the richtersveld cultural and botanical landscape - SAHRA

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Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape World Heritage Site Nomination 63 latter half of the 19thCentury, ultimately leading to the almost complete disappearance of languages and identity early in the 20 th Century. The Namas of the Richtersveld The 20 th Century was a particularly dark time in the history of South Africa. For the surviving KhoiKhoi it was a period when their continued presence was denied by successive governments and eventually defined out of existence through its exclusion from the apartheid panoply of races and active suppression by being subsumed into the ‘Coloured’ racial category, a classification created for people of mixed descent. In the 20 th Century South Africans of all backgrounds were educated to believe that the KhoiKhoi were extinct surviving only as a proportion of the origins of the Coloured community, and at that a percentage that most descendants of the KhoiKhoi were encouraged to deny as the authorities sought to ensure that yet another racial identity did not surface to complicate an already unwieldy ideology. Notwithstanding the 20 th Century experience, the post-liberation period (since 1994) has seen the re-emergence of KhoiKhoi identity amongst so-called coloured people many of whom are showing an interest in rediscovery of roots in the pre-colonial indigenous communities of Southern Africa. It has also seen the re-emergence of the Nama, the last of the KhoiKhoi who still live and practice their culture along the west coast Africa. The home of the Nama is an undefined region that lies along the west coast of Africa stretching inland to well above the continent’s western escarpment. It includes the north-western parts of both the Western and Northern Cape Provinces of South Africa, referred to in the vernacular as Namaqualand, and much of southern Namibia. Some older maps show ‘Greater’ Namaqualand to be an area straddling the border of Namibia and South Africa, while ‘Smaller’ Namaqualand is confined to the South African side. It is a beautiful, but inhospitable land with a rough terrain and unpredictable climate and vast, unpopulated areas.
Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape World Heritage Site Nomination 64 The part of the Namaqualand into which the Richtersveld falls became part of the Cape Colony in 1847 when Britain extended the boundary in the north-west to the Orange River. The area had been subject to European influences since the last quarter of the 1600’s when the first Dutch explorers reach the mouth of the Gariep. By the time of British annexation framers and missionaries had been a permanent feature of the area for at least a half century. The Germans occupation of northern Namaqualand in the 1880s also followed earlier penetration by Europeans, but nevertheless, by the early 20 th Century the area was the only one where a substantial KhoiKhoi community survived with its identity, language and culture relatively intact. Although impacted upon by the disruptions caused in the lands further to the south and prolonged migration and incorporation of refuges from that area, as well as by the incorporation of their own lands into the British and German colonies, probably due to its remoteness and isolation, impact was not as heavily felt as outside the formerly referred to ‘Coloured’ Reserve’. At the dawn of the new century one small part of the larger region of Namaqualand remains the only place where all three of the components of language, cultural practice and identity remain strongly routed in the people. This is the Richtersveld. In other places, most notably across the Gariep in Namibia language is still strong, but transhumance and traditional building techniques are no longer practiced. Small pockets of Nama also survive in South Africa to the south and east of the Richtersveld, but once again have not retained the strength of culture found there and are largely differentiated from other South Africans only because they speak a different language, although usually in a ‘broken’ form. More so than the rest of Namaqualand, the Richtersveld is a place of isolation and refuge. It is the connection between the environment and topography of the Richtersveld that has determined that in this area in particular a once extensive people survives and can continue to do so. The Richtersveld is drier, and due to its mountains more inaccessible and remote than the surrounding parts of Namaqualand. Until the recent popularity of 4x4 vehicles, it was an area into which few other South Africans could or desired to penetrate. Today most do so only for short periods of time for recreational purposes.
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the richtersveld cultural and botanical landscape - SAHRA

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