In search of indigeneity

Abstract

The Cape Colony served as the incubating historical micro-environment in which the notion of racialised identity would provide the foundations for incipient social relations which would at once underpin and structure both racial and ethnic consciousness as permanent features of society. Focusing on the ongoing public debates on the South African (pre-colonial) ‘indigeneity’ of African population demonstrated by some sections of the Khoisan cultural and political leadership’s demand to be recognised as ‘the first people of South Africa’, this analysis maintains that the current discourse on this issue is historically illogical, decontextualised and tainted by colonialist perspective, reflected in the uncritical reliance on Eurocentric assumptions and conceptual scheme to grasp pre-colonial inter-cultural dynamics and conceptions of state and land proprietorship. Colonial administration saw tribalism as a useful ideology for the durability of colonialism. Tribalism and ethnicity received undue emphasis with the onset of colonial political administration.