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In South Africa, the myth of white anteriority

The question of white or black precedence in South Africa often comes back to the center of the debates. Historians have played a role that has had important political consequences.

Thirty years after the official repeal of apartheid laws, discussions are still going well between researchers and historians. The subject of the discord: the presence of whites, which would have preceded that of blacks, in South Africa. On this subject, the research is at the very least vague and far from simple. In "Africa: the history in the place", released in 1989, the historian Bernard Lugan returns to this already very agitated debate between specialists. The author explains that “historical reality” allows us to avoid any “speculation”. But what reality? South African colonial history is clear: Vasco da Gama, in the XNUMXth century, landed on the Natal coast in South Africa without the Portuguese colonizing the country. It was the Dutch who were at the origin of the first European settlement, in the middle of the XNUMXth century. But the debate centers on the period before colonization.

Before that, between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, the Bushmen and the Bantu fought a battle of territories, two centuries after the arrival of the Bushmen pastoralists from the center of the continent. But Bernard Lugan sums up the pre-colonial history of South Africa as follows: “South of the Orange River and the Fish River, the Dutch settlers did indeed constitute the first sedentary settlement, while the anteriority of the Blacks north of the river Kei is not contested by anyone ”. However, historical doubt remains, he continues, about the area between the Fish and Kei rivers. “South of the Kei River, were the Xhosa already established, were they being established, or were they just beginning to roam the land, pushing cattle in front of them, when the first Europeans from the Cape arrived? », Asks Bernard Lugan.

If the historian tries to relaunch the debate in the field of history, we are no further ahead. “Scientific truth compels us to recognize that blacks, like whites, are foreigners in South Africa. Some have invaded the region from the north and others from the south, ”he adds to kick in touch, arguing that“ their forward march was even partly carried out simultaneously. It was at the time of their contact that the border between the white and black areas emerged. The advance of the white pioneer front was favored by the possession of horses and firearms ”.

"The white South African nation was built on the myth of a virgin country built by Europeans"

Of course, the question has the merit of being asked. Responding to them means giving each other "natural rights which derive from the priority of their occupation", adds the historian.

Reading Bernard Lugan, it would therefore be almost impossible to answer the question of the anteriority of whites or blacks in South Africa. What feed the theory of followers of Afrikaner nationalism. This is deplored by other historians, like Etienne Augris, professor of history and geography in the British international section at the Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc in Nancy. In the journal L'Éléphant, he assures us that the theory developed by Lugan serves the Afrikaner theory without being based on clear and precise facts. “The white South African nation was built on the myth of a virgin country built by Europeans,” he writes. The reality is quite different. The difficulty or even the impossibility of writing a political history does not imply its absence ”. The author of these lines explains that "oral history and archeology are not enough to fill the uncertainties linked to the absence of written sources".

Uncertainties that have caused a rewrite of history. A story which, in its revisited version, legitimized the possession of the land by white populations. "This process of rewriting white history, and Afrikaner in particular, deserves reflection insofar as it is an avatar of the remnants of apartheid discourse", summarizes Gilles Teulié, professor of British and Commonwealth civilization at the Aix-Marseille University and specialist in South Africa.

The Khoisan, decimated by the colonists

Because this assertion consisting in thinking that "the Dutch colonists did indeed constitute the first sedentary population" in the south of the Orange River and the Fish River could suggest that the territory conquered by the colonists was desert and devoid of any native population. However, the indigenous populations were indeed there. At the time, "this progressive occupation of the territory is all the more easily done as it meets only weak resistance on the part of the indigenous population", writes Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, doctoral student in geography at Paris IV- Sorbonne.

The indigenous populations are then made up of Khoisan, better known under the names of Bushmen and Hotentots - terms today pejorative -, little by little decimated by the material of the colonists but also by the diseases that the latter brought with them. .

The Afrikaner identity therefore arises from a systematic rereading of history. The events are reinterpreted, with Calvinist religious discourse. It must be said that since the arrival of the employees of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, the relationship between Europeans and local African populations has been complicated, and has had consequences for the entire history of the country. until the establishment of the pillar laws of apartheid.

A less violent colonization than in Nieuw-Nederland

But why did we come to think that the whites were the first to be present in the south of the country? Aware of the concerns of colonization in North America, and in particular in Nieuw-Nederland - New York today - the Dutch settlers had neither the right to brutalize the local populations, nor to enslave them or to steal their cattle. A smooth arrival which made it possible to erase, over time, the presence of the Khoisan.

“The history of the Whites is then grafted onto a centuries-old history. That of the hunters without (the Bushmen, editor's note), the first inhabitants of the region, ousted from Cape Town and driven back to the desert areas of the interior by the Khikhois pastoralists, while to the east and north of the Orange River is develop well-organized societies in the Bantu, Nguni, Sotho and Tswana worlds ”, writes the French historian and ethnologist Paul Coquerel. A story which, rewritten, will give the impression that the white settlers have arrived in an uninhabited space. A myth which, perpetuated, changed the political history of a country which will forever be marked by apartheid.

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