You could say that Southern Africa’s people of first origin are also Southern Africa’s people of first dispossession – the oldest landless people on Earth.
Plucky Little Earth-warriors
But why were the Bushmen chased away so vehemently, and why did the campaign against the Bushmen take on overtones of what we now call ‘Ethnic Cleansing’?
The reason why everyone hated the Bushmen is because these plucky little Earth-warriors instinctively and violently resisted any outside attempt to usurp their traditional lands and lifestyle.
They especially resented the narrow-minded arrogance of the white settlers, who took it as their right to waltz through the countryside with their hungry cows, taking over choice grazing land wherever they saw it.
The first recorded attack by Bushmen on a white cattle farmer took place as early as 1701, only 50 years after the Dutch had landed at the Cape.
Kick a Man Where it Hurts
Although the Bushmen often outnumbered their pastoralist foes, they did not have the miraculous firepower of the Boers or the physical stamina of the Zulu.
So, the Bushmen fought the enemy in the only way they knew how; by stealing away their cattle and burning down their farms. This was akin to kicking a man where it hurts the most but, instead of backing off, the Bushmen’s acts of defiance only made the enemy more ruthless.
Thus, by the late 1700’s the gloves were well and truly off, and the colonists were enmeshed in a vicious struggle with the Bushmen holed up in the Sneeuberg mountains around Graaff-Reinet. The Bushmen in this region had been living there for centuries, and refused to be pushed out by the invasive Trekboers.
The Trekboers, in turn, refused to be turned back by a bunch of primitive little black men, but the Bushmen attacks were devastating the new farms and settlements of the region. Something had to be done. The white man’s solution was to turn genocidal.
The Final Solution
This final solution to the Bushman problem was happily sanctioned by government, and regular commandos were organised to carry out the job. These bands of armed men rode out on horseback with the express purpose of exterminating any troublesome ‘vermin’ in the region, and the success of each sortie was measured by the body count.
The Bushmen, for their part, would rather die than surrender, and proceeded to perish in great numbers before the bullets of the Boers.
Captured woman and children were given to commando members as servants, or handed over to the Boer’s Hottentot collaborators as wives. The records do not speak of any men who were captured alive. After several years of this ferocious policy, the Sneeuberg Bushmen were no more.
Wanton Slaughter
This battle for land then continued up the coast as the Afrikaners entered Natal and the Zulu became increasingly territorial. The Bushmen were destined to bear the brunt of the escalating conflict and were, once again, dismissed by both sides as inveterate cattle thieves and worthless rascals.
Thus, in several short decades, the mighty white Boers and the powerful Zulu pastoralists inadvertently combined forces to exterminate the immemorial Bushmen and, by the late 1800’s, the Bushmen were gone from their stronghold in the Drakensberg too.
As a result of this wanton slaughter, much of the ancient Bushman lore has been lost. Today, the old recipes for their eternal paint pigments, ancient ethnological beliefs, customs, language and lifestyle are all but unknowable.
This needless waste is summed up in one saddening, maddening story of a lone, elderly Bushman who was shot dead in the foothills of the Drakensberg, late in the 1800’s.
When the killers recovered his body, they saw that the old man was wearing a leather belt, fashioned to hold small pots of pigment and a reed stylus. One of the last traditional Bushmen rock painters was gone forever.
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