all time. For they were conquerors, subjugators and complete masters of the animal kingdom, these people whom Frobenius extolled as the
"typical hunters of the world, the lovers of freedom and independence".
Through the shrouds of time they moved southwards until they occupied, hunted, gathered food and painted in the southern half of Africa, leaving behind them indelible paintings and engravings which neither time nor man could erase.
The great hunters, contrary to the teachings of the Aryans in anthropology, did not merely work with pebble, hand-axe and flake tools. They went beyond the stone-age and worked with iron in their homeland, Africa.
"The classic land of the iron industry amongst primitive peoples".
In changing over from stone to iron tools the Batwa made a fundamental contribution to human culture. He suffered the setback which went along with this switch-over, the temporary regression whilst learning to make and handle new tools. Then, with iron weapons, and weapons were his main tools, he went ahead towards the total conquest of the animals.
With this advance in hunting, due to the development of his weapons, went progress in the use of fire. Unlike some other primitive peoples who could merely keep a fire burning in a "fire-station", the Batwa could actually kindle fire. Fire and iron helped to forge the wondrous art of the Batwa. They enabled him to extract and work with mineral ores from which the colours were made, vegetable dyes being but a minor source of painting materials. Fire enabled them to melt fat for the mixing of their colours. Fire gave them burnt sticks with which to draw the outlines of their paintings. Their art reflected their technical development.
Yet this same art also reflected their immense backwardness. Since their art was a form of recording their personal or family history, a form of "writing", it was a remote
"step towards a real phonetic script".
Yet their art was beautiful, whether impressionistic or naturalistic. But script is "ugly". The Batwa, Eskimos and Australians painted well, but were more backward than tribes who painted badly, but whose drawings came nearer to "writing". For as paintings and drawings
"increase in value as written signs, they deteriorate as natural representations".
This backwardness, however, belonged to pioneers along the human road; for pioneers are more "backward" than those who follow them and build on their achievements.
On the basis of a development in tools and weapons, the Batwa or !Ke developed as hunters. The hunt was the main activity, and hunting the pivot of social life, mythology and customs.
They were organised into monogamous hunting families, not yet into clans. There was no private property of animals (e.g. the cattle of the Bantu), little division of labour between men and women, no organised armies, and hence practical equality existed between the sexes. The hunting families were grouped into hunting "bands" which were part of an embryonic tribal organisation. However, unlike the Khoi-Khoin and Bantu, there was no central tribal authority. Nor did membership of the "tribe" rest on kinship, as was the case with the Khoi-Khoin; or on allegiance to the king, as was the case with the Bantu. Membership of the "tribe" rested on common respect for a "totem" which was a symbol of and arose out of the hunting existence of these people. Rare or feared or useful or other animals became the symbol of the tribe, and, as in Egypt and North America, could be reincarnated. Thus the old Egyptians used to "worship" the pig or crocodile; and the North American Indians "worshipped" the raven, bear or wolf. So it was with the Batwa hunters. This expressed and perpetuated a very loose "tribal" organisation. This looseness proved fatal when the wars of dispossession came.
From the hunt as the mainspring of activity arose a "solar religion":
"The whole system of the sun, moon and stars enters simultaneously and compendiously into their mythology".
This "solar worship", however, arose not because the Batwa were harvesters like the Khoi-Khoin and Bantu, but because they were great travelers, and the sun, moon and stars were their compass, without which they would get lost or perish. They did have "rain-worship", but this arose not out of agriculture but because the rain would bring the rivers, grass and forests to life and an abundant animal life would be available for hunting.
The hunter is an individualist, self-conscious and proud. And so, for the Batwa or !Ke, the Supreme Being was man himself. For it was the man Cagn who made the world, stars, moon, sun and life. It was Cagn, the man who changed the slayers of his son, Cogaz, into baboons and condemned them to live on scorpions and spiders to the end of time. Man, the hunter, the stalker, the slayer of living creatures, was the creator of life, and the centre of the world. He was supreme on his own domain, for it was death to all living creatures, whether animal or human stranger, to roam on the hunting grounds which were his for use, although belonging to the tribe as a whole. Hunting was the pivot of life, including ideas.
Annihilation by the conquistadores could not destroy the !Ke physically. For those who preceded or survived this destruction inter-bred with Khoi-Khoin, Bantu, Malay slaves and European conquerors.
Batwa blood runs through the veins of Persians, Indians and Arabs whose forefathers traded with the Batwa at Sofala and elsewhere as late as 950 A.D. Batwa blood courses through the "pure" Zulu, amongst whom they lived right up to the 19th century, and who were forbidden by the first Boer Republic of Natal to mix with the Batwa. The Batwa are part of the Pondo, Tembu and Xhosa. The Khoi-Khoin inherited not only some of the language traits, but also the stock of the !Ke. The 18th century Boer frontier cattle-farmers enserfed the children of the !Ke whom they slayed, brought forth progeny from these serfs, and then abused the stock of the !Ke "wives" as yellow pigmies. But even the racialistic Broome admits that, before the European conquest of the Batwa, they were
"men and women of quite ordinary size".
The technique, social organisation, language and physical nature of the !Ke were handed on to succeeding peoples, mostly their conquerors. What is known as the "Bushmen", the !Ke, the Batwa, virtually vanished from the face of South Africa. The "Red Indians" of North America were likewise annihilated, both having many similar features in their whole organisation. But in destruction itself, their whole heritage was transmitted, changed, adapted, built upon and, often in unrecognisable shape, is yet everywhere to be seen even in 20th century South Africa.
To contents of Volume 1, Sections 2 to 6
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