Tuesday takeaway....

Much the same as comments on the Khoikhoi from the old Dutch who arrived here with Van Riebeeck. This from an East Indian Company official of the time:

"From us they have learned blasphemy, perjury, strife, quarreling, drunkenness, trickery, brigandage, theft, ingratitude, unbridled lust for what is not one's own, misdeeds unknown to them before, and the accursed lust for gold."

Not comments you'd ever find in the history books we learned from in school, of course. We only learned about the noble European showing the savage the way to the light.

Have you read 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee' by Dee Brown who was Red Indian?

'The white man promised us many things but there was one promise he kept and that was to take our land....Sitting Bull.'

Yep, I've read it.

Keep in mind though the Native Americans weren't angels. Lewis and Clark on their famous exploration to the West coast and back found many tribes almost starved to death, harassed and driven to flight by stronger warlike tribes. Just like Europeans weren't the only ones to take land here - the Amatolas for example was Khoi land, taken by the Xhosa. The Matabele fleeing the Zulu drove numerous tribes out of their homeland in what is now Zimbabwe. And even while Cecil Rhodes was cunningly stealing that land away from them again Lobengula still did yearly raids on the Shona (I think, might have been a different tribe), killing and enslaving men and stealing women and children.

People are people. Especially a few hundred years ago when modern sensibilities didn't exist you wanted the best for your tribe or nation and if that meant driving someone else off land you liked better just because you are stronger than them, then that's what you did. It's not right, but it's what just about everyone was doing.

Thanks Pakie....didn't know that, our school history was very limited, we learnt about the Great Trek, the Voortrekkers and the hardships they faced, the Anglo/Boer wars and its aftermath and the Zulu/Boer wars. Mahatma Ghandi's visit to South Africa sparked my interest in South African politics and my interest in Red Indian history started long after I left school, literature was scarce in those years. Is there anything you can recommend?

Frontiers by Noel Mostert, if you can find it, is a good one. It deals primarily with the Xhosa situation but starts with a very good overview of the initial settlement at the Cape (the quote in my first response above is taken from that) and then the expansion to the north and east and the inevitable conflict that caused.

Forgotten Frontiersmen by Alf Wannenburg (again, if you can find it, these are all out of print) puts a spotlight on lesser known feats in the pioneer days by mostly coloured people like the Griquas that would probably have heroically graced the mainstream history books had they been done by white men.

Peter Becker wrote a series of books on the Matabele, Dingane's reign and the Basotho - Path of Blood, Rule of Fear, Hill of Destiny, all worth it.

Those are what I can quickly recall now but there are hordes of great histories, only thing is to find them as I said as most are out of print. A recent one you may find on Kindle is John Laband's "The Boer invasion of the Zulu Kingdom", which attempts to deal even-handedly with the whole Voortrekker/Zulu situation, especially giving some attention to the much neglected Zulu perspective.

The hardest about American Indian history is to get balanced accounts. Especially in SA those books are not common. Dee Brown gives some insight but I won't exactly call it balanced. I've had some others over the years but can't recall titles anymore as I read far more local history. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose on the Lewis & Clark expedition paints a good overall picture of the world back then just before the whites started expanding, but not something you'd read if you just want to know about the natives. There are encounters with various tribes but it's not the bulk of the book. Just a fascinating journey of endurance and survival if that's your kind of thing.

I have still got Dances with Wolve as one of my favourite movies on computer,     I read a lot about what the English in particular do to the Red bndians and it was ugly.   They did the same with the Xhosas, the Zuluz and the Boers and caused gnerations of utter provery for everybody bar the English gettig rich and destroying more tan anything else to do so.  

Hav you ever ehard of John X Merriman - the Cape Prime Mnister and duing the Anglo Boer War arrested by the English Gvernment - causing a world wide outcry and became a hate symbol of he English.   They hated him since he was a liberal and against apartheid and for giving voting rites to all Christans Black or Colored - the same viewpint of President Kruger.    When King Edward VII had to appoint a new Prime Minister he appoined General Botha - leading ultimately to apartheid.

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Amazon only have 1 copy of Frontiers think it's going to be a struggle.

tx again.

I guess people like shinies. But I recall for example the Incas, while having plenty of gold, didn't attach material value to it. It was decorative and ritualistic/religious as they believed it was the tears of the gods or something to that effect. They found the Spanish obsession with it strange.

Amazon only have 1 copy of Frontiers think it's going to be a struggle.

Ja even in SA it's tough to find a copy unfortunately. Pity, it's probably a book most South Africans should read just to understand that we're not all that different. We all want our little place under the sun, and if you take someone else's for yours you can't blame them when they push back.

Do read a bit about the battle of Grahamstown, Denny. Frontiers gives a more detailed account, but I found this PDF that gives a short summary. If the Xhosa hadn't stuffed that up the settlers may well have abandoned the Eastern Cape at that point. Interesting to speculate on how that might have changed SA history.

https://sewfamhistory.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/the-significance-of-grahamstown.pdf

Fascinating read, had no idea, amazing how one event change leads to another.

cheers

Hence why Grahamstown was renamed "Makhanda" back in 2018

And as with all name changes it didn't make a jot of difference to the town's fortunes. Useless token politics.

Spot on Pakie

All it did was cost so much unecessary wasted funds from changing all the maps, books, road signs etc et c

It's definitely a romantic notion, Plum. I sometimes go down to the river or out into the veld for a day, start a fire, listen to the birds and yes, it brings a beautiful peace. After a few hours you don't miss your phone or your internet or your TV or your cheap entertainment (my personal experience) and then I find myself wondering "how did we give up this for the damn 9-5 grind and being stuck to computer and TV screens or cursing in traffic every day"? But common sense is always at the back of my head. Living off the land is an incredibly difficult and hard life.

I am reminded though, as an example, of the initial diamond rush to the Vaal River and then Kimberley. How many of those old prospectors at Klipdrift on the Vaal took the trip to Kimberley only to turn right around from that chaos and going back to a life of hunting and fishing and digging up the odd diamond along the river. Because that was a hard life, definitely not a prosperous life, but for them a good life, a better one than chasing after wealth. Depends on who you are and what you want.

Another question is how far can we still progress technologically, and how does it benefit us? In my opinion technology has now advanced to a point where it's becoming detrimental to us as a species and we have completely lost harmony with nature. We're killing and poisoning the very thing that sustains us. We can't even drink from our own rivers anymore. Sure, we have good medicine and mostly easy lives, but you also have a huge number of poor people who have no means to provide for themselves because everything is behind fences and corporations are slowly killing small businesses, while the compensation for manual labour for those who have work barely buys you a meal every day. Even in die middle classes most people live lives of "quiet desperation", empty lives tied to the routine of going to work, coming home, eating, watching TV, bed, scrape enough together to pay the bills, repeat. I think far more than anything human beings need purpose, and technology is increasingly replacing that purpose by taking humans out of the equation, denying them a means to contribute and provide. Constant entertainment has just become the new drug to dull our lack of real purpose. We no longer have communities who share freely and support one another because the internet and social media age have convinced us that only the self matters and everyone is busy with his own little struggle for survival and coping, or chasing the next status symbol to one-up the guy next to you. There's a balance to be struck and I don't think we've maintained any sort of balance.

I realize we're all different, but for me, having a self-providing little plot of land, a nice chunk of nature around me, a daily purpose to feed, provide and the means to do it through the labour of my own hands is not a bad life. Certainly one I'd much prefer to the one I have now, tied to the much vaunted technology because the labour of your hands is a dying commodity that can't earn you a living anymore.

I think it's perfectly human to long for simpler times and it's easy to do because your mind will only entertain you with the nice things, romanticize it, and ignore the realities. But to answer your last question about living in tipis, I wouldn't see it as a waste. But that's me.

Nature is without a doubt unmatched. From being in it to learning about it, it never fails to deliver.

For me, there are mainly two consequences of technology that suck on a large scale. Pollution and predatory social media algorithms. Pollution is solvable...I don't think the other one is.

The world is becoming a global society and the problem is that it is marketing companies and social media giants that are shaping the direction of that birth. 

If those two could be removed then I'd feel a lot better about stats like these.

I think it's fair to say that there are plusses and minuses at every level and time of every civilization. With sophistication we became more selfish and greedy but I so hope that we never lose our humanity.

Imagine what people in 300 years from now will be saying about how we managed to live during these times.

Just like we talk about how easy or difficult it was for mankind hundreds of years ago, that is possibly how we will be referred to as well, in the future.

Yes but the average life expectancy in Victorian London was 40 years. Life expectancy in the Congo is 58 years. The best of the past vs the worst of the current.

Life 200 years ago was grim but for a lucky few.

The vast majority of Indians died because of European diseases, not European wars.