Abstract
This chapter explores the early processes of the colonial encounter and the formation of proto-states by both settlers and indigenous populations. The purpose is to demonstrate the intensely trans-level processes that gave rise to what otherwise appear to be hyper local processes of race and identity formation, particularly among Afrikaners, and the roots of the South African state. This chapter explores how movements of people and material began to engender nascent identity and state building by the Zulu peoples and the boer republics.
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The trekboers also encountered the San, a loose grouping of hunter-gatherers. It was not uncommon for the trekboers to slaughter any adult male San they encountered and take the surviving women and children as slaves. In this sense the San too augmented the cheap labour available to the trekboers, though not to the extent of the Khoikhoi. The slaughter of the San became so regular, however, that it was organised into sometimes monthly ‘commandos’ toward which all trekboers were expected to contribute. This process was so thorough that Adhikari (2010) argues it constitutes a genocide.
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Many of these coloureds came to be known as Griquas who would go on to form their own, albeit temporary, states on the edges of the expanding British colony in the nineteenth century (see Ross 1976).
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Now Makhanda, Eastern Cape.
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This is not so odd as it seems nor so much a thing of the past. Carl Sagan thought the extraordinary accuracy of celestial predictions by the Dogon tribe in northern Cameroon surely indicated that some missionary or white traveler had imparted this knowledge some time in the past (recounted in Mudimbe 1988).
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Keegan is referring to liberal scholars of the twentieth century where liberalism provides a theoretical lens with which to analyse the past, its failings, and its historical unfolding.
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The presence of gold in the area of what is now Johannesburg had long been known but the Jo’burg find was much easier to access as it lay literally, if only initially, right at the surface.
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The full name is the Afrikaner Broederbond, sometimes simply referred to as the ‘Broederbond’ or ‘the Bond’.
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Becker, D.A. (2020). The Meaning of Belonging: Race and the Making of South Africa. In: Neoliberalism and the State of Belonging in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39931-3_3
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