'Hottentots' and the Evolution of European Racism

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Journal of European Studies

‘Hottentots’ and the evolution of European racism

NICHOLAS HUDSON University of British Columbia

Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that ‘race’ is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of ‘racism’, under- stood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all ‘savages’. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred. Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots’ ‘Otherness’, but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of ‘race’. ‘Race’, and its corresponding ideology of ‘racism’, I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the ‘Other’ into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture.

Keywords: Hottentot, Khoi, race, racism

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Before the rise of racial science, with the work of Buffon, Kant and Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century, Western hostility to non- European cultures necessarily took a different and less structured form. Indeed, ‘racism’ seems a deceptive term to describe prejudices that lacked justification in the theory that the human species is divided into five or six more or less static sub-groups, or that these ‘races’ can be ranked according to physical differences and innate capacities.1 This is not to deny that hatred of foreign groups existed before the invention of race. Yet racism, in a modern sense, is a more historically specific phenomenon than we are apt to imagine, for distrust or loathing of the Other has taken different forms in different eras in accordance with transforming philosophies, world-views and economic priorities. Racism, that is, has a cultural history. And in guarding against its insidious influence on human thinking and affairs, we have some reason to reflect on how that history has unfolded. We cannot, of course, examine every instance of Western hatred of the Other throughout history. But our investigation can begin to shed light on the evolution of racism by focusing on the development of attitudes towards a particular group that became, quite arguably, the most reviled people in European thought of the early modern era. These were the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a herding society that lived near the Cape of Good Hope when Vasco da Gama first touched there in 1497, and that developed a long and troubled cultural and economic relationship with Europeans over the next four hundred years. By the eighteenth century Hottentots had become proverbial as the most savage of all savage peoples, occupying a rung, according to many, elevated just above the beast. As Sir Joseph Banks commented after his visit to the Cape on Cook’s Endeavour in 1771, Hottentots ‘are generally represented as the outcasts of the human species, a race whose intellectual faculties are so little superior to those of beasts, that some have been inclined to suppose them more nearly related to baboons than to men’ (Banks, 1896: 439).2 The very term ‘Hottentot’ became a familiar insult exchanged among Europeans themselves for any behaviour deemed uncivilized, filthy or ill-mannered. The question this hatred raises is ‘why?’ Why were the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people in colonial expansion, singled out from all other non-European peoples for this abuse? Relatively simple answers spring quickly to mind, such as those presented in Linda Merians’ recent Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early Modern England. Focusing almost exclusively on accounts by English writers, Merians argues that the English needed

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to denigrate another people to prove their own superiority, suggesting later that they wished to ‘vent their frustrations and inscribe their own nightmares’ (Merians, 2001: 19–21 and 244). But these answers beg the question of why the distant Khoikhoi became the special target for this ideological exploitation. In presenting my own explanation of why the Khoikhoi were so despised, I will maintain what might appear, at first, a paradoxical position: the evolution of European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi from contact to the rise of nineteenth-century raciology is characterized not by increasing belief in their Otherness or beastliness but rather by the increasing insistence on the Hottentot’s humanness and cultural banality. In the first phase of contact between this people and Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and Dutch travellers, reactions to the Khoikhoi generally reflect the fear and bewilderment of Europeans who, armed only with their insufficient paradigms of Eden, ‘wild men’ and monsters, found their conceptions about the human universe profoundly shaken. During the Enlightenment, similarly, it was the absolute Otherness of Hottentots that seemed most to preoccupy authors, although increasingly the Khoikhoi came to represent the relativity of all human values and to demonstrate the comparable absurdity of European claims to absolute truth. In the final phase of this evolving relationship, however, the Khoikhoi became increasingly encompassed and ‘normalized’ in the paradigms developed by Europeans to fit all peoples in their globalizing theory of ‘human nature’ – including, finally, the theory of race. The scientific notion of race involved a peculiar economy of Otherness and sameness, for the racial type was simultaneously accepted as ‘human’ while also sub- divided as inherently (as opposed to culturally) peculiar. In short, contrary to the assumption embedded in much post-colonial scholarship about colonization and race, an intellectually respectable and systematic racism became possible only through a process of approximating the foreign Other to the European self. While this process can seem superficially sympathetic to peoples like the Khoikhoi, and often debunked earlier perceptions of monstrous difference or beastly estrangement, it was in fact perfectly compatible with the aims and practices of European racism and imperialism in the nineteenth century and afterwards. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century adventurers who first came to the Cape of Good Hope carried with them a range of ethnological preconceptions which heavily informed their experience of foreign peoples. The medieval myth of the wild man portrayed the uncivilized Other as a hairy, beast-like creature with little or no

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language, an unquenchable sexual drive and, very often, an appetite for human flesh (see Bartra, 1994). While the Khoikhoi lacked the hirsute appearance of the wild man, their virtual nakedness, feral lifestyle and unusual language, whose unique vocal ‘clicks’ sounded to European ears like ‘turkeys clucking’ or ‘farting with their tongues’,3 all seemed to conform roughly to the wild-man stereotype. It was easy to leap to judgements that lacked empirical evidence – for example, that this ‘wild’ people ‘would not scruple’ to ‘eate mans fleshe’, as one frightened English traveller recorded in 1608.4 This traveller’s unsupported suspicion of Khoikhoi cannibalism derived, first, from the undoubted fearsomeness of the Hottentots when the Europeans offended them: fifty to sixty-five Spaniards were slaughtered during the voyage of Francisco d’Almeida in 1510, and thereafter pockets of Europeans were sometimes killed, often for reasons not easy to determine (see Raven-Hart, 1967: 9–11).5 Nor is there any reason to doubt that the almost universal astonishment of Europeans at the dietary habits of the Khoikhoi – they seemed to prefer tripe to animal muscle, making apparently minimal effort to clean and cook their food – had some foundation in real observations, however distant and imperfect. For Europeans, these habits confirmed the ‘beast- like’ nature of the Hottentots, especially at a time when cleanliness and strong dietary values had become the mark of ‘civilized’ life in the European middle ranks (see Vigarello, 1988). These ‘wild men’ also bore some resemblance to the strange visions of foreign peoples, especially in Africa, propagated in works such as the Travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, a name probably as fictional as his fantastical tales. Amidst his menagerie of humanoids who have eyes on each shoulder or who hiss like snakes, this mysterious fourteenth-century writer tells us of people in the Andaman Islands whose ‘ears are so big that they hang down to their knees’, and of other ‘people who have feet like horses, and run so swiftly on them that they overtake wild beasts and kill them’ (Mandeville, 1983: 137). Both these tales find echoes in early accounts of the Khoikhoi, though notably among travellers who seem to be relying mostly on hearsay.6 Nevertheless, even for those able to observe the Khoikhoi more closely, there seemed plenty in their aspect and lifestyle to support Mandeville’s vision of the vast and sometimes monstrous variety of human-like beings. As Gijsbert Heeck exclaimed in 1655, the Khoikhoi were ‘quite unbelievable’ (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 38). Here was a people, it was insisted, who wore the raw and rotting guts of cattle as ornamentation; though white at birth, they smeared their bodies with darkened grease to

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Fig. 1. From Raven-Hart (1971). By permission of A. A. Balkema Press.

make themselves look blacker; they used foul odours as perfumes; the men had one testicle removed at birth, which at least one traveller testified was actually a miniature crystal ball (Anon., 1732: 4, 774); the women possessed an extra membrane or ‘apron’ over their pudenda, as well as breasts so pendulous that they could feed children over their shoulders (another story recounted in Mandeville’s Travels). Among the most copiously illustrated peoples of the seventeenth century, the Hottentots were inevitably portrayed in ways that high- lighted their alleged strangeness. In the accompanying illustrations, for example (see Figures 1 and 2), they are displayed in their grotesque finery or fighting over a tangle of guts.7

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Fig. 2. From Raven-Hart (1971). By permission of A. A. Balkema Press.

Even such strangeness, however, would not be so disruptive to European preconceptions if the Khoikhoi did not display traits that Europeans recognized as undeniably human. Prolonged observation convinced many Europeans that these people, however bizarre or repellent to Western ideas, belonged to the same Adamic lineage as themselves. Even in the earliest accounts of the Khoikhoi, a significant minority of sympathetic observers exerted an important, and often underrated, tug on the evolution of Western attitudes. During Thomas Best’s voyage of 1612, the crew recorded a variety of perspectives, from the most violent repugnance to the more sensitive portrait given by the ship’s chaplain, Patrick Copeland: ‘The people are loving, afraid at first, by reason of the unkindnesse of the Dutch, who came there to make traine Oyle, who killed and stole their Cattell; and at our returning more kind: of middle size, well limmed, very nimble and active’ (Raven-Hart, 1967: 59). Copeland’s blaming the Dutch for injustice against the Khoikhoi reflects, in fact, a very widespread tendency of European nations to claim that the dirt of colonial adventurism covered only the hands of other nations, a belief that demonstrated, at least, a European desire for clean hands: hence

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the self-justifying tone of the anonymous account that we have from the Dutch ship Remonstratie in 1649. In a curiously modern gesture, this writer brushed aside all previous accounts of the Khoikhoi as ‘a sailor’s yarn’, arguing that any violence by Hottentots represented their reaction to European oppression, and promising that a new generation of Khoikhoi, under a ‘good commander’, would deal fairly and gladly speak Dutch (Raven-Hart, 1967: 177–8). Beneath their insalubrious appearance, that is, these people had many moral virtues. Though ‘very dirty and stinking’, as F.-T. De Choisy observed, ‘they are good folk’ (Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 269). Early conventional assumptions that the Hottentots, like all ‘savages’, were sexually promiscuous gave way to the very widespread acknowledgement that husbands and wives were faithful to each other and that they even punished adultery with death.8 While the Khoikhoi are frequently accused of theft in the very earliest accounts (among the most conventional features of colonial narratives around the world), Dutch settlers seemed satisfied with their extensive business dealings with the Khoikhoi, trusting them around their goods and property. Similarly, if the Khoikhoi looked like the ‘nasty, brutish’ savages imagined by Hobbes, they were evidently not in a Hobbesian state of war. As François Leguat observed, ‘their Humanity towards one another, yields in nothing to that of the Chineses’ (Raven-Hart, 1971: 2, 436). Early assumptions that they had no government or ‘polity’ gave way to abundant evidence of social cohesion and cooperation; the belief that they were a nation of ‘atheists’, though it remained part of traditional lore concerning the Hottentot, was in fact questioned very early on by travellers who observed their moonlit worship and rituals. In summary, for reasonably fair and thoughtful Europeans, prolonged relations with the Khoikhoi threw into doubt many of the assumptions that had informed European ethnography since Herodotus. How could one explain a people who seemed so ‘brutish’ in their dirt and squalor, yet who clearly possessed qualities of benevolence, honesty and chastity? Europeans were even willing to admire certain features of Hottentot culture, such as their sharp blades, herbal remedies and skill with cattle. The ready explanation for savage degeneracy was environmental, the hardness and isolation of life outside Europe usually being blamed for both darkened skin and degraded manners.9 Yet even the environmental explanation seemed problematic, given that the Cape region seemed virtually Edenic in the mildness of its climate, its fertility and its natural beauty. Surely such a paradise, as J. M. Coetzee remarks in White

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Writing, should contain beings of Adamic innocence and beauty – but instead it contained Hottentots, springing alarming puzzles about the very myth of an innocent garden (Coetzee, 1988: 2–3). Was it, in fact, even possible that living in the Garden of Eden presented inherent challenges to the purity prized by Europeans? As one traveller mused, perhaps the very luxury of this garden had precipitated the supposed sloth and dirtiness of its inhabitants, who (not unreasonably) laughed at the Dutch for working hard to obtain what was so easily gathered in this land of abundance.10 Another explanation was even more challenging and would set the agenda for discussion of the Hottentots during the Enlightenment: perhaps the Khoikhoi in fact embodied an alternative to European values and attitudes, showing the diversity and power of the ‘custom’ which ruled over all peoples, in Europe as well as elsewhere. Very early, travellers revealed their nervous amusement that Khoikhoi customs were, in fact, analogous to European customs, though strangely inverted. Though born ‘white’, it was said, they apparently preferred black, and painted themselves appropriately. Their filthiness and foul smell, thought travellers, arose not merely from an impoverished life, but was actually sought and cultivated as a beauty or dignity. It was the richest Khoikhoi, not the poorest, who were smeared most fulsomely with fat and dirt, a sign that they had cattle to spare for this decoration. Even the Khoikhoi taste for precious metals seemed a bizarre deviation from European ideas: the Khoikhoi valued not gold, but copper, which they purchased from the colonists at great expense of cattle and fashioned into elaborate ornamentation. Such details could hardly be related without drawing detailed comparisons between European and Hottentot culture, and early descriptions repeatedly portray Hottentots as a kind of parody of Europeans. Consider, for example, Georg Meister’s observations in 1677 on the ‘wonderful ceremonies’ surrounding Hottentot courtship and marriage, which consistently draw from European customs as their frame of reference. ‘The friends of the bridegroom come together’, he tells us, ‘and then [the groom] throws a thick, greasy cow-gut around the neck of his sweetheart instead of lovely pearls and golden chains, and this is the true bond of love, which is worn until it falls off of itself’ (Raven-Hart, 1971: 1, 349). Elsewhere Meister paints a ludicrous picture of Hottentot men rising from a meal of barely cooked guts, bowing ‘most humbly’ to their hosts, and going off ‘two-by-two in their leather coats like the merchants of the Exchange in Amsterdam or Hamburg in their silken ones’ (Raven- Hart, 1971: 1, 203).

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Such descriptions were presumably intended to make the Khoikhoi seem laughable. Yet parody is a dangerously two-edged sword, threatening to suggest that the differences between Hottentot and European manners were not absolute at all, but merely relative. For what, indeed, made gold better than copper? Were not the richest European men also the ones with the most fat, though theirs was inside? Did not European women also smear their faces with grease and dangle shiny objects on their bodies? The fact that Europeans repeatedly suspected that they glimpsed their own visage in the unflattering mirror of Khoikhoi life helps to explain why this people so commonly served as currency of abuse among Europeans of the eighteenth century. To call someone a ‘Hottentot’ because they were ill-mannered or dirty or ignorant or atheistical was, implicitly, to acknowledge that inhabitants of England, France or Germany could act very like the natives of the Cape. This reaction, loosely speaking, represents a kind of ‘racism’ – but a racism unsupported by scientific theories of neatly boxed human varieties and innate degeneracy. The particular viciousness and obsessiveness of the European denigration of the Hottentots reveals something more complicated than a desire to feel superior; it suggests an awareness that the loathsome strangeness of Khoikhoi manners in fact derived from the common absurdity of all human beings. And it was precisely this anxiety that made the Khoikhoi a particularly tempting source of satiric commentary on European life and manners among leading satirists of the age. In 1711, for example, the English Tory controversist Charles Leslie portrayed his arch- adversary, the Whig bishop Benjamin Hoadly, losing an argument with a Hottentot ‘chief’ over the virtues of the new commercial England that the Whigs were in the process of building (see Leslie, 1711). As the chief demanded of his befuddled English adversary, was the Hottentot love of shiny metal or their vicious territorial wars really any more contemptible than English luxury or imperialism? Here were questions, as noted by a recent scholar, that may have inspired the Tory satirist Jonathan Swift in his creation of the Yahoos, a bestial yet disturbingly humanoid race that piles up shiny stones, has crude hierarchies and cruel wars, finally plunging Gulliver into a nightmare of self-loathing (see Eilon, 1983). Similarly, the Dutch-English social philosopher and satirist Bernard Mandeville wondered in The Fable of the Bees whether Hottentot ‘Pride be more Savage than ours’ (Mandeville, 1924: 1, 127). Perhaps the fullest use of Hottentots as a commentary on European life was an essay appearing in 1754 in the journal The Connoisseur, raising laughter of various kinds – self-indulgent, nervous, knowing – throughout Europe, especially Germany, where it became a locus

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classicus of relativist aesthetics. Probably composed by this journal’s chief editor, Lord Chesterfield (the same who once called Samuel Johnson a ‘respectable Hottentot’),11 this essay portrays the courtship of two Hottentot lovers with unpronounceable names, Tquassouw and Knonmquaiha. The strangeness of these names, like the clumps of consonants that abound in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, typifies eighteenth-century representations of Hottentots, underscoring, of course, their cultural alienation from Europe. At the same time, however, both the possession of language and the essay’s theme of courtship confirm the Hottentots’ basic humanity, and it is this interplay between alienation and proximity that generates this essay’s unsettling ironies. For a literary critic, these ironies are marked by the essay’s generic instability. Should we call this piece a racist and self- satisfied polemic against the Hottentots, an ‘oriental tale’, a parody of European culture, or even a work of serious anthropology? A superficial reading, apparently like that of Lessing in his Laocoön, noticed only the ludicrous satire of the Hottentots: ‘We know how the Hottentots are and how many things that awaken disgust and loathing in us are beautiful, comely, and sacred to them’, wrote Lessing; ‘think of all this expressed in the noble language of sincerity and admiration, and try to keep from laughing’ (Lessing, 1989: 132–3). But a more careful reading found less justification in assuming that the joke was entirely on the side of Europeans. At one point, for example, we see how a Dutchman looks through the eyes of the Hottentots: Upon his skin the sun darted his scorching rays in vain, and the colour of it was as pale and wan as the watery beams of the moon. His hair, which he could put on and take off at pleasure, was white as the blossoms of the almond tree, and bushy as the fleece of the ram … His lips and cheeks resembled the red oker, and his nose was sharpened like the beak of an eagle. His language, which was rough and inarticulate, was as the language of beasts; nor could TQUASSOUW discover his meaning, till an Hottentot ... interpreted between them. This interpreter informed the prince, that the stranger was sent from his countrymen to treat about the enlargement of their territories, and that he was called, among them, MYNHEER VAN SNICKERSNEE (The Connoisseur, 1754: 1, 165–6). For a line of German commentators – including Friedrich Riedel, Christoph Wieland and Marcus Herz – the Connoisseur essay pointed to the absence of any rational measure of beauty, a view that militated

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against the universalizing aesthetics of the Aufklärung, as formulated by Lessing and Mendelssohn (see Mielke, 1988). In Britain, similarly, the Hottentots provided a classic example that beauty was in the eye of the beholder and that all fashions could seem preposterous from a different cultural perspective. Lovably cantankerous spokesmen of the British middle orders, like Mr Wildgoose in Robert Graves’ popular novel The Spiritual Quixote, found Hottentots a useful metaphor for the inanities of polite fashion: ‘if an inhabitant of the Cape of Good Hope were to behold the stiff horse-hair buckles, or the tied wigs, of our Lawyers, Physicians, Tradesmen, or Divines, they would appear as barbarous and extraordinary to them, as sheep tripes and chitterlins about the neck of a Hottentot do for us’ (Graves, 1773: 242). Thus, whereas early explorers to the Cape reacted variously with fear and loathing in the face of the Hottentots’ apparent alienation from all that was called ‘civilized’ or even ‘human’, eighteenth-century authors became more willing to acknowledge their humanness, making possible the often self-reflective proposition that ‘Otherness’ lies mostly in cultural difference not in ‘nature’. And this change made possible as well the foundation of a genuinely anthropological approach to the Khoikhoi, as pioneered by the German scientist, Peter Kolb. Kolb’s Reise nach dem Vorgebürge der guten Hoffnung (1727), was quickly translated into several languages, including Guido Medley’s abridged English translation of 1731, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope. For some modern historians, such as Mary Louise Pratt in her well-known Imperial Eyes, Kolb had produced a quintes- sentially high-Enlightenment exercise in the subjection of an alien people to the restrictive categories of Western anthropology (Pratt, 1992: 41–9). Kolb, originally an astronomer who had come to the Cape to study the southern constellations, attempted to assess the Khoikhoi with the cold objectivity of a star-gazer, surveying their culture through the rational lens of religion, government, law, manners and so forth. While this method, as argued by Pratt, may well represent the conceptual colonization of a non-Western society by means of Western cultural categories, it also led Kolb to reject, again and again, the governing assumptions of the first travellers to the Cape – particularly their assumption that the dirt and squalor of the Hottentots represented a degeneration of humans to the level of ‘beasts’. Rather, Kolb discerned complex patterns of social organization (see Figure 3): his Hottentots possessed a developed idea of government, sophisticated religious beliefs, and a deep veneration for ritual and tradition in every facet of their culture. Kolb even claimed

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Fig. 3. Hottentot trades. From Kolb (1731).

that these traditional exemplars of grossness and filth actually possessed a real, though non-European, idea of manners and cleanliness, wrinkling their noses at Dutchmen who passed wind or alluded openly to fornication (see Kolb, 1731: 1, 163). There is, indeed, plenty of ludicrous mockery of Hottentots in Kolb’s book. Nevertheless, as in some of the earlier travellers’ accounts, this mockery is seldom far removed from the satire of Europeans. If Reise nach dem Vorgebürge der guten Hoffnung is a work of the Enlightenment in its attempt at rational objectivity, it also strongly anticipated and influenced later works that stressed the

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relativity of all social conventions and fashions, European and non- European. In their alien notions of beauty or propriety, exemplified by their penchant for grease and filth, the Hottentots showed Kolb ‘the Force, the Witchcraft of Custom’ (Kolb, 1731: 1, 316). For Europeans who wished to maintain their superiority or a belief in absolute standards, this was a threatening thesis. As the English Methodist leader John Wesley observed of the Hottentots in a sermon on ‘The Imperfection of Human Knowledge’, ‘A late writer has taken much pains to represent them as a respectable people: But from what motive it is not easy to say’ (Wesley, 1829: 6, 345). In Wesley’s mind, there was no question of the essential degradation and immorality of the Hottentots: the very exemplification of what happens to people ignorant of the Bible and abandoned to original sin by God. Such was the attitude of many Europeans who continued to use the term ‘Hottentot’ as an epithet of ridicule or debasement. But there was another, more subtle way of rejecting Kolb’s book and the cultural relativism it implied. And this rejection corresponded with the rise of racial science and the emergence of a genuinely modern form of ‘racism’. It is an initially surprising, yet finally logical, characteristic of this phase in the evolution of European racism that it was bent, in important respects, on the normalization of colonized peoples. Although Kolb had insisted strongly on the need to subject all stories about the Khoikhoi to first-hand scrutiny, a procedure that led him to dismiss many legends as ‘Excesses of the Imagination’ (Kolb, 1731: 1, 37), he also confirmed many reports that marked their profound cultural and even physical difference from Europeans: he testified, for example, to witnessing the ‘Hottentot apron’, the excision of one testicle from the men, and the practice of spreading darkened grease over their bodies. Later travellers rejected even these claims, accusing Kolb of precisely that reliance on hearsay that he professed to disdain. In the words of François Le Vaillant, writing in 1790, ‘It is … not to be questioned, but that after ten years residence … [Kolb] thought it easier to associate with the good fellows of the colony, who, while they drunk his wine, laughed in their sleeves, and vied with each other in recounting those ridiculous anecdotes which compose the bulk of his memoirs’ (Le Vaillant, 1790: 109).12 Taking his lead from Rousseau, who had grouped Hottentots with other noble savages (Rousseau, 1986: 147), Le Vaillant inveighed sentimentally against the supposed abuse of this people by Kolb and previous travellers: ‘Worthy injured people! … Peaceful Hottentots! behold with disdain those harsh invaders who first reduced to slavery, then basely traduced and placed ye on a level with the

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brutes’ (Le Vaillant, 1790: 160–1). In sharp contrast with the depiction of Hottentots as haughtily independent, alone and proud in their alien customs, Le Vaillant portrayed ‘Klaas’, a noble-hearted guide who selflessly defends the French traveller from the hoofs of a charging elephant. ‘Klaas pupil of nature!’ exclaims Le Vaillant, ‘artless soul, uncorrupted by the false tinsel of superficial politeness, continue to cherish the remembrance of that friendship to whom thy idea must ever be dear!’ (Le Vaillant, 1790: 249–50). What high-mindedness, we might like to echo, to rescue the Khoikhoi from the guts and grease that filled previous accounts. Yet behind Le Vaillant’s much more palatable and conventional portrait of the Hottentots may indeed lie the crushing of this people’s unique culture under prolonged European influence. For the Khoikhoi were dying a slow cultural death. Its population thinned drastically by smallpox, its binding forms of social order mocked and humiliated, this nation of wandering herdsmen increasingly abandoned its traditional ways, donned Western livery, and entered European houses as domestics or guides. When Joseph Banks arrived in the Endeavour in 1771, he heard only rumours that Hottentots existed in an aboriginal state far beyond Table Mountain.13 The Khoikhoi he witnessed, as they tied his horse or brought his food, seemed so banal that he wondered why anyone thought they were extraordinary or particularly disgusting. Eager to witness cultural difference, he ordered Hottentots to dance for him. What he saw convinced him of the total falsehood of stories describing a people that, covered with grease, streaming in copper, and loosely clothed in animal skins, wildly danced as they shouted what Dutch witnesses heard as ‘Hottentot! Hottentot!’, the apparent origin of their European name. Instead, he watched dances ‘as dull and spiritless as can be imagined’, consisting ‘entirely of beating the earth with one foot and then with the other’ (Banks, 1896: 440). What Banks interpreted as the visible demonstration that the dance of Hottentot culture was unremarkable, and always had been, we might well reinterpret as a dance of cultural death. Others of this time, such as the popular travel writer William MacIntosh, similarly praised the Khoikhoi as a people of ‘mild and tractable disposition’ who had been ‘very much misrepresented in Europe’ (MacIntosh, 1782: 1, 217–18). But this praise came with a proviso aimed at Khoikhoi who insisting on remaining on the outskirts of European acculturation. Such ‘wild Hottentots’, as MacIntosh went on to insist, ‘are untameable and unmanageable by any means that have yet been tried’. Indeed, MacIntosh’s assertion that these uncooperative Khoikhoi

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‘scarcely deserve to be ranked among the human species’ (1782: 1, 220) is, arguably, chilling in a way that the earlier accounts of Hottentot beastliness are not. For exclusion from the human race now meant, as never before, an unwillingness to submit to European authority, imposing a simultaneously geographical and ideological boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. In insidious ways, the ideological boundary has been reaffirmed even in the most ‘politically correct’ commentary on the Khoikhoi to the present day. Linda Merians, for example, congratulates the many commentators on the Khoikhoi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who make Hottentots ‘full members of the human family’, praise that reflects her approval that these authors ‘unambiguously articulate their awareness that the long-standing tradition of negative description of Hottentots was misleading or inaccurate’ (Merians, 2001: 199 and 208). In fact, these late visitors to the Cape had no real basis to judge whether the previous accounts were accurate or not. And what Merians calls ‘negative description’ often indicates resistance to customs and forms of behaviour that merely differed from what Europeans considered meet, palatable and salubrious according to a certain evolving code of middle-class mores. To wash away all that had made Hottentots fearful and threatening to European values became, indeed, the preoccupying aim of accounts of this people in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, this tendency corresponded in significant ways with the inauguration of a science of race during precisely the same era. Buffon, who was instrumental in introducing the term ‘race’ into scientific discourse, acknowledged that the Hottentots were ‘fort extraordinaires’, but he dismissed most of the stories about these people as apocryphal, denying, for example, the existence of ‘le tablier Hottentot’, and insisting that ‘ce peuple n’est pas si excessivement laid que la plupart des voyageurs veulent le faire croire’ (Buffon, 1854: 4, 600–1). His departures from Kolb tended instead to make the Khoikhoi seem more like conventional ‘savages’ whose lives were brutal, nasty and short: they beat their wives, crawled in the dirt, and seldom lived past forty years old. In a different way, the goal of reintegrating Hottentots within the reigning paradigms of European thought was sought by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the most influential figure in the theorizing of race in the late eighteenth century. Blumenbach introduced the practice of bunching the Hottentots with all the neighbouring peoples of southern Africa (including, prominently, the ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Caffres’), whom he classified together as ‘woolly-haired African nations’ differing

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in their somewhat lighter skin colour from the ‘Negroes’ further north (Blumenbach, 1865: 306 and 351–2). It was the light skin, predictably, that presented the greatest threat to the direct relation between skin colour and racial capacity that became a typical thesis of nineteenth-century ethnography.14 In innumerable works of anthropology from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, therefore, the Hottentots were interpreted as a hybrid of so-called ‘Negro’ and other racial traits, an anomalous touching of one stem on others to produce an errant, southward-pointing twig. In the words of A. L. Kroeber in a popular anthropological textbook first published in 1928, the Hottentots were a ‘very specialized race’ with some ‘Caucasian or Mongoloid’ features modifying their basic ‘Negroid’ stem (Kroeber, 1948: 769).15 Kroeber’s relatively modern definition (similar, for example, to the definition of ‘Hottentot’ in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary)16 reveals the effort not to excise but to reattach Hottentots to the branching network of human development. Such efforts, however, needed to explain all that allegedly made Hottentots non-human and alien, such as the ‘Hottentot apron’ and the pendulous breasts noted by early travellers to the Cape. While these anomalies were not totally denied, nineteenth-century anthropologists tended increasingly to question their authenticity and to find natural explanations for what had previously seemed inexplicable and prodigious. Such was the self-consciously rational orientation of Sir William Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1822). Lawrence’s presentation of the Cape ‘tribes’ before the Royal Society of Physicians was based heavily on the study of the Hottentot Venus, dubbed Saartje Baartman, whose naked body, minutely measured by teams of scientists, was carefully dissected, catalogued and displayed once she was dead. The stripping and bodily inspection of Baartman are strongly indicative of the new methodology of race science, for what was stripped away – the clothes and customs so fascinating to previous authors like Kolb – meant little to nineteenth-century professors except as showing the deficient mental capacities of ‘savages’. Contrary to what might be thought, moreover, this scrutiny of Baartman’s body was intended to diminish rather than intensify the sense of difference between the Hottentots and other peoples. Relying on scientific reports on the Hottentot Venus in the Mémoires du Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Lawrence pondered one by one each of the supposed physical monstrosities of ‘the tribes in the south of Africa’, drawing each within the ambit of observed phenomena in natural history. The

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‘Hottentot apron’ was in fact only elongated nymphae or labiae minorae, present not only in certain Hottentot individuals but in ‘Negroes, Moors, and Copts’, as well as some European women. Reports of the pendulous breasts of Hottentot women bore ‘an evident air of exaggeration’ and were, in any event, common to many savage peoples. The protuberant buttocks of Hottentot women – steatopygia, a characteristic almost never reported before the nineteenth century – was only the kind of variation equally observed in ‘fat- buttocked sheep’. Indeed, as Lawrence summarized, ‘the development of the nymphae, and the other varieties enumerated in this chapter, are merely analogous to the variations observed in corresponding points among many domestic animals’. The repeated analogies between savages and animals, along with that peculiarly nineteenth- century fascination with the details of female genitalia and buttocks, should indeed alert us to a significant constellation of racist and sexist ideologies characteristic of Western raciology. Yet Lawrence was also being consciously high-minded, reflecting paternally on the need to rebut suggestions of the ‘monstrous’ difference between Hottentots and the rest of the human species: ‘In proportion as distant regions become well known’, he concluded, ‘such monstrosities disappear, and the progress of natural knowledge will gradually consign all these marvellous tales to oblivion’ (Lawrence, 1822: 360–72). In an insightful essay on monstrosity in eighteenth-century thought, Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille describe how the ‘monster’ loomed threateningly over efforts in the Enlightenment to build a coherent and all-inclusive grid of taxonomies (see Curran and Graille, 1997). Yet it was really in the nineteenth century that efforts to drive the monster from the precincts of natural history became the single- minded preoccupation of science. As we have seen, the Enlighten- ment anthropology of Kolb and those he influenced accepted and even endorsed many of the observations of previous travellers to the Cape with regard to the stark alterity of Khoikhoi culture. They ratified these stories even at the expense of destabilizing assurance in the universality of European norms, the ‘enlightened’ (and partly satirical) goal being to expose the tyrannical reign of arbitrary ‘custom’. The racial science being developed from Buffon to Lawrence was designed precisely to halt this slide into relativity and self-mockery. And from this ideological root grew the distinctive language of modern racism. The library of a Victorian gentleman with an interest in raciology might well, for example, have contained J. S. Wood’s heavy and

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Fig. 4. Nineteenth-century depiction of Hottentots. From Wood (1878).

lavishly illustrated volume, The Uncivilized Races of the World (1878). In a substantial section on the Hottentots, Wood cited Le Vaillant’s authority in dismissing Kolb as ‘utterly unworthy of belief’ (Wood, 1878: 218), following the French explorer in the intention of sanitizing the Khoikhoi into picturesquely banal ‘savages’, as reflected by the illustrations that accompany his description (Figure 4). Sans grease, sans guts, Wood’s amused portrait of the Hottentots relies heavily on a more recent work, Francis Galton’s Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. This is significant, for Galton is remembered by us now as the scientist who coined the term ‘eugenics’ and did much to popularize the idea of controlling inheritance for the supposed good of humanity, the vision so infamously pursued by the Nazis. The anthropological thinking that led Galton to these theories began when he was a young man exploring the Cape region in 1851, employing and occasionally ‘thrashing’ Hottentot servants and guides. Like racial scientists whose views clearly oriented his observations, he disregarded previous stories of the supposed physical and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Hottentots and the neighbouring peoples of this

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area, whom he grouped together as a single biological group characterized by their particular shade of ‘olive’ skin colour and low state of social development. Since Hottentots and Bushmen, Namaqua or Oerlam, were all the same race, he wrote: when I say Oerlam, Hottentot, or Bushman, the identical same yellow, flat-nosed, woolly-haired, clicking individual must be conjured up before the mind of my kind reader, but differing in dirt, squalor, and nakedness, according to the actual term employed; the highest point of the scale being a creature who has means of dressing himself respectably on Sundays and gala- days, and who knows something of reading and writing; the lowest point, a regular savage (Galton, 1889: 42). Galton thus banalized the famously exotic dirtiness of Cape people into a mere sign of poverty and ‘regular’ savagery. And in other respects, as well, he viewed all south African ‘tribes’ through well- worn cultural stereotypes that relate solely to their degree of cooperation with or resistance to European occupation. On the one hand, there is the faithful noble savage, like ‘Barmen’, ‘a respectable old gentleman, who spoke Dutch perfectly, and every now and then earned something by doing odd jobs for the missionaries’ (1889: 50). At the other extreme is ‘Jonker’, the impudent and barbaric despot whom Galton variously flatters and cajoles into allowing him access to his territories. As suggested by the Europeanized names given to all these Khoikhoi – Jonker, Barmen, Captain Frederick, Johannis – Galton’s aim is to absorb these people back into a universe that can be easily articulated by European tongues and minds. His Hottentots all behave in perfectly understandable but ‘savage’ ways, the point being that they are human beings of a sort familiar to Europeans, though of a lower ‘scale’, to borrow Galton’s expression in the quote above. Galton’s book, that is, develops a verbal adjustment between distance and approximation, a linguistic habit given literal and spatial form in his account’s most famous episode. Galton shared the Victorian male’s peculiar fetish for the ‘Hottentot Venus’, a fascination with enlarged buttocks barely disguised beneath shows of gentlemanly modesty and cold scientific calculation. Inflamed by a Cape woman whom he describes as ‘a Venus among Hottentots’, but too discreet to fulfil his desire of measuring her steatopygia with a pocket-ruler, Galton stands at a distance with his sextant, measuring her curves and then calculating their width and breadth by means of trigonometry (1889: 53–4). This episode makes obvious the tendency

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of nineteenth-century anthropologists to reduce non-European peoples to specimens for their strangely interrelated scientific and sexual projects. But Galton’s lust also points explicitly to his recognition of this woman’s conformity with European ideas of female beauty. As he writes, ‘I gazed at … that gift of bounteous nature to this favoured race, which no mantua-maker, with all her crinoline and stuffing, can do otherwise than humbly imitate’. This reference to the clothing fashions of women in Victorian England leads to other comparisons between Caucasian ladies and his Hottentot Venus, who ‘was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do’ (1889: 54). Francis Galton thought that Hottentots were racially inferior, but he also wished to copulate with Hottentot women. This reaction surely marks an important difference between Europeans of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, for the sexual proclivities of these travellers themselves form a revealing social history. The sailors who first came to the Cape admitted, in the style of naughty boys, to paying Hottentot women with brandy and trinkets to obtain a fleeting, and dramatically repulsed, glimpse of the ‘Hottentot apron’.17 Galton, on the contrary, portrays himself extending his sextant in the direction of a flirtatious Hottentot Venus in a winking display of colonial lust. The fact that Galton does not deny the humanity of a people he wished to colonize and abuse essentially underprops the logical economy of nineteenth-century imperialism and its supporting racist ideology. In an essay entitled ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, Homi Bhabha observes that what the imperialist mentality really desired was ‘a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994: 86). That is, the very logic of imperialism, with its paternalistic attitude towards occupied peoples, required that Sambo or Gunga be perfectly ‘human’ in all their dark- eyed and dependent childishness, for it was that humanity which made them appropriate subjects of colonial control and indoctrination. Hence, the most notorious racists of the imperial era openly admitted, like Gobineau in The Inequality of Human Races (1853–4), that ‘even the lowest tribes are not absolutely stupid’. It meant nothing at all, he insisted, that a particular Hottentot might be a ‘good servant’. Indeed, he continued, I actually go further than my opponents, as I have no doubt that a fair number of negro chiefs are superior, in the wealth of their ideas, the synthetic power of their minds, and the strength of

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their capacity for actions, to the level usually reached by our peasants, or even by the average specimens of our half-educated middle classes (Gobineau, 1967: 180). Such an admission not only cost Gobineau nothing, it even contributed to his pose of ‘scientific’ accuracy and his dual goals of imperialism abroad and aristocratic hegemony at home. This history of evolving attitudes helps to answer the questions that opened this essay: why then did the Khoikhoi become so singularly notorious as a degraded or obnoxious people? And what does this reputation reveal about the nature of European racism? At an early stage, as we have considered, the Khoikhoi came closer than most peoples to materializing a European vision of humanoid strangeness at the borders of the world. Ultimately, however, it was how much the Hottentots were like Europeans that caused the deepest anxiety, along with a loathing that was simultaneously projected onto ‘Hottentots’ and reflected back onto Europeans themselves. It is important to keep in mind that the Khoikhoi were a highly sophisticated people of a form that Europeans soon recognized. Fiercely independent and self-sufficient, unsympathetic and even mocking towards Europeans, militarily formidable, culturally rich and complex, sharp though honest traders who drove a hard bargain for products the Europeans needed, Hottentots challenged at its roots European confidence in being the natural guardians of universal truth. At the same time, however, Europeans genuinely found the Khoikhoi deeply distressing, and to deny this fact of ethnographic history is simply to refuse to consider the evidence. Early travellers’ accounts reflect a degree of disgust with the dress, customs and manners of the Khoikhoi that corresponds in no logical way with the needs of European egotism or colonialism. The disgust appears, indeed, to have been more or less mutual, revealing the extent to which Khoikhoi and European cultures had developed in conflicting ways. For Europeans, at least, the Khoikhoi presented a problem of categorization. They confused a European vision of the world and humanity, forcing the painful process of readjustment that lies behind virtually all the commentary – repulsed, satiric or scientific – that we have considered. At the end of this rather dismal rainbow lay the scientific concept of ‘race’, a powerful and lasting paradigm because it achieved the goal of both amalgamating and subordinating other cultures so efficiently. Backed by the authority of most of the eminent cultural leaders of the nineteenth century, racial science gave an apparent

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coherence and intellectual legitimacy to the scattered prejudices and fears that had existed before, creating what can be called a genuine modern racism. This racism, as I have maintained, involves a crucial approximation of the Other; its psychological seduction derives from its apparent ability to explain and to make what seems physically or culturally strange a ‘normal’ category in an overarching global outlook. The moral lesson of this ethnographic history may not be what we expect, for thwarting racism evidently involves more subtle guards than avoiding or condemning expressions of dislike or discomfort with respect to another group (which may in fact represent an ineluctable and even ‘healthy’ phase of cultural interaction). Racism may, in fact, find its most nourishing psychological sources in the consciously high-minded effort to reduce or erase the sense of difference. To be alarmed by the difference of cultural Others represents something close to a human norm; to deny the legitimacy of this cultural difference has been the peculiarly poisonous inclination of modern European ideology.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Titi Adepitan, Andrew Curran, Daniel O’Leary and Claude Rawson for their sensitive and learned comments on previous versions of this essay.

Notes 1. On the evolution of ‘race’, see Hudson (1996), Stocking (1968), Popkin (1973), Banton (1977 and 1987), Honegger (1991), Todorov (1993) and Smedley (1993: 36–40). 2. Hottentots were widely believed to occupy a position between humans and apes in the Great Chain of Being. See Voltaire (1877–85: 22, 210), Long (1774: 2, 364), Smith (1788: 144). Linneaus (1758: 14) placed the Hottentots in the class ‘homo monstrosus’. But ‘homo monstrosus’ differed from ‘homo sapiens’ by artificially induced rather than natural deformity. 3. Johan Jacob Saar (1662) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1649), cited in Raven- Hart (1971: 1, 63 and 67). 4. John Jourdain (1608), cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 42). 5. See also the 1670 voyage of William Hore (Raven-Hart, 1967). The Icelandic traveller Jón Olofson assumed, without evidence, that these were cannibalistic attacks (Raven-Hart , 1967: 111). 6. See the 1610 account of Pyrard de Laval (1610), who relied entirely on hearsay, cited in Raven-Hart (1967: 47). 7. To what extent do these early accounts provide accurate information on the cultural practices of the Khoikhoi during this period? This question seems

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virtually unanswerable, as this culture is now extinct and later accounts portray them in a highly Europeanized form. Richard Elphick claims that many of the stories, like the wearing of guts, were at least partially accurate (1985: 194). He also maintains, however, that the Hottentots were found by the Europeans already in a state of severe cultural decline (1985: xvii). 8. See, for example, the account of Frederick Andersen Bolling (1670), in Raven- Hart, (1971: 1, 147). 9. On environmental theories of human modification, see Glacken (1967). 10. See, for example, the comments of Johann Wilhelm Vogel (1679) and Guy Tachard (1685) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 218 and 289). 11. See Chesterfield (1892: 1, 407), letter 160 (28 February 1751, OS). The editor of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, G. B. Hill, maintained that Chesterfield was actually referring to Lord Lyttleton, though the description seems far more applicable to the famously uncouth and uncleanly Johnson. See Boswell (1934–50: 1, 266–7). 12. Le Vaillant was not alone in romanticizing the Khoikhoi during the late eighteenth century. See also Raynal (1783: 309). 13. The virtual disappearance of ‘wild’ Hottentots in the vicinity of European settlement is widely confirmed by other travellers. See De Mist (1954: 28) and Barrow (1806: 98–100). 14. In 1813, for example, Pritchard (1973: 44) made a direct correlation between skin colour and level of civilization, yet felt obliged to admit that the Hottentots were both light-skinned and racially regressive. 15. Kroeber reviews the similar arguments of previous anthropologists (1948: 155 and 215). 16. Hottentots are defined as a people ‘of mixed Bushman-Hamite descent, with some Bantu admixture’. 17. See, for example, the accounts of Wouter Shouter (1665), Georg Meister (1677) and David Tapen (1682) in Raven-Hart (1971: 1, 85, 204, and 238), respectively.

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Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Address: Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada [email: [email protected]]

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