Cape Argus - Will 2010 rob the Quena again?
Will 2010 rob the Quena again?
The first inhabitants of Mouille Point must be acknowledged in plans to build a World Cup stadium at Green Point, writes Cyril Hromnik The World Cup in 2010 poses a great challenge and, at the same time, a great opportunity. The focus is on Green Point, which some see as an ideal place for a new big stadium, while others foresee an ecological, social, economic and even political disaster if the stadium is built on the the present day golf course and the adjacent green area.
Archaeologists have given the green light to the project and nobody has yet considered the historical background and the social and cultural impact the chosen site will have on the inhabitants of this Tavern of the Oceans.
Green Point and the adjacent Roggebaai is where it all began, where the West met the East, where the early Portuguese met the local Quena (Red people, also known as Mixed or Otentottu people; corrupted by the Dutch into "Hottentot") and where the Dutch obtained permission from the Quena to build a small refreshment station for their sailors and traders travelling to the markets of India and of the Orient in general.
Neither the Portuguese nor the Dutch came here with the intention of establishing a colony. All they wanted was fresh water, which they got from the stream called Camissa or Sweet Water, sheep and cattle for slaughter, which the local Quena were happy to sell; and vegetables, which were hard to come by at this wind-swept Cape of Storms, as the Portuguese first came to know it in 1488.
The lack of vegetables was the reason why neither the Portuguese nor the French and English wanted to settle here. The Dutch, who came later, had no choice, because all the more arable places on the coast of Africa had already been taken by the earlier trading nations.
When Jan van Riebeeck's people landed at Camissa Bay (known to European navigators as Table Bay since 1601) on April 6, 1652, the indigenous Quena people received them in good faith, allowed them to land and to collect mail. The Dutch immediately began building a small earthen fort, and employed some of the local Quena "to push the wheelbarrows".
These people introduced themselves to the Hollanders as Otentottu, meaning "mixed" or "related people", and under this, at the time incomprehensible name to the Dutch, they entered the record of the VOC (the Dutch East India Company). They used the name corrupted by the Dutch into the infamous "Hottentot" proudly, knowing that it related them to the peoples of the world.
Those among them who spoke some Portuguese facilitated their communication with other Europeans. Others looked like and were justifiably taken for Indians, for they indeed bore some Indian blood. Up to 1 500 years before Bartolomeu Dias, Dravidian Indian traders and mariners were active on this land, which they named Diab, and in the surrounding ocean which they first named the Ethiopian and later the Indian Ocean.
All along, these Orientals mixed with the local Kung or Bushman people, and through this miscegenation the mixed Otentottu or Quena came into existence. Obviously, their mixing with the mariners and traders of the world went back much further than the 150 years of miscegenation with the Portuguese.
The Camissa Valley (Table Valley) on the shores of the Camissa Bay (Table Bay), which was watered by the Camissa Stream (Rio Doce of the Portuguese; Soeterivier or Sweet River of the Dutch; and modern Platteklip Stream), was inhabited by two distinctive groups of Quena or Otentottu people.
The //Kurin gai-Quena or "Sea-food collecting Quena" lived at //Hû-!Gâis (the "Great Rocks of Storm", now Table Mountain) more or less permanently. They became known to the early Europeans as "Watermen" and to the Dutch as "Strandlopers" or Beachcombers. They owned no cattle except what they had stolen from their cattle-keeping neighbours. Their chief was Autshumao, a Portuguese-speaking man with a touch of Portuguese ancestry, better known by his Indian nickname Harry (from Bengali Hari).
Their hut villages stood in the Camissa Valley and on the flat sea-side ground of what the Portuguese first called the Cabo Tormentoso (the "Cape of Storms") and subsequently the Cabo da Boa Esperança (the "Cape of Good Hope"), now Green Point and Mouille Point.
"The Watermen live permanently in this Table Valley and behind the Lion and the Table Mountain," Jan van Riebeeck wrote in his diary on November 13, 1652.
The second group or tribe of the Quena at //Hû-!Gâis were the Huri-!Xai Quena or "Sea-place Quena" , who became known to the Dutch as Kaapmans (the Cape People). They practised line fishing in the sea, but they also owned some cattle. A shortage of grass for their cattle in dry
season and the "sour" pasture during the cold months forced them to leave the Camissa Valley every year at regular intervals and to search for pasture in the hinterland.
But they saw themselves as "allies" of the shore-based Huri-!Xai Quena and as co-owners of the entire //Hû-!Gâis area. After the winter rains, they always returned to their pastoral and camping ground called Kai Haa Mullai, the "Great Flat Pastoral Land", which the French or others corrupted into the well-known but nonsensical Mouille (meaning "Anchorage" where there is none!).
This ancient Quena name of Dravidian origin survives until now in the present-day anglicised Mouille Point. The Mullai of the Quena was what it says - the flat piece of pastoral land at the western extreme point of the Cape where the Strandlopers and the Kaapmans had their villages, and which is now at the centre of the much-debated Green Point area.
The early maritime visitors to the K'koe Qui //Hû-!Gâis (the Cape of Great Rocks of Storms), be they Indians, Portuguese, English, French or pre-1652 Dutch, did not disturb too much the annual regime of both the //Kurin ai-Quena (Strandlopers) and the Huri-!Xai Quena (Kaapmans). The coming of these foreign traders to the Camissa Bay tended to enrich the material existence of the Quena and to expose them to more advanced food production and a higher lifestyle.
The major - and in certain ways less desirable - change came with the arrival of the permanent Dutch settlers in 1652. From now on, the indigenous Quena had to gradually adjust to the behavioural pattern and to the needs of the newcomers, who intended to stay here permanently.
A huge change (then, unwittingly, of national dimensions and consequences) came to the lives of the Quena at //Hû-!Gâis, almost as great as the changes that are coming with the planned building of the soccer stadium on the former village site of the //Kuri ai and the Huri-!Xai Quena, when the Dutch started ploughing the land near and further away from the Fort.
"Upon further examination," on November 3, 1656, Van Riebeeck hoped that "about 100 morgen of land will be found behind the Lion Hill (that is at Kai Haa Mullai or Mouille Flats of Green Point), rather nearer to the Fort, and easily preserved from the Hottentots."
The Quena did not take it lightly and the chief of the //Kurin gai-Quena, Harry or Autshumao, declared that "the land belonged to his people". Furthermore, as we read in Van Riebeeck's Dispatch of March 5, 1657, "They venture also to assert boldly that it does not please them that we break up the ground, and destroy the grass which grows for the use of their cattle - to grow our crops."
But things were moving forward, the flat camping ground of the Green Point was declared to be "the Commander's arable land" and the Kaapmans and Harry's Strandlopers were allowed to build their huts under Dutch protection on the Kloof Nek, "provided that they grazed their cattle along the coast from the Lion's Head to Hout Bay, as the land of this Table Valley, and the flat behind the Lion Hill (granted to the said Commander by Hon Van Goens) was wanted for the Company's cattle".
This way, the former village grounds of the Quena became the first piece of land in future South Africa to be "legally" transferred, though without the consent of the original owners, to the new Dutch keepers.
The symbolic value of this piece of land, both in the eyes of the former Quena owners and of their modern Quena (now called coloured) descendants is extraordinary, and should be borne in mind when the nature of these grounds, fortunately still green, is to be irreversibly changed. This symbolic value is no doubt many times higher than the value of the soccer stadium proposed to be built there.
Looking at it from an historical perspective, and from the perspective of the self-awareness and self-respect of the current Quena (coloured) people, the right solution would be to keep the Kai Haa Mullai green, and perhaps a symbolic Quena village should be built there.
However, should the history-disregarding impulse to build a stadium there prevail, the stadium should bear the name of the original Quena village, Kai Haa Mullai -- the "Great Flat Pastoral Land".
As time went on, the Kaapmans and the Strandlopers were incorporated into the VOC establishment and many of them mixed with the Europeans, Indians, Malays and even with the black slaves brought to the Cape.
The last thing to consider is what happened when the Quena inhabitants of Kai Haa Mullai and of the Camissa Valley realised that the only home they knew had been irreversibly taken from them. They took their horses, put their wives and possessions on the backs of their humped oxen and drifted into the dry hinterland of the Karoo.Looking back at Kai Haa Mullai and the Camissa Valley from that new perspective, the Quena expressed their deepest feeling about what had happened by calling their former home at the K'koe Qui //Hû-!Gâis (the Cape of Great Rocks of Storms) by the name which says it all •/I-/k??ab, meaning De Facto Theft.
Will history repeat itself and will the Cape of Good Hope become for the second time /I-/k??ab, or De Facto Theft?
Dr Hromnik is a historian and researcher.
Published on the web by Cape Argus on January 21, 2007.
our pasts inform our futures --spread the word
