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Excerpted from Sarah Britten’s The Art of the South African Insult
“I’m prejudiced because it’s good for survival.” Eric Miyeni
WHEN THE honourable Cape Judge President John Hlophe denied telling attorney Joshua Greeff in 2005 that he was a piece of white shit and it was time he went back to Holland, he may or may not have been continuing a proud South African tradition.
We may not be very good at soccer. Or cricket. Or sticking to the speed limit. (In fact, if we are going to be honest with ourselves, it does seem, from time to time, that we are not very good at anything except inventing automatic pool cleaners, perfecting chutney recipes and carrying out cash in transit heists.) But, at any given point in time, we are very good at calling each other names.
South Africans are, after all, a bunch of Dutchmen and Souties, Charras and Hotnots, Shangaans and the Xhosa Nostra, Bushies and Afs, Goms, Porras, Lebs, Crunchies, Zots, Mlungus, Japies, Boers, Chinamen, Makwerekwere, Rooineks, Rockspiders, Makwankies, Hanskhakis, and yes, (even though we know of course that nobody except Australian cricket supporters use it) Kaffirs.
It’s what defines us as a nation.
1488 and all that
If we’re going to get down to technicalities, of course, it must be said that for millennia, large parts of South Africa were the domain of charmingly artistic people who now, for the most part, arrows on back and bows in hand, prance across fleamarket placemats, hotel staff uniforms and duvet sets from Mr Price Home.
But we all know that history only starts when men show up in boats.
Despite the prevalence of the K-word in our geography in the years preceding (and in some cases, extending into) the New South Africa, the early years of European exploration were disappointingly restrained in their descriptions of their encounters with the locals.
There was that unfortunate incident at Mossel Bay, where Bartolomeo Dias fired a crossbow at the gathering crowd and killed someone, thus setting the tone for some of the 1600s and the 1700s as well as a large part of the 1800s in addition to the 1900s. Nonetheless, we have to wait until the arrival of the Dutch to see some good quality nastiness.
And the Dutch, efficient as they were back then in the days before they became limp-wristed liberals who decriminalised hashish and embraced various forms of loose living, wasted no time. According to a book compiled in 1652,
The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature….[They] are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks…They all smell fiercely, as can be noticed at a difference of more than twelve feet against the wind.
The smell must have been impressive, given that the European visitors themselves back then were hardly poster boys for personal hygiene. As we all know, the world would have to wait 350 years for Jacques Kallis to tell us all about the importance of using antibacterial showergel.
By 1653, Van Riebeeck, the man with the long hair and chiselled cheekbones who used to smile mysteriously from our bank notes back when it was $2 to the Rand, was begging the VOC to remove him from the company of the ”dull, stupid, lazy, stinking people” at the Cape and send him to Japan instead.
Laziness was a big problem at the Cape. The laziness of the locals became the third favourite obsession of the Europeans, after the difficulty of finding a good slave and the challenge of driving the local wildlife to extinction.
In 1654, Johan Nieuhof declared:
They are lazier than the tortoises which they hunt and eat.
In 1667, a man by the mildly Harry Potteresque name of Volquart Iverson observed: They are a lazy and grimy people who will not work.
1691: They are a very lazy sort of people (William Dampier)
By 1719, nobody had thought of anything new to say, but Peter Kolb said it anyway: They are, without doubt, both in body and mind, the laziest people under the sun.
And, in a dazzling display of originality,
1801: Perhaps the laziest nation on earth (C.F. Damberger)
In contrast, Governer Wagenaar, who replaced Van Riebeeck, was very worried about the laziness of the burghers, who exhibited “indolence” and led “irregular and debauched lives”. This was 1663.
How comforting to know that nothing has changed.
1836 and all that
“Voortrek, draadtrek, saamtrek”. “Trekking, wanking and coming together”, as performance artist Peter van Heerden sums up Afrikaner history.
If you were to sum up South African history in general, you would probably only require two words instead of three, namely stealing and killing. Most of our history up to and including 1902 involves grasping British imperialists, backward Boers and savage Natives. None of them liked each other very much. The American historian Stephen Crane summarised the situation that led to not one, but two wars:
To the Boers, the English seemed prejudiced and arrogant beyond mortal privilege; the English told countless tales of the Boers’ trickery, their dullness, their boasting, their indolence, their bigotry. Certainly, Crane noted, the Boer was not exactly a fun-loving party animal.
“But in spite of his dour sanctimoniousness, he was not a perfect person, any more than his brother Briton.” When the Great Trek started in 1836, the British seemed to think it was good riddance. Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary at the time wrote, “I can hardly suppose it serious…if reports be true, they are no longer useful citizens but freebooters.” Then followed lots of battles in which Boers, British and Natives took turns to slaughter each other.
Even God got involved, stepping in to help the Boers at Blood River but apparently deciding to sit out the rest of the nineteenth century. The ancestors weren’t going to be left out either, sending messages to Nongqawuse, who told the Xhosa that if they slaughtered their cattle and burned their crops, the white man would be driven into the sea. (It turned out the ancestors were actually a third force and secretly conspiring with the white man.)
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