Settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past: a response to Burnett et al.’s ‘a politics of reminding’

ABSTRACT

In ‘A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district’, Burnett et al. scrutinize the memory activism of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council, which is part of the wider ‘Khoisan resurgence’ sweeping across post-apartheid South Africa. Although the authors missed important nuances, they also pointed out flaws in the way I used Niezen’s ‘therapeutic history’ [Niezen, R. (2009). The rediscovered self: Indigenous identity and cultural justice. McGill-Queen’s Press] in my work to account for why Khoisan activists turn to the past. I therefore not only respond to their criticism, but also revise aspects of my theoretical framework. Therapeutic history is not divorced from material concerns. Nor is it representative of all engagements with the past by indigenous people or simply the opposite of academic history. Instead, by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and theorizing alongside the Khoisan, I show how it captures emic discourses on the past that entangle notions of indigenous identity, healing, and history in order to resist settler colonialism and its oppressive etic histories. While the concept of therapeutic history has its limitations, it effectively highlights indigenous people’s agency in the face of settler colonialism in South Africa and elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Therapeutic history
• emic history
• etic history
• settler colonialism
• Khoisan activism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided invaluable comments. I am also indebted to scholars Egon Bauwelinck and Francesco Longo for taking my arguments seriously when they were still in their infancy. Finally, I also thank Chiara Verbuyst Pugliese for her insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The correct way of referring to the indigenous people of South Africa remains a hotly debated issue (Bam, 2021, pp. xxi-xxviii). I am aware of the controversies surrounding ‘Khoisan’ and I use peoples’ personal preferences whenever I can. ‘Khoisan’ is nevertheless my default option because it was the most common form of identification I encountered during my ethnographic fieldwork.

2 The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act has since been deemed unconstitutional because there has been insufficient public participation (Broughton, 2023).

3 Khoisan activists also suffer the aftermath of racial discrimination by virtue of their classification as ‘Coloured’. However, these grievances should be analytically distinguished from those related to ongoing settler-colonial domination (Veracini & Verbuyst, 2020).

4 ‘Coloured’ for instance remains an option on the census. It is also used as a metric in the context of affirmative action policies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek under Grant 12ZT622N.

Notes on contributors

Rafael Verbuyst

Rafael Verbuyst is an anthropologist and historian. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s History Department. He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Khoisan activists since 2014. Rafael’s research interests are Khoisan activism, indigeneity, land claims, settler colonialism and ethnographic methodology. His work has appeared in journals such as Anthropology Southern Africa, The European Journal of Development Research, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Social Dynamics. His monograph, Khoisan Consciousness: An Ethnography of Emic Histories and Indigenous Revivalism in Post-Apartheid Cape Town, was published by Brill in 2022.