History shows that on occasion the lesser culture that is sometimes oppressed or invaded by a more advanced culture, will end up adopting the brutality of that culture, despite being subjected to it themselves. They go on to commit the crimes of those who abused them previously. Even worse, history shows that sometimes a civilized society will produce a system or person who inflicts genocide upon his own people. Stalin and Mao come to mind. Hitler was the same throughout Europe, although he was at war. Neither Stalin nor Mao were at war. They were simply genocidal towards their own citizens for their own ends.
Similar events may have occurred further back in history too under other such tyrants and megalomaniacs. Our history is littered with wanton human tragedy that brought nothing but needless harm to innocent masses. Despite all the education in morals, ethics and theology in which we prided ourselves at the time, still our ancestors were able to commit similar genocides upon lesser advanced societies when we encountered them on our colonization of the planet. Whole races were almost wiped off the face of the earth by so-called pious and god loving civilized people like my ancestors.
I don’t know all the details of how the South American or Australian or North American indigenous people were slaughtered, but I can tell you about my own country of South Africa, and how the indigenous people were basically wiped out as a race by my British and Dutch ancestors. I’m not talking about the black Bantu or Nguni tribes who still proliferate the nation and now actually rule it. I’m talking about the older race of smaller stone age hunter/gatherers that actually were here before the European settlers, as well as the central African black Bantu tribes, arrived. I’m talking about the Bushmen, properly known as the Khoi or San indigenous people of greater southern Africa.
Doe to the push by European explorers and traders to reap the treasures of the planet wherever they found them, Dutch settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa to set up a permanent base for their trade ships to the East at the time, around 1652. They found here a tribe of stone age people which they called Hottentots, who herded cattle along these shores and with whom they bartered initially.
However, there was also another stone age race, more mongoloid in features who did no cattle herding, nor any such pastoral activities or agriculture whatsoever. They were pure hunter/gatherers who lived naked and roamed the land without any concept of ownership or territorial boundary. These Khoi and San Bushmen are clearly described in the famous literature of Sir Lourens Van Der Post, which includes books like “The Lost World of the Kalahari”.
Sir Lourens was born and raised in the early 1900s in the region bordering the Kalahari desert, which today stretches through South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. It is there that he learned about the Bushmen from his nannies as a small child, and where he later went on safari expeditions to search out the last possible remains of the Bushmen tribal people who may still inhabit that vast desert interior. As a descendent of the Dutch settlers, he saw how they were treated and learned of the tragic history of their race. He felt the same affinity and compassion for these underdogs that I do, being perhaps a self-reflective soul. He was able to accurately articulate his findings and the tragic history of his own parents and grandparents who committed the last genocidal crimes of wiping out most of the Khoi San Bushmen race.
However, it was not only the European settlers, with their so-called piety and their Semitic bible in one hand, who systematically went out on hunting parties to murder every last adult Bushman that they could hunt down. It was also the black African Bantu tribes who slaughtered them at certain points around that time in history. All of this occurred sometime from the late 1600s all the way to the early 1900s, from what I can make out in the writings of Sir Lourens. These humble first people, who had no more than bow and arrow and stone implements, were easily slaughtered by the civilized cultures with their guns and horses, as well as by the Bantu with their metal spears.
This history is something that shames me as a descendent of such so-called civilized pious Europeans. And I believe it shames the Bantu (Xhosa and Zulu and others) as well because it was them who recently chose to place the Bushman on the new national coat of arms when they took over the government in 1994, as Apartheid and white rule ended. The new coat of arms has, among other things, a depiction of two Bushmen facing each other in greeting. Under them in their own now extinct or “dead” language is written the motto of South Africa, which in English translates as “diverse peoples unite”.
The descendants of those Khoi San children who were taken onto slavery or serfdom when their parents were slaughtered, still live on in mixed race citizens of South Africa, but their original culture and often their spirit is broken, destroyed by alcoholism, Christian theology and modernization. And you might even find a show-bottle tribe of Bushmen in the desert, though they are more a tourist attraction nowadays. These humble souls, no more than five feet tall, are the real indigenous people of Southern Africa. The rest of us wiped them out when we colonized the territory. Yet their spirit lives on in my thoughts and mind as I explore their ancestral cave dwellings nearby to me on the south coast of Africa, known as middens, which date back perhaps thousands of years.
If my so-called civilized ancestors could commit such a genocide on their march toward colonization, what’s stopping the next future more advanced “civilization” from wiping me out on their march toward imminent globalization? History may not exactly repeat but it usually rhymes. Chinese takeaway anyone?
(images pixabay)
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