Orangutans, Bushmen, and Black Women: Genocide and Scientific Racism from the Cape to the US and Europe

In a Genocide course examining case studies of genocidal violence in African history, the genocide perpetrated by the Cape Colony and its frontier colonists against the Cape San peoples of the northern Cape revealed an ugly etymology for the appellation "Bushman." According to Guenther's "From Brutal Savages to  Harmless People: Notes on the Changing Western Image of the Bushman," the Cape Colonists used the Malay word for man of the forest or man of the bush to describe hunter-gatherers in the Cape. However, the word Bushmen was used rather loosely, a reference for fugitive slaves adopting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, dispossessed Khoikhoi herders who joined San/Bushmen bands (for the sake of convenience, I shall henceforth refer to the indigenous peoples of southern Africa who engaged in hunter-gathering as San, even though that word itself is derived from a pejorative Khoi word), or Cape San peoples whose long presence in southern Africa is seen in their rock art, and evidence of Khoisan-speaking peoples mixing with Bantu-speakers (such as the Xhosa, who acquired clicks in their language). Upon learning that European trekboer colonists, their mixed-race "Baster" allies, and Khoikhoi servants (essentially slaves) began to refer to the Cape San peoples with a term derived from that for the orangutan of Indonesia is both highly disturbing as well as quite revealing of predominant settler attitudes toward the "brutal savages" of the Cape, whose hunter-gatherer lifestyle was an obstacle to colonial expansion on the northern frontier and pastoralism. Unfortunately for the Cape San peoples, no amount of noble savage idealism, British missionary activity, or even British colonial rule in the Cape colony would end the commando raids that mercilessly slaughtered San adults while enslaving the children as "apprentices." What follows below is an examination of the genocidal violence targeting San bands who resisted for several decades colonial encroachment on their semi-arid lands as ancestors of the Griqua and Boers continued to slaughter, enslave, and steal land from the San followed by some of the links between the racist dehumanization of indigenous peoples of the Cape in South Africa and the dehumanization of all African and black peoples.

 The extremely negative racial stereotyping of the Cape San or Bushman peoples can be explained in many ways. This period was one of increasing racialization along pseudo-scientific lines in Western Europe and its colonies, particularly by the mid-19th century. Enlightenment science and rationalism paved the way for a return to a Hobbesian, negative perspective on Bushman societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The San bore the brunt of racist stereotyping in comparison to Bantu-speakers and Khoikhoi based on their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, in the eyes of European and other colonial settlers moving beyond the frontier of the Cape colony, were inefficiently using the land and therefore, in order to justify exterminatory campaigns against competitors for the land, racist claims of San inferiority were widely adopted. Indeed, the origin of the appellation “Bushman” can be derived from the Dutch version of the Malayan word for the orangutan of Indonesia (Guenther 127), indicating the dominant views toward San held by European colonists, as if the San were nothing but animals with unintelligible language, regressive and backwards societal norms, and lacking marriage, proper family units, and therefore any semblance of humanity (Guenther 128 and Kicherer 8).

Unlike the Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa and pastoralist Khoikhoi groups, the San were hunter-gatherers whose lifestyle meant dependence on water holes and, inevitably, conflict with pastoralist trekboers and others who wanted land and water for pasture to support their herds (Guenther 134). They justified their use of the land and water resources based on their civilized purposes of pastoralist food production for markets, Christianity, whiteness. Bantu-speakers were, at the time, also experiencing colonial encroachment, but, because of their agro-pastoralist economies and more advanced technology, were harder to defeat and deprive of land compared to San bands dispersed across the semi-arid and arid lands of the northern Cape, thereby facilitating stereotypes of Bushman inferiority, primitiveness, and animalistic features. Moreover, Bantu-speakers and Khoikhoi, as fellow pastoralists, had a valuable commodity in their herds and more contact with European colonists and missionaries (Guenther 136). Although British views of the San could take on positive dimensions, such as the potential for Christian conversion and civilization of the Cape San, under British tutelage of course, these views were paired with anti-Boer sentiments and failed to lead to policy changes that prevented further colonial encroachment, enslavement, and dispossession (Guenther 130-131).

These aforementioned views and relations in the colonial Cape as well as the general state of lawlessness and weak colonial authority in the region culminated in genocidal violence against San groups and kidnapping of children as the San resisted colonial settlers’ expansion into their land. Racism provided a justifiable reason for settlers and their informal Commandos that wrought havoc on the frontier, killing, kidnapping, and seizing territory. Since this period coincided with the development of theories of white supremacy both in Europe and the colonies, the San, as hunter-gatherer obstacles to colonial pastoralist expansion, were easily demonized, dehumanized, and conveniently erased as independent people except in the worst areas. Since similar developments of genocidal violence and extermination occurred in the US during the 18th colonial genocides with racist overtones against hunter-gatherer societies were clearly not rare.

What is of note, however, is the widely held beliefs by some Europeans and European colonists in Africa, Europe and the Americas about racist ties between Africans and orangutans. For instance, the myth that orangutan males preferred black women just as black men preferred white women over their own, uttered by Thomas Jefferson  and was even painted in the 18th century as fact (see picture above, of a black man shooting an arrow at what the artist labels an orangutan, even though orangutans do not live in Africa and of course do not engage in sexual intercourse with black women!)! This illustrates that across European colonial and Euro-American thought, scientific racism prior to the rise of Social Darwinism already linked African bodies with apes, whether they were the "brutal savages" of the northern Cape (or perhaps the Nama of Namibia, victims of German colonial genocide like the Herero in early 20th century Namibia, or German South West Africa), African-descended slaves in the US, or Africans more generally, as some of the work illustrates. By the 19th century, with taxonomy, advances in zoology and biology, and legacies of earlier racist, imperialist perceptions of indigenous peoples of southern Africa (and elsewhere throughout the globe), European and American artists continued their association of black people with apes through comparisons of skulls, assumptions about intelligence, and Eurocentric standards of beauty and civilization. The prognathous features of "Negroes" versus the "Caucasian" (a term that only caught on after Blumenbach popularized it, despite its lack of any scientific merit) somatic norm and comparisons of the former with apes only consolidated European and Euro-American opinions on black inferiority.  Furthermore, other Khoisan-speaking indigenes of southern Africa found their way into the burgeoning field of scientific racism in Europe, as Sarah Baartman's examination by French scientists in the early 19th century reveals, with the ugly result of demonization, racialized sexualization of black bodies, and an ugly legacy in the use of black people for human zoos, freakshows, and colonial racial hierarchies. 

Clearly, the racist dehumanization targeting Cape San, Hottentots, "Bushmen," Khoikhoi, and other peoples of southern Africa was linked not only to racism and sexism directed at black women slaves in the Americas, but Africans more broadly as the late 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of scientific racism. Not only were the San equated with apes and orangutans (despite the fact that orangutans did not live in Africa!), but orangutans were believed to sleep with black women! "Negroes" were associated with orangutans and chimpanzees to contrast both with the superior "Caucasian" as well as justify enslavement of Africans in the US (as Jefferson's notes on "Negroes" reveals). The exploitation and examination of indigenous peoples such as Sarah Baartman and even Ota Benga, a "Pygmy," lay bare this ugly history linking racism, sexism, science, slavery, colonialism and genocide. Today, the only San peoples that exist in South Africa are descendants of groups from Namibia and Angola, the earlier Cape San wiped out by colonial encroachment with survivors absorbed into trekboer society as essentially slave laborers. The intersections of race, gender, pseudoscience and colonialism undoubtedly run deep...

The Khoikhoi and Griqua of South Africa

When the Dutch East India company decided to form a permanent supply base and colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 at the southwestern tip of the African continent, the local peoples, who had been there for several centuries, were Khoikhoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers further north. The Cape settlement quickly grew due to the desire for additional farmland, inevitably resulting in conflicts with the Khoikhoi using the hinterland for pasture. In addition to lacking firearms and metal weapons used by the Dutch and Huguenot settlers, the Khoikhoi population was decimated by European diseases and reduced to vassalage and slavery for the expanding white populations. Of course intermarriage also occurred, gradually giving birth to the first of the "Cape Coloured" population of contemporary South Africa and Namibia, the Griqua peoples. Those who managed to escape complete assimilation into the growing Cape Colony's European-dominated society as subservient peoples, continued their pastoralist lifestyle on the outskirts of the gradually encroaching whites from Cape Town. Oddly, the trekboers,  white colonists moving further north into southern Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries often adopted a similarly semi-nomadic, pastoralist economy while engaging in a long series of frontier wars with other peoples of South Africa, especially the Xhosa. 

The Cape Coast of South Africa during this period, long before the rise of apartheid, was still one ruled by white supremacy. The difference here, however, was the cosmopolitan, multiracial origins of many of the residents. Indeed, even if lacking significant "mixed" heritage, many were culturally heterogeneous, including the whites, coming from the Netherlands, German-speaking states, and France. In addition to the European presence, enslaved Africans from West Africa, Central Africa, and Mozambique were also forcibly imported, along with Malay and other Southeast Asians from Dutch Indonesia. Indeed, the Dutch East India Company's reason for the Cape Coast settlement was to restock Dutch ships en route to Indonesia and back. Their descendants, the Cape Malay, brought Islam to Cape Town and became part of the ethnic stew of the modern Cape Coloured population as well as contributing their own cuisine and religious traditions. The Griqua, descendants of Khoikhoi herders speaking Afrikaans, started their own independent church and formed a separate community that existed as a middleman between the Bantu-speaking South African populations to the north, and the whites to the south. The Griqua also engaged in slave raiding, selling their captives to whites in exchange for firearms which were then used for more slave raids and conflicts. 

 Adam Kok III, Griqua leader 

The aforementioned Griqua started their own settlements as well as independent states with their own coinage before being incorporated into the encroaching British colony of South Africa, like the Boer republics. The interesting thing about the Griqua, however, is that many do not appear "mixed" at all, so the Griqua identity is more about the fusion of cultures to produce a new identity as the Khoikhoi were gradually deprived of land and incorporated into the "white" society of the Cape settlers. I use "white" in quotations since many of the early settlers' progeny were mixed people who, because "money whitens," were able to become significant actors within the colony. Anyway, the Khoikhoi have also been classified as a separate "race" from Bantu-speaking South Africans, based on their phenotype and distinctive clicks. However, some Bantu languages in southern Africa have incorporated clicks and, if one could use the phenotypes of some "black Bantu" South Africans, the Khoisan-speaking peoples have long mixed with Bantu-speakers who had reached southern Africa nearly 2000 years ago. So, I guess my point is the ridiculousness of assigning peoples like the Khoi as a separate "race" than blacks, since both groups are dark-skinned and the result of local adaptation to that region of southern Africa. The Griqua themselves have also claimed their Khoikhoi heritage, particularly in the demands for the return of Sarah Baartman's remains from France. Sarah was a Khoi woman with large buttocks brought to Europe to participate in freak shows. 

Below are several pictures depicting the Khoikhoi, Griqua, and others in South Africa.