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...