Negotiating Contemporary Indigeneity: Cultural Aesthetic and Communicative Practices among Contemporary! Xun and Khwe San Youth of Platfontein, South Africa

Abstract

The San or Bushmen of South Africa have been represented in popular literature and media as hunter-gatherer primitives who live nomadic lives and whose history predates that of all later immigrants to the country. While the ubiquitous representation and myth provide incentives in the form of cultural/ecotourism and engenders much international interest, it has rarely translated into any form of sustainable socioeconomic benefit for the impoverished Bushmen. Rather, it obfuscates accounts of modern acculturation, hinders the process of self-determination and contributes to a systemic socio-political and economic exclusion, repression, and marginalisation of contemporary San in South Africa. The San youth who seem to have suffered the most as a result of this essentialised representation are appropriating modern popular cultures (such as hip-hop) to project self-identity, counter-narratives, and position themselves as a modernised people. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal interviews from 2014 to 2018, this article examines the complex, multi-layered composition of contemporary!Xun and Khwe San identity, which places the youth at the nexus of competing expectations thrown up by imperatives of social change, global influence, dominant social paradigms, poverty, joblessness, and indigeneity. The analysis of their identities in the late-modern South Africa, provokes the question whether contemporary Indigenous people are “indigenizing modernity or modernizing indigeneity.”

Keywords:

• modernising indigeneity
• indigenising modernity
• social integration
• San
• Bushmen

Acknowledgements

This research is drawn from a Doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Johannesburg under the supervision of Professor Keyan Tomaselli and Professor Nyasha Mboti.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 I am aware of the controversies surrounding the use of the terms “Bushman”, “San”, “Basarwa” and “Khoi San. The varieties of terms used today are both specific and general to communities and individuals. I have used both “San” and “Bushmen” interchangeably in the study even though many of my respondents preferred the term “Bushmen”.

2 Most of these western researchers are whites. Authors such as Masilela (1987) and Mboti (2013) have questioned the absence of black authors and the context in which historical indigenous knowledge were collected, produced and reproduced.

3 Maughan-Brown (1987: 117) reveals that Bushmen were put on exhibition across South African and European cities.

4 Stuart Douglas (1996) notes that the black majority in South Africa still feel disconnected from the San construct and are ignorant of the real plight of Bushmen especially during the struggle.

5 The San primitive myth is based on the idea and genomics that San or Bushmen are the most genetically ancient people on Earth, having existed for more than 40,000 years in the Southern Africa sub-continent (Diop 1974).

6 The Khoisan is a more generic term that consists of the Bushmen (San), the Khoikhoi, Nama, the Korana, and the Griqua and other so-called aboriginal peoples of South Africa who were distinguished from their black farming neighbours by their click languages (Stavenhagen 2005: 2; De Wet 2012: 508).

7 Communicative practices are understood in the study as “a range of social activities that involve performing, talking and listening and or, more generally, doing anything that involves “messages” in any medium or situation” (Craig 2006: 39).

8 The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) homes refer to the popular small housing units built by the African National Congress (ANC) government of Nelson Mandela in 1994.

9 De Beers in May 2007 approved a grant towards the development of the San Cultural Heritage Route. The route links the !Xun and Khwe of Platfontein (De Beers 2008).

10 At the heart of the contemporary decolonisation discourse is the need to re-centre the indigenous worldview while contesting the enduring legacies of colonialism which continues to position the indigenous persons as subhuman (Smith 1999).

11 I have argued elsewhere that digital media access in Platfontein is enabled by few “privileged”’ persons who can afford internet and mobile data, who then share with others (Bodunrin 2016, 2020).

12 As argued elsewhere, the contemporary practice of hip-hop among Platfontein youth may be interpreted as a new form of the San storytelling tradition (Bodunrin 2016).

Additional information

Funding

Many thanks to Prof. Keyan Tomaselli, whose Rethinking Indigeneity project funded the research.

Notes on contributors

Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin

Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. He has research interests in Urban Indigeneity and politics of identity in contemporary times.