Read the introduction to Ellis’ “Ons is Boesmans” again and answer the question that follows.
Introduction
1 In 1995, the ≠Khomani San of the southern Kalahari lodged a claim for land located inside the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. As part of a complex and fairly all-embracing restitution package, the ≠Khomani San were granted more than 68 000 hectares of land, financial compensation as well various rights of access to the Park.1 According to the restitution agreement, the compensation was handed over to the ≠Khomani gradually over the period from 1999 to 2003. Despite the delight at the return of “their” land, the ≠Khomani soon realised that the community under the name of which they had submitted the land claim was not as coherent and concrete a unit as they had assumed. Instead, it revealed itself as a fractious collective. Some members of the collective had not even known each other before the claim was submitted.
2 The cracks in the unity of the ≠Khomani community arose around issues of who could legitimately and authentically claim to belong to the community. In this debate, the terms “Bushman” and “Boesman” came to play a critical role. Academic discourse dating back as far as the 1950s declared the terms “Bushman” and its Afrikaans counterpart “Boesman” to be racist, derogatory and even sexist and called for their removal from general discourse. Nearly 60 years later, however, San people living in the southern Kalahari refer to themselves by these terms. Not only are the terms in common use, but some ≠Khomani embrace them proudly, declaring: “Ons is boesmans” [we are Bushmen].
3 The embracing of terms that had been rejected by academics can be understood in terms of what elsewhere has been called the “authenticity construct,” namely a contest over authenticity or “narratives of authenticity” (see Ellis 2010, 2012, 2014). According to Guenther (1995, 111), the “authenticity construct” is composed of “a stereotyped, racial-cultural iconography and representations of the San, ideas that ‘standardised’ their culture, and a general prescription of this ‘construct’ as appropriate to proposals for development.” Stereotypic ideas of what it means to be San guided the visions for economic welfare and proposals for development of the ≠Khomani San community and the ≠Khomani were expected to act within this framework of San-ness.2 The “authenticity construct” is that index that is constructed from the jumble of ideas and materials which can be referenced by whosoever needs to show what a real bushman (lower case intentionally used, see Rassool and Hayes 2002; Ellis 2014)3 is. Among the many practices and ideologies that make up these standardising and authenticating practices of the authenticity construct are the acts of naming and ascription of terms to supposed ethnic entities. The aim of this particular paper is to probe this acceptable San norm (Ellis 2010) or, as Guenther puts it, the authenticity construct, in relation to the diverse practices that assign and determine San nomenclatures.
4 The paper does not wish to discuss Guenther’s authenticity construct itself in any detail. Rather, it examines one specific “construct,” namely the choice of nomenclatures by diverse ≠Khomani interest groups. The paper argues that various ≠Khomani interest groups developed names and labels for themselves by using ethnonyms, glottonyms and self-referents. Their search for appropriate names is, critically, about being able to lay a claim to the disputed land as their own, in sufficiently authentic a manner.
5 It is not the goal of this paper to suggest a new or novel nomenclature, nor to suggest that terms proposed by ≠Khomani interest groups should be accepted. The intention is rather to illuminate a dynamic process of name selection that reflects a localised set of responses to political, socio-economic, policy and other conditions that prevail and exert influence on the lives of people. The process of a community selecting a name for itself does not occur in a vacuum: it takes place within a context and situatedness.
6 The question posed by this paper is: why should the naming practices take the form that they do? The paper analyses the question along two strands. First, it reads the concern with nomenclature in light of current ethnographic data. Using ethnographic data is critical as it permits a view of the fact that, despite the academic critique, San are choosing to be located in nature from where they want to make their living. The ethnographic data suggests that, once the land claim is settled, bushman-ness will be put to work in an interplay of the representational and the developmental. The aspirations of certain bushmen is to commoditise culture and make it “work,” that is to do labour: to let it provide food, income, housing, healthcare and services such as water, toilets and electricity.
[Ellis, W.F. 2015. “Ons is Boesmans: commentary on the naming of Bushmen in the southern Kalahari.” Anthropology Southern Africa 38(1&2): 120-133.]
Which paragraph poses questions that the paper seeks to address? In other words, where does the author introduce secondary arguments?
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