SOS Bushmen

The Bushmen certainly stole Khoi cattle, because the concept of private ownership of animals was foreign to them.

But the Khoi started the process by stealing the Bushmen’s land when they colonised the southern and western Cape and proceeded to wipe out or reduce to serfdom every Bushman they could lay hands on.

The Khoi south of the Fish River were at the losing end from the 1660s onwards, when southward-moving Xhosa clans began crossing over and settling.

The Dutch did not enslave any local people. Dutch East India Company policy was to set up truck stops along its routes to and from the Far East; it was not interested in establishing colonies or making war on local inhabitants except strictly in the line of business, or trying to convert them to Christianity.

The Khoi and Bushmen were never enslaved – instead, slaves were brought in from West and East Africa, India and today’s Indonesia.

The constitution of the Batavian Republic,which took over at the Cape in 1803, expressly forbade slavery. The colonisation of Southern and Central Africa really began not in 1652 but in 1806, when the British, in O’Riain’s colourful phrase, relieved the Batavian Republic of the Cape and then started a relentless take-no-guff expansion process.

Does any of this really matter? It would, if one learnt the lessons from the past and avoided them in the future. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.