Khoikhoi

"Khoi" redirects here. For the Iranian city, see Khoy.

The Khoikhoi ("men of men") or Khoi, sometimes spelt KhoeKhoe, are a historical division of the Khoisan ethnic group of south-western Africa, closely related to the Bushmen (or San, as the Khoikhoi called them). At the time of the arrival of white settlers in 1652 they had lived in southern Africa for about 30,000 years, and practised extensive pastoral agriculture in the Cape region.

Name

They were traditionally - and are still occasionally in colloquial language - known to white colonists as the Hottentots, a name that is nowadays considered offensive by the Oxford Dictionary of South African English. The word "hottentot" meant "stutterer" in the colonists' northern dialect of Dutch, although some Dutch use the verb "stotteren" to describe the clicking sounds (klik being the normal onomatopoeia, parallel to English) typically used in the Khoisan languages. The word lives on, however, in the names of several African animal and plant species, such as the Hottentot Fig, or Ice Plant (Carpobrotus edulis).

History

Khoikhoi social organisation was profoundly damaged and, in the end, destroyed by white colonial expansion and land seizure from the late seventeenth century onwards, which ended traditional Khoikhoi pastoral life. As social structures broke down, some Khoikhoi people settled on farms and became bondsmen or farmworkers; others were incorporated into existing clan and family groups of the Xhosa people.

Although there is no longer any 'pure' ethnic group in southern Africa with an exclusively Khoikhoi identity, mixed race groups such as the Coloured people of the Cape area; the Griqua people of the Western Cape and the Oorlams people of Namibia all possess Khoikhoi heritage or ancestry, as do many Xhosa (mainly Bantu) people of the Eastern Cape, and some people who identify as white South Africans.

Hottentot women were displayed in Europe in the eighteenth century because of their presumed sexual powers. The most notable of these was a woman known as Saartjie Baartman. In his book Regular Gradations of Man (1799), Dr. Charles White, a historical race scientist, claimed blacks were half way between whites and apes in the great chain of being. He used the example of Hottentot women to show the supposedly primal sexuality of blacks. He claimed Hottentot women had overdeveloped breasts, showing a more animal nature. Also cited were the elongated labia minora which among Khoisan women could hang down as many as four inches outside the vulva, and steatopygia; their tendency to develop large deposits of fat on their buttocks, in a very specific way far beyond that of Western women.

Publications

P. Kolben, Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (London, 1731-38);
A. Sparman, Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope (Perth, 1786);
Sir John Barrow, Travels into the Interior of South Africa (London, 1801);
Bleek, Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot Fables and Tales (London, 1864);
Emil Holub, Seven Years in South Africa (English translation, Boston, 1881);
G. W. Stow, Native Races of South Africa (New York, 1905);
A. R. Colquhoun, Africander Land (New York, 1906);
Schultz, Aus Namaland und Kalahari (Jena, 1907);
Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten (Hamburg, 1912);
Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (London, 1977).

External links

Cultural Contact in Southern Africa by Anne Good for the Women in World History website
An article on the history of the Khoikhoi
The genetic heritage of one Afrikaner family

Khoikhoi | Indigenous peoples of Southern Africa | Ethnic groups in Namibia | Ethnic groups in South Africa | African nomads

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Name

History

Publications

See also

External links