In 1995, the ≠Khomani San of the southern Kalahari lodged a claim for land located inside the
Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. As part of a complex and fairly all-embracing restitution
package, the ≠Khomani San were granted more than 68 000 hectares of land, financial compensation as well various rights of access to the Park.1
According to the restitution agreement, the
compensation was handed over to the ≠Khomani gradually over the period from 1999 to 2003.
Despite the delight at the return of “their” land, the ≠Khomani soon realised that the community
under the name of which they had submitted the land claim was not as coherent and concrete a
unit as they had assumed. Instead, it revealed itself as a fractious collective. Some members of the
collective had not even known each other before the claim was submitted.
The cracks in the unity of the ≠Khomani community arose around issues of who could legitimately and authentically claim to belong to the community. In this debate, the terms “Bushman”
and “Boesman” came to play a critical role. Academic discourse dating back as far as the 1950s declared the terms “Bushman” and its Afrikaans counterpart “Boesman” to be racist, derogatory and
even sexist and called for their removal from general discourse. Nearly 60 years later, however,
San people living in the southern Kalahari refer to themselves by these terms. Not only are the
terms in common use, but some ≠Khomani embrace them proudly, declaring: “Ons is boesmans”
[we are Bushmen].
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Anthropology Southern Africa 121
The embracing of terms that had been rejected by academics can be understood in terms of
what elsewhere has been called the “authenticity construct,” namely a contest over authenticity or
“narratives of authenticity” (see Ellis 2010, 2012, 2014). According to Guenther (1995, 111), the
“authenticity construct” is composed of “a stereotyped, racial-cultural iconography and representations of the San, ideas that ‘standardised’ their culture, and a general prescription of this ‘construct’
as appropriate to proposals for development.” Stereotypic ideas of what it means to be San guided
the visions for economic welfare and proposals for development of the ≠Khomani San community
and the ≠Khomani were expected to act within this framework of San-ness.2
The “authenticity
construct” is that index that is constructed from the jumble of ideas and materials which can be
referenced by whosoever needs to show what a real bushman (lower case intentionally used, see
Rassool and Hayes 2002; Ellis 2014)3
is. Among the many practices and ideologies that make up
these standardising and authenticating practices of the authenticity construct are the acts of naming
and ascription of terms to supposed ethnic entities. The aim of this particular paper is to probe this
acceptable San norm (Ellis 2010) or, as Guenther puts it, the authenticity construct, in relation to
the diverse practices that assign and determine San nomenclatures.
The paper does not wish to discuss Guenther’s authenticity construct itself in any detail. Rather,
it examines one specifi c “construct,” namely the choice of nomenclatures by diverse ≠Khomani interest groups. The paper argues that various ≠Khomani interest groups developed names and labels
for themselves by using ethnonyms, glottonyms and self-referents. Their search for appropriate
names is, critically, about being able to lay a claim to the disputed land as their own, in suffi ciently
authentic a manner.
It is not the goal of this paper to suggest a new or novel nomenclature, nor to suggest that
terms proposed by ≠Khomani interest groups should be accepted. The intention is rather to illuminate a dynamic process of name selection that refl ects a localised set of responses to political,
socio-economic, policy and other conditions that prevail and exert infl uence on the lives of people.
The process of a community selecting a name for itself does not occur in a vacuum: it takes place
within a context and situatedness.
The question posed by this paper is: why should the naming practices take the form that they
do? The paper analyses the question along two strands. First, it reads the concern with nomenclature in light of current ethnographic data. Using ethnographic data is critical as it permits a view
of the fact that, despite the academic critique, San are choosing to be located in nature from where
they want to make their living. The ethnographic data suggests that, once the land claim is settled,
bushman-ness will be put to work in an interplay of the representational and the developmental. The
aspirations of certain bushmen is to commoditise culture and make it “work,” that is to do labour:
to let it provide food, income, housing, healthcare and services such as water, toilets and electricity.
“Confined to a name”
The epigram by Mbembe that opens this paper neatly captures the process of naming and its
effects in especially the colonised territories of the world when it argues that the colonised have
been “confined to a name.” The “confinement” turns the gaze away from humans as objects of
analysis and traps knowledge of them in representations; in short, names are crucial in creating
simulacra. Moreover, “confinement” conveniently provides an empty category to be filled with
materials and references. Once a name and its associated category become established, it is ready
to be populated with various racial and ethnological referents, signs and even materials. The word
“bushman,” for example, instantly evokes a veritable catalogue of signs, such as bows and poison
arrows, the loincloth, ostrich eggshell beads, click languages and specific racial features. These
indexical materials and signs are not lost in the present; rather, they are sublated into whatever San
people are currently doing. I am understanding sublation according to Hegel ([1807] 1910) as the
principle of something that is being cancelled out without being destroyed. A new form emerges
that is at once still what it was before and at the same time novel.
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122 W.F. Ellis
Western popular theories of change and social constructionism cannot accommodate sublation
in their views of the San. Many of the non-San people, and here I refer to all those individuals who
are not known as San nor have they volunteered an identity as San, encountered in the southern
Kalahari during fi eldwork4
thought of the San as either trapped in the past or as corrupted by historical forces. Thus the San are forced to be either “bushmen” or “not bushmen.” What is more
critical, however, is that some groups of ≠Khomani think of being bushman in similarly restricted
ways, unable to incorporate the phenomenon of sublation into their defi nitions of what makes up
an authentic bushman. The poorest among the ≠Khomani San are the most fervent advocates of
the view that the claimants in the land claim can be grouped into the westerse [westernised San]
and the tradisie [traditional San]. In contrast, the San who are regarded as westernised, who are
also often those who are better off in the community, embraced the possibility of a sublated identity; in fact, their own San-ness depended on this sublation. It is telling to note here that those San
who accept the sublated perspective of identity also use the term “San” to refer to themselves.
Conversely, those San who cannot accept sublation as playing a role in identity building tend to
use the term “Boesman.” The contests of authenticity, it seems, centre on the indices and materials.
The construct not only begins with this name but persistently returns to this name: it is that index
that materials are attached to. The discussion now turns to an analysis of the names and terms that
have been assigned to, and some even claimed by, the San.
Over the centuries of contact with Europeans and other groups, such as Nguni-speaking
farmers and slaves of diverse national origins brought to the Cape, the San of southern Africa have
been identifi ed by numerous different terms. Diverse ethnonyms, or appellations applied to ethnic
groups, were used. They can be understood in terms of a typology of ethnonyms that has been
developed by academics. Some ethnonyms used for the San have been xenonyms, names used
to label “strange” or “foreign” groups. The names can be constructed from words taken from the
ethnic group that is being described, thus an auto-xenonym, or can be ascribed, thus come from
another language. Other ethnonyms denote the language spoken by the people in question, such as
Nharo or Ju/’hoansi, and are thus philological terms or glottonyms. Another number of ethnonyms
applied to the San involve academic conventions or are the result of the attempt by researchers
to fi nd politically correct terms. “Bushmen,” “San,” the Afrikaans word “Boesman,” the Nguni
“Abathwa” and the Tswana “Basarwa” are some of the terms most commonly applied to the San.
Each of them is used in different settings and can have both positive and negative connotations.
For instance, the everyday Afrikaans “Boesman” or the colloquial English “Bushmen” denotes
a person with a particular set of racial features that are not favoured by the dominant portion of
society. This appellative is hardly ever used in a fl attering or laudatory way. The terms also imply
a hierarchical prescript, so that a person designated a Bushman is immediately placed on a lower
level within commonly assumed social and cultural strata. And, while some prefer to see the San
as Stone Age relics while others are yet to see them as equals in a relativist sense, it is useful to
remember that these terms are “ideologically versatile” and appeal to actors across the political
spectrum (see Douglas 1995). At the same time the terms are generic and homogenising: they lump
people together regardless of any inter- and intra-group diversity. On the other side of the spectrum
are self-referring terms, which are used to overcome the damage of past naming practices. The
following surveys and briefl y evaluates the principal terms that have been used.
The xenonym “Bushman” is undoubtedly the most frequently used designation when people
speak about the San. It has its origin in the early years of Dutch colonisation of the Cape in the 17th
century and derives from the Dutch bosjesman. According to Humphreys (1985), the term captures
the idea that the San were seen by colonists as an elusive people who could only be glanced before
they disappeared into the bushes (bosjes/bossies) again. Nienaber (1952) claims that the diminutive “bossies” was used because it denoted the indigenous shrubby fynbos. Academics in the 1950s
decided to use the term “San,” a philological term, instead of the derogatory “Bushman” (Morris
1992), which was considered racist, hierarchical, sexist and suffused with negative connotations
What racial/ethnic identity stereotypes are associated with the name “Bushmen”? (Identify and explain at least four.)
1. Inferiority: The term "Bushmen" implies a hierarchical prescript, suggesting that those designated as such are immediately placed on a lower level within society's social and cultural strata.
2. Stone Age relics: Some may view "Bushmen" as Stone Age relics, implying a primitive or outdated way of life and culture.
3. Otherness: The term "Bushmen" may also evoke ideas of strangeness or foreignness, reinforcing an outsider perspective towards the people it refers to.
4. Homogenization: Using the term "Bushmen" can lump together a diverse group of people, disregarding the individual differences and diversity within the community.