The fact that universal civilization has for a long time originated from the European centre has maintained the illusion that European culture was, in fact and by right, a universal culture. Its superiority over other civilizations seemed to provide the experimental verification of this postulate. Moreover, the encounter with other cultural traditions was itself the fruit of that advance, and more generally the fruit of occidental science itself. Did not Europe invest history, geography, ethnography, and sociology in their explicit scientific forms? (Paul Ricoeur)

From the outset black identity was a European invention. By describing, studying, and ruling over Africans, Europeans constructed a discourse about blacks by which they were constituted and dominated. This discourse came profoundly to influence the making of South Africa, the parameters of its politics, society, ideologies and even its imagination.

'The country or land of Kaffraria', according to an 'early Dutch account of the Cape 'is so named after the Kafirs, its native inhabitants. They are commonly known to our countrymen as Hottentoos or Hottentots, because their language is so clumsy and difficult.'¹ Their speech is 'full of clucks, like hose of the turkey-cocks'. 'Because of this our countrymen, observing this impediment and extraordinary stuttering in speech, have given them the name of Hottentots, in the sane sense as that word is commonly used here at home as a taunt against anybody who stutters and stammers in his uttering words.' Yet the native peoples of the Cape originally called themselves 'Khoin Khoin', meaning real people.² In this explicit way, the Khoikhoi were named and reified through the grid of European imagination, which chanced upon the 'abnormal' manifestation of their vocal sounds; their very entry and ontological presence in Western culture and writing was the result of a negative and fortuitous designation of their language.³

In looking at what was radically 'other' about the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa during early western contact, the aim will be to enquire within what space of the order of knowledge the 'primitive' person was constituted; and on the basis of what historical framework of perception ideas appeared, sciences were established, experience was reflected in philosophies and rationalities were formed of 'primitive' people. The first step will be to see how Western thinking determined that black people were different; the second, how it perceived the difference between the European and 'primitive' man, perceptions that were to provide a foundation and justification for the description and classification of blacks; and finally how these perceptions combined with local circumstances at the Cape to create a racist discourse and to lay the foundations of a racially structured system of social relations.

The Same and the Other

Since Vasco da Gama's pioneering voyage to India the ships of many European nations had berthed at Saldanha and Table Bay and travellers had brought back to Europe their impressions of the Cape. So the Dutch already knew something about the Cape and its inhabitants when they established a station there in 1652. In time, this knowledge developed into a more systematic observation of the indigenous peoples; collections of data, descriptions and classifications all emphasised the peculiarity of the physical appearance, clothing, speech, and way of life of the natives. As early as 1668 discourses on 'other races' began to emerge, structured around the conceptual opposition between the European and the 'savage' world.

Even a cursory glance at early descriptions of the Khoikhoi reveals the trend in European perceptions of the blacks. In particular the observations of Dapper (whose report on the Hottentots published in 1668 was essentially a compilation), Ten Rhyne, (a physician in the Company's employ whose main interest was natural history and botany) and Grevenbroek (a clerk also in the Company's employ and local secretary of its Council of Policy) should be compared with those, a hundred years later, of Sparrman (a student of Linnaeus and naturalist who travelled in the Cape) and Mentzel (a Company soldier).⁴ These writers all touched variously on the Khoikhoi's physical appearance, dress, diet, habitation, utensils and weapons, customs (particularly those at birth, marriage and death) religion, or rather superstition and magic, government and law (or the absence of it), language, and character. These categories came to form a conceptual grid into which the descriptions of Khoikhoi life could be placed. A discursive structure began to emerge from even these simple descriptions, and, significantly, they demonstrated a particular ordering of 'otherness', structured around the stark opposition between European and Savage. Some typical comments on the physical appearance, food, houses, character, art, trade, religion and law of the Khoikhoi are set out below, as illustrations of the contrast between Western and 'savage' norms:⁵

1.Physical Appearance
In build and shape |they have] ill-formed bodies and insignificant appearance, and yellowish in colour (Dapper in Schapera,Early Cape Hottentots, p. 43)

... they smear their bodies and faces with grease and fat, so that altogether they are beastly, savage, coarse and dirty in habit, and consequently look as if they never wash (Dapper, ibid., p. 51)

2.Food
Like other savages, they do not know how to prepare or dress their food, but fall on the dead beast like dogs, eating it raw, and seldom cooked, with entrails and guts as well, first however, pressing out the excrement backwards or squeezing it out with the teeth (Dapper, ibid., pp. 55-7)

3.Mode of Dwelling
Apart from their huts they have no houses, nor shelter, nor dwelling place.... (Ten Rhyne, ibid., p. 119)

4.Character
In faithlessness, inconstancy, lying, cheating, treachery, and infamous concern with every kind of lust they exercise their villainy. (Ten Rhyne, ibid., p. 123)

5.Art
You might as well look for jewels in a sty as for arts in this degraded people (Ten Rhyne, ibid., p. 149)

6.Trade
They have no great inclination towards trade (Dapper, ibid., p. 73)

7.Religion
No one ... has ever been able to find among all the Kafirs or Hottentots or Beach rangers any trace of religion, or any show of honour to God or the Devil (Dapper, ibid., p. 75)

8.Law
Although being bound neither by the bonds of God nor of shame, they absolve themselves from law, yet they are often a law to themselves, imitating by blind impulse, under the teaching of dame custom, those things which their fathers before them did (Ten Rhyne, ibid., p. 143)

9. All the Kafirs or Hottentots are people bereft of all science and literature, very uncouth, and in intellect more like beasts than men (Dapper, ibid., p. 45)

Designating the Khoikhoi in these ways gave Europeans proof of their own alterity. The Khoikhoi were classified according to the tenets of Western thought and imagination: it was not arts, science or religion, but their absence which described them. Alterity was the opposite, a negative category of the ‘Same’. The Khoikhoi thus becomes the 'Other', which by its difference from the norm specified the identity of the 'Same'. At the same time, by proclaiming a series of differences between European and Khoikhoi, these differences were capable of being assimilated into white thought by recognising the ways in which they departed from the white norm; the way in which these differences were identified and arranged was itself a comment upon the epistemological foundations of contemporary Western thought.⁶

This conceptualisation was informed by the general opposition between European life and 'Savage' life. The notion of savagery (as the Latin suggests) translates as wildness, and could variably be defined as 'living in a state of nature', being 'undomesticated', 'uncivilized', 'uncultured', 'rude', and 'untamed'.⁷ These notions express not only the condition of the savage, but derive their meaning in an oppositional relation to 'civilization', 'culture', 'government' and so forth. As Hayden White aptly remarked, the notion of savagery or wildness 'belongs to a set of culturally self-authenticating devices which includes, among many others, the ideas of "madness" and "heresy" as well. These terms are used not merely to designate a specific condition or state of being, but also confirm the value of their dialectical antitheses: "civilization", "sanity" and "orthodoxy" respectively'.⁸ By refusing to give the radically different life of the Khoikhoi a validity except as an 'antitype of negative instance', the meaning of European life was validated while that of the Khoikhoi was denied.

Terms such as 'civilization' and 'humanity', Hayden White argues, are defined by juxtaposition and stipulation, rather than observation and induction.⁹ Thus, if we do not know what civilization is, we can always find out by illustrating what it is not. Conversely, Khoikhoi characteristics can be determined by seeing how they differ from the European. All that the various terms to designate the Khoikhoi have in common is their 'not-being European'. The antagonism between European and Khoikhoi is reduced to the contradictory relationship of European and non-European. Khoikhoi is the negative, which cannot be directly represented and is thus constituted through an ensemble of specific antagonisms. Whereas Europeanness is represented as a tightly woven construction of positive determinations, Khoikhoi life is dissolved into a series of negative equivalences lacking any positivity of its own. Thus the Khoikhoi are constituted in terms of the subordinate character, established through a series of equivalences constructed by means of antagonisms. It is this relationship that came to underlie the conceptual structure of racism in South Africa. In it the European would throughout be the paradigmatic representative of the human species, and the black, the 'Other', of this idealised image.

This process of negation, differentiation and rejection, presupposed an implicit scale of values which placed the European above the savage, and the experience of the savage is subject to moral critique. The absence of laws, religion, government, reflect an uncontrolled and licentious society without moral restraint or moral obligations. It is precisely this feature of savage life that produced the graphic descriptions which scandalised the Classical Age, and underlined for that Age the negative effects of a relaxation of morals.¹⁰ A moral perception sustains Ten Rhyne's account of Khoikhoi habits:

These lawless barbarians and immoral paeans practise only those habits to which a blind impulse of nature irresistibly impels them. ... Abandoned as they are to every vice, they practise the rite of Venus a posteriori; the woman rests upon her side higher up than the man, while he reclines in the hollow that serves him for a bed. Thus after the fashion of the beasts they rush on their mutual embrace.¹¹

As Dapper claimed, the absence of laws meant the absence of morals and any notion of shame. Shame was seen as the proof of adulthood, civilised standards, and 'proper behaviour'.¹² According to Dapper and other observers, the Khoikhoi possessed neither morals nor shame: 'They are unashamed... and for a small piece of bread or tobacco will expose themselves entirely to your gaze'.¹³ This constant harping on the absence of shame among the Khoikhoi is a commentary on the contemporary European obsession with morality and good behaviour. Thus, the beginnings of racist discourse not only involved the construction of black Otherness, it also invested this Otherness with a sensibility of moral condemnation.

Idleness

Another recurrent theme was that the Khoikhoi were idle. Indeed, idleness was regarded as the central feature of their character.¹⁴ With hardly a dissenting voice,¹⁵ the Khoikhoi were condemned as idle, slothful, indolent and lazy. For Protestant Europe, to be idle was to defy the fundamental divine edict; to be improvident, to look to God to save oneself from starving, was an offence. Without the discipline of unremitting work, mankind would relapse into sin. In Calvinism, as Weber has written, 'Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one's own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health ... is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.'¹⁶ In contemporary Europe, as Foucault has noted, 'the great confinement' had got under way, and with it the campaigns to stamp out vagrancy and begging. Beggars as well as criminals and the insane were now shut away. In periods of high unemployment, houses of confinement incarcerated the unemployed; during better times the same houses were used as hostels. In productive terms these houses of confinement were a failure, but that is not the point; their purpose was not to turn a profit, but to proclaim the ethical value of work. In the early phases of industrial development, Foucault suggests, labour and poverty were viewed as polar opposites; labour was regarded as having the power to conquer poverty 'not so much by its productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment.¹⁷ It is in terms of such concepts of labour that the Khoikhoi were judged and found wanting.

Mentzel described the Khoikhoi as 'idle and lazy; timid and shy or stupid ... filthy in their habits and swinish at their meals; ignorant and not eager to learn anything . . . they are greedy, and have a natural inclination for strong drink and tobacco.’¹⁸ What was the remedy? Work. According to William Burchell, manual labour would teach them the 'necessity of honest industry', and this in turn would 'cut off the root of at least half the miseries of the Hottentot race.'¹⁹

As these observers denounced the sloth of the Khoikhoi, they reflected upon the causes and considered the answer to the question of how the slothful Khoikhoi were to be rehabilitated. According to Mentzel, the answer lay in education; 'Hottentots are people whose whole way of living is proof that they have no educators ... They have grown up, as it were, in a state of nature. They do not think about anything except what they have learned without direction or instruction.'²⁰ Mentzel's investigations aimed explicitly to discover the most efficient means of colonizing the Khoikhoi. He thought that 'they can however be tamed, if they are gently persuaded to become servants.... Especially those taken in hand when young may easily be trained and used.'²¹ The Khoikhoi were idle because they lived in a state of nature: their route to improvement lay in subjection to European authority. By working for the European colonist, the lifestyle of the Khoikhoi would be transformed, and they would acquire the regularity and discipline of European society. Putting the Khoikhoi to work would lay the basis for their incorporation into colonial society. From their labour would flow the benefits of production and also of moral improvement.

As contact with the Khoikhoi grew, the European view about them became more sophisticated, as did the explanations about their idleness. Mentzel, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, did not demur from the earlier view of the Khoikhoi as uncivilised, but he was able now to give further and better particulars:

These authors are right insofar as the Hottentots build no cities, live in the most distant parts, between the mountains, in valleys, in wildernesses, along the rivers, in the bushes and forests, migrate from one place to another, acknowledge no authority, accept no laws, except those they have chosen for themselves and have observed by long custom.²²

As a consequence their 'whole way of living is proof that they have no educators.'²³ But Khoikhoi traits had deeper causes. Sparrman, a scientist and doctor, thought their diet and an. inactive lifestyle was the likely cause of their listlessness:

... the Hottentots are more cold and moderate in their desires of a certain nature than any other nations; qualities which are the natural consequences of the dull, inactive and entirely listless disposition, which is the leading characteristic of their minds -qualities which are produced by the debilitating diet they use and their extreme inactivity and sloth which increase, but in extremes deadens and benumbs both the physical and moral sensations.²⁴

Here are early signs of that hegemony of the visual mode of knowing in medicine (and indeed in science), which came to be linked with the political hegemony of Europeans over non-European. The subject of political hegemony (that is, the Khoikhoi as colonised) and the scientist's object (the Khoikhoi as studied) were coming to be addressed within the same space.²⁵

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Khoikhoi were being forced to work, and this entailed imposing rigorous forms of physical constraint upon them. To begin with, the colonists got the labour they needed by tying the Khoikhoi's family to the farm or by holding onto his wages.²⁶ The official line was that the Khoikhoi must be kept constantly employed. Any Khoikhoi who neglected his duties must, according to 'the good order' laid down by Fiscal J.A. Truter, like 'children, apprentices and slaves' be punished by their betters.²⁷ Curbs were imposed upon their mobility and pass laws and vagrancy regulations were designed to tie them to their jobs. In 1794, theDutch East India Company gave settlers the right to arrest armed Khoikhoi who were found idle along the roads or in the fields.²⁸ In 1809, after the British had become the masters of the Cape, Governor Caledon put onto the statute book the curbs that ultimately left the Khoikhoi with no choice but to work under a system which relegated them permanently to the status of involuntary serfs. As De Kiewiet put it, 'The Caledon Code brought the relations between master and servant within the ordinary processes of law'.²⁹ To prevent, idleness and vagrancy, Caledon's Hottentot Proclamation made it compulsory for Khoikhoi to have certificates of residency or, when they left their abode, passes issued by their master (or the Landdrost).³⁰ This marks the first appearance of the Pass Laws in their long and notorious history in South Africa: their aim was to eliminate idleness and vagrancy, satisfy the white demand for labour, regulate the movements of the black population, and tie blacks by a system of laws that continues to control their lives to the present day. The pass laws were one element in the sequestration of black life, which stands out as a feature of white settlement in South Africa.

Savage Life

As Hayden White has shown, early modern Europe's conception of the wild man endowed him with one of two distinct personalities, depending upon how the relationship between nature and society was perceived.³¹ If living in a state of nature was defined negatively, and society was seen as preferable to the natural state, the savage was seen as the 'antitype of desirable humanity', representing a threat to society and its norms. If, on the other hand, nature was viewed through rose-tinted spectacles, and society was seen as a ‘fall away from natural perfection', then the wild man served as 'antitypes ofsocial existence'.³² Broadly speaking, Hobbes belongs to the former tradition and Rousseau to the latter.

During the seventeenth century, the notion of the savage flowed in two distinct channels. Savagery was either projected in terms of the positive aspects of man released from the trammels of convention or in negative terms in which man's submission to the 'state of nature' was a warning of the dire consequences of rejecting society and its norms. Significantly, the positive view of the state of nature was rarely found in travel accounts, and was conspicuous by its absence among the European settlers at the Cape. An exception was Grevenbroek's portrayal of the Khoikhoi: 'In whiteness of soul they are superior to many of our countrymen'.³³ In an account which anticipates Rousseau's noble savage, Grevenbroek argued that the Khoikhoi had degenerated through contact with Europeans. 'From us they have learned blasphemy, perjury, strife, quarrelling, drunkenness, trickery, brigandage, theft, ingratitude, unbridled lust for what is not one's own, misdeeds unknown to them before, and among other crimes of deepest die, the accursed lust of gold.'³⁴ For Grevenbroek the passage out of nature was the beginning of corruption and the degeneracy of the Khoikhoi was not an original condition, but a condition acquired through contact with the European.³⁵

It was the Hobbesian vision, however, that prevailed in most of the accounts of the Cape. In a familiar passage in the 'Leviathan', Hobbes condemned the State of Nature as a condition of war, with no industry, agriculture, commerce, arts, letters or society: '... and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' According to Hobbes this was the condition of 'the savage people in many places of America’, and his description could have as well come from any of the travellers' portrayals of Khoikhoi life.³⁶

Yet Hobbes's view of the savage as 'brutish', 'barbarous', and 'hostile', with the 'State of Nature' as the antithesis of civilised society, and Rousseau's portrayal of the 'Noble Savage' and nature as innocent, unspoiled and virtuous embodied in the 'Noble Savage', though apparently opposed, were in fact anchored within a single system of analysis. Firstly, both posit a 'State of Nature' which is without Arts, Sciences and Writing, in other words, the opposite of civilization. The opposition is coupled around the idea that culture is different from Nature; culture in its positivity as presence is different from Nature in its negativity as absence.

Secondly both discourses saw the 'beginnings' of man and his relation to Nature in the transition from origin to genesis. The description of 'pure Nature' makes room for such a transition. But 'pure Nature' is supplemented by an exterior addition; it is innocent and good or it is evil. Throughout their texts, the negativity of Evil for Rousseau and the negativity of good for Hobbes, form the supplementarity of Nature³⁷ thus for Rousseau, evil is exterior to Nature and for Hobbes evil is interior to Nature. In both Rousseau and Hobbes, Nature is supplemented by notions evil or good, which are exterior to Nature itself as descriptions. Thus Nature can only derive its meaning through a procedure of supplementarity, in which the 'savage' is presented through a system of substitution, aimed at reconstituting the edifice of Nature. As Derrida argues, nature does not supplement itself at all, its supplement does not proceed from itself, it is alien and 'other’ than Nature.³⁸ From this point of view, both discourses are reconciled within the unity of a single code of supplementarity of nature, which is the precondition of that code. In both accounts the 'savage' derives his identity through the supplements good and evil. The supplement of Nature as evil produces a vision of savage life as one without order, regularity, science, arts and harmony. These are exterior to and against Nature. Savage life is thus characterised as 'lawless' and 'immoral', displaying 'a wretched ignorance of all virtues', producing 'unbridled lusts' all of which though 'they have not the law yet do things that are of the nature of law'.³⁹ Through the supplementation of nature as essentially evil, the Khoikhoi 'resisting every impulse of humanity, ...persist in the savagery of their fore-fathers'.⁴⁰ Savage life is clearly not a social state, but a curse of Nature; the Khoikhoi suffered from the same handicaps, stemming from the same causes: being savage in the state of Nature. The negativity of the State of Nature produces the negativity of savage life.

The Khoikhoi, as savage, is directed solely by natural instinct in which lust and passion prevail: 'the force of nature keeps them absolutely subject to their squalid ways'. Consequently they lack the faculties, the self-restraint and the social structures by which the Europeans, for example, have raised themselves above those base instincts. It is precisely the transition of man from the Natural to the Social State that distinguishes him from the animal kingdom. According to this line of reasoning about the State of Nature on the one hand and structure of European society on the other, the Khoikhoi were perceived as pre-cultural, antisocial, or natural, and thus accorded with purely animal functions.

It is not surprising then, that descriptions of the Khoikhoi throughout this period were dominated by images of animality or bestiality. An English clergyman who visited the Cape in 1615; graphically described the Khoikhoi as 'beasts in the skins of men, rather than men in the skins of beasts, as may appear by their ignorance, habit, language and diet.'⁴¹ Even when they eat 'they fall on the dead beast like dogs, eating it raw and seldom cooked'.⁴² Their disposition and bodies resemble that of beasts: 'They have the temper of wild animals ... and bodies more than human'.⁴³ These images of animality, projected on the way that they ate, their habits, disposition and physical appearance, distinguished the Khoikhoi from the European, and distanced them from sensibilities of European man. This distance was a precondition of the discourse; it substantiated the alterity of the Khoikhoi and sustained it throughout.

InSome Years Travels into Africa and Asia, published in 1665, Thomas Herbert tried to establish that the Khoikhoi were beings halfway between man and ape. Having 'a voice 'twixt humane and beast, makes that supposition to be of more credit, that they have a beastly copulation or conjuncture. So as considering the resemblance they bear with Baboons, which I could observe kept frequent company with the Women, their speech... rather agreeing with beasts than men.'⁴⁴ This reinforced the contemporary perception that the Khoikhoi were not entirely human, in a period when classification was used to detect similarities and mark out differences between species. If the European, the dynamic creator of writing, laws, arts and government, represented the exemplary paradigm of Man in the chain of Being, where would the Khoikhoi fit? Local settlers at the Cape, who called them 'schepsel', also had their doubts whether the Khoikhoi were entirely human and a visitor, Landdrost Alberts, remarked in 1805 that 'according to the unfortunate notion prevalent here, a heathen is actually not human, but at the same time he cannot really be classed among the animals. He is therefore a sort of creature not known elsewhere.'⁴⁵

Khoikhoi language, we have seen, was compared to the clucking of hens or the cackling of geese. Associating it with language's fabled origins, when forms of human expression hardly distinct from the tongue of animals began to emerge as speech. Ten Rhyne wrote:

If one listens to them talking, one supposes the age of Pythagoras to have returned, in which birds were fabled to have enjoyed mutual converse in speech. In sober truth it is noise, not speech, if one attends to the mode of expression of the Hottentots ... The result is that they are bereft of all interchange of speech with other races; nor after all this lapse of time can one of our countrymen be found who can converse perfectly with them.⁴⁶

Since speech, for Ten Rhyne and the Classical Age to which he belonged,⁴⁷ distinguishes man from animals, and language marks one nation from another, the Khoikhoi were seen as outside the family of man, incapable of communication with other peoples because they were bereft of speech. Above all, the unintelligibility of their language made communication between the races impossible. It is this that sets the Khoikhoi ever further apart from human-kind. The Khoikhoi was not only distinct from the European in language, he was underdeveloped. Men and animals alike used sounds as signs, but the signification of words involved the 'spiritual element' of speech,⁴⁸ as is shown by Condillac's exposition on linguistic acquisition, in which he systematically developed and incorporated Locke's rejection of innate ideas. The notion was accepted that all knowledge of the external world, all complex ideas, are generalizations from simple ideas which are the mental images of sense perceptions.⁴⁹ For Condillac, the differences between classes of being are a result of theircapacity to receive, collect and utilize experiences. Men are superior to animals, not simply because they possess reason, but because they have learnt to use complex signs. Language provides the basis for reasoning which makes connections and generalizations from the perceptions of the senses. For the human species, language is an acquired ability and each individual has to be trained in its use. The capacity to know depends on the development of the different senses and the ability to differentiate between sense impressions. This ability in its turn depends upon the demands placed on the senses, and the exigencies of a person's needs. When the range of human needs is extended, so is the range of sensations, and therefore, of human abilities. Thus, environment, language and social development are necessary for the formation of the capacities conceived of as distinctly 'human', the capacity to reason and to speak. Man’s isolation from civilised society will reveal only his 'natural' endowments, what sense experience at its most simple level can produce in the individual, without benefit of training or the stimulus of civilised needs. In this context, the Khoikhoi represented the most primitive level of linguistic capacity, acquisition and expression. Khoikhoi language signified human language in its 'purely natural' and hence most undeveloped and inferior state. At the same time, since the his environment is the state of nature, his language under-developed, and his social development pre-cultural, the Khoikhoi does not have the necessary capacities conceived of as distinctly human, and is closer to the animal than to 'civilised' man.

An entire framework had thus been set up into which manifestations of Khoikhoi behaviour could be placed. The significant fact was that the framework was conceived in terms of animality. The animality of the Khoikhoi dispossessed him of all that is specifically human. For the European, the Khoikhoi ultimately is man not yet released from animality. In his animality he becomes an object of disgust, loathing, anxiety and fear, the quintessence of what Europeans feared they might become again if they relapsed into a State of Nature. This fear of savagery embodies European anxieties about the Hobbesian 'State of Nature' or, as Samuel Butler put it in the 1680s,

The Whole World, without Art, and Dress,
Would be but one great Wilderness
And Mankind but a Savage Herd,
For all that Nature has Conferd.⁵⁰

In the accounts of contemporary travellers, there is no explicit formulation of the argument that Khoikhoi nature and traits were innate; this was language that would be used later in the nineteenth century to describe 'primitive' peoples. But there were signs of a not unsimilar view, albeit implicit, beginning to emerge. Ten Rhyne considered that races are distinct from each other with distinct qualities: 'The human race as a whole, apart from local and national peculiarities, is provided at birth with a character proper to itself.'⁵¹ Since the Khoikhoi were regarded as a distinct race with distinct physical and moral traits, most Europeans at the Cape did not believe that a change of circumstances or conversion could fundamentally improve or alter them. This attitude is revealed by the experience of Eva, a 'civil, modest body, of rational discourse',⁵² the first Khoikhoi woman who was converted to Christianity and then married a Danish surgeon. By 1658 Eva had mastered Dutch and had become one of the first interpreters between Europeans and her people. After less than four years of marriage, she was left a widow with three children. The Company gave her a home in an abandoned pottery but she took to drink and prostitution. Typically, at a dinner with the colony's elite, she shocked the guests by becoming drunk and hurling abuse at them. Threatened with banishment to Robben Island, she fled the colony but was arrested on her way back to the Khoikhoi. Eva was sent to Robben Island where she spent most of the last five years of her life. Her obituary in the official journal makes the point:

This day departed this life, a certain female Hottentoo, named Eva, long, ago taken from the African brood in her tender childhood by the Hon. Van Riebeeck and educated in his house as well as brought to the knowledge of the Christian faith, and being thus transformed from a female Hottentoo almost into a Motherland woman.... Since his |her Husband's| death ... she had brought forth... many illegitimate ones, and for the rest, led such an irregular life.... Hence in order not to be accused of tolerating her adulterous and debauched life, she had at various times been relegated to Robben Island where, though she could obtain no drink, she abandoned herself to immorality. Pretended reformation induced the Authorities many times to call her back to the Cape, but as soon as she returned, she, like the dogs, always returned to her own vomit, so that finally she quenched the fire of her sensuality by death, affording a manifest example that nature, however closely and firmly muzzled by imprinted principles, nevertheless at its own time triumphing over all precepts, again rushes back to its inborn qualities.⁵³

This extract has been retained in its original form, since its style reveals not only the moral outrage and the unbending self-righteousness of those who judged her fall, but it also suggests how racist attitudes and moral judgement went hand in hand. Eva's racial origins are posited as the essential cause of her degradation, while her debauched and adulterous conduct are seen as consequences of being irremediably a 'Hottentot'.

Eva's tragic life reveals that the settler community in the Cape were already acutely conscious of their white racial identity, and this throws an interesting light on the nexus between cultural identity and racial practice in the early colonial period. As the daughter of a European man and a Khoikhoi woman told a traveller in the 1780s:

You know the profound contempt which the whites entertain for the blacks, and even for those of a mixed breed like myself. To settle among them was to expose myself to daily disgrace and affronts.⁵⁴

Finally, the epitaph on Eva's brief life encapsulates the early European perception of the Khoikhoi. Their flirtations with European culture would, inevitably, end badly and they would always revert to their bad own ways.⁵⁵ Indeed, Eva's life was a parable of what most white people already believed: that the Khoikhoi were incapable of absorbing European culture; they were unassimilated and unassimilable.

Classification, Order and Hierarchy

Classifying nature and man into types marks the faint beginnings of modern theories about race. In the eighteenth century, the exhaustive description of all living beings was placed in one systematic table, classified as part of the great hierarchy and continuum of nature. This involved a rational process of ordering in which classification was made by detecting similarities and picking out differences. Linnaeus and Buffon were not alone in an intellectual movement which held that the bodily (and moral and intellectual) extensions could be precisely measured in terms of their characteristic elements and not merely their physical appearances.

In natural history a type had a particular character which provided the observer with a designation, or as Foucault says, 'a controlled derivation'. These types and characters belong to a system, a network of related generalisation. Thus,

... all designations must be accomplished by means of a certain relation to all other possible designations. To know what properly appertains to one individual is to have before one the classification - or the possibility of classifying - all others.⁵⁶

In the writings of philosophers, natural historians and travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, character-as-designation appears in terms of physiological-moral classifications. Thus for example, Linnaeus tried to classify all living beings and arranged them into an ordered taxonomic table. The abbreviated version of Linnaeus' arrangement of Homo Sapiens from his tenth edition of Systema Naturae in 1758 ran as follows:

Wild Man - shaggy hair, mute, four-footed.
American - red, choleric, erect; thick, straight black hair; distended nostrils.... He paints himself with variegated, red lines. He is ruled by custom.
European - white, sanguine, muscular, long, blond hair; blue eyes, gentle, most intelligent, a discoverer. He covers himself with clothing suitable to the northern climate. He is ruled by religious custom.
Asiatic - yellow, melancholy, rigid; dark hair, dark eyes; austere, arrogant, greedy. He covers himself with loose clothing. He is ruled by opinion.
African - black, phlegmatic, lax; black, curly hair; silky skin, apelike nose; swollen lips; the bosoms of the women are distended; their breasts give milk copiously, crafty, slothful, careless. He smears himself with fat. He is ruled by authority.
Monster - divided into two groups; those by nature... and those by custom.⁵⁷

Linnaeus's classification was based on the contrast between the other races and the European. Distinctions include geography, colour, racial personality traits, facial and body features, the wearing or the absence of clothes, and customs. The European was clearly the paradigm against which all other races were measured.

Linnaeus's categories were not organised in the same way as in Buffon's Chain of Being. For Linnaeus, human beings as rational speaking beings, were simply one more kind of creature, whose nature could be read off from their proper definition and to whom their proper place on the table of beings could thus be assigned. However, by defining the different physiological-moral traits and establishing the differences between races, by contrasting other races against a Eurocentric model of man, these were designated by their inferiority. In Linnaeus's system, the Khoikhoi were classified and designated as 'Monster', a kind of pathological species. This classification reified the difference, distance and inferiority of the Khoikhoi compared with European man.

The idea of the Great Chain of Being was another method of classification in natural history. This Chain of Being, commenced with inanimate objects and ranged upwards through the lowliest forms of life and the more intelligent animals until it reached man himself. It then continued upwards through the ranks of heavenly creatures until it reached its pinnacle in God.⁵⁸ Within this system the distinction between races was achieved by ranking them hierarchically. As the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet stated, 'there is a prodigious number of continued links between the most perfect man and the ape.'⁵⁹ Within this system, the proximity between Ape and man is shown by the 'Hottentot'. The natural historian Soame Jenyns confirmed this view by declaring that

. . . animal life rises from this low beginning in the shell-fish . . . and beasts to the confines of reason, where, in the dog, the monkey, and chimpanzee it unites so closely with the lowest degree of that quality in man, ... From this lowest degree in the brutal Hottentot, reason, with the assistance of learning and science, advances, through the various stages of human understanding, which rise above each other, till in a Bacon or a Newton it attains the summit.⁶⁰

According to Buffon, the Khoikhoi were the lowest exemplars of mankind in the 'Chain of Being', bridging the gap between Man and Ape, and he repeated the now well-worn legend that the beastly sexual appetite of Khoikhoi women encouraged them to copulate with apes.⁶¹ In this classificatory system the Khoikhoi was ranked as the lowest human species; he was constituted as being not different and distant from European man, butinferior to him.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and natural historians analysed the 'savage', their analysis was guided by questions derived from philosophy and natural history. The philosophical questions had to do with the nature of man and the distinctions between the natural and the social state, questions which presumed savagery to be the converse of civilization, and civilization the source of the ethical standards by which the ways of savage life could be judged. On the other hand, questions of natural history led to the analysis of beings, their conduct, disposition and physical varieties. Together, the two sets of questions gave the civilised European the double task not only of defining and judging himself but also of analysing, classifying and identifying his converse, (the savage).

Black Identity

The Khoikhoi as 'other' was labelled with a set of signs which mirrored the potential threats they were seen to pose to European civilization. As 'other', the black was invested with all the qualities of the 'bad', 'evil', 'savage', 'dirty', 'immoral' and so on. The association of these negative qualities with black identity, and positive qualities with white identity, is a recurring image in racist discourse. As Fanon wrote

In Europe the Black man is the symbol of evil. The torturer is the Black man, Satan is black.... It would be astonishing, if the trouble were taken to bring them all together, to see the vast expressions that make the Black man the equivalent of sin. In Europe, whether concretely or symbolically, the Black man stands for the bad side of the character ... on the other side, the bright "look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly, light.⁶²

In effect there was an overall negation of the black. In the early colonial context it involved, as Fanon has pointed out, the destruction of Khoikhoi cultural values and ways of life; their language, dress and systems of reference, all were devalued.⁶³ Expropriation, dispossession, raids and murders were accompanied by the annihilation of Khoikhoi customs and cultural patterns. In their place, a Western system of governing, and a new system of values were imposed. At the Cape a society emerged which was hierarchically ordered on racial lines, and functioned under white supervision. The Khoikhoi were thus constituted and confined within a system alien to their own. In this early phase the colonist established his domination, while his every attitude, action and behaviour massively affirmed his superiority. All this literally made the black an object in the hands of the European. He came to be enclosed and fixed within the colonial status. The perception of the black as stupid, dirty, and immoral was constantly renewed by the very system that had destroyed his traditional mode of life. Racist views were systematically generated within the colonial context, and these views informed practices which in turn had reifying effects. The notorious apathy of the Khoikhoi which the white colonist decried was in itself the consequence of these developments. In other words, the conception of the black as 'lazy', 'stupid', and 'dirty' was produced by the very system that repressed him. It can therefore be seen why the question of black identity is so crucial to the formation of any racist discourse. As Fanon wrote, 'for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.'⁶⁴

It is worth recalling that Eva's conversion to Christianity and adoption of a European lifestyle alienated her from her traditional culture without gaining her a real acceptance by Europeans.⁶⁵ Accepted in neither culture, Eva was reduced to seeking the company of sailors, those gypsies of the sea. Another Khoikhoi woman, Sara, who spent most of her short life amongst the Dutch as a servant and concubine, killed herself at the age of twenty-four.⁶⁶ A Khoikhoi, converted to Christianity and taken to Holland in 1707, was considered on his return to have led such an immoral life that he was banished to Robben Island. Another westernized Khoikhoi, known as Pegu, escaped the same fate only by fleeing back to his own people.⁶⁷

The experience of these Europeanized Khoikhoi symbolises how racism in its initial phase, involved the total violation of the individual, existentially, politically and most distinctively, culturally. Fanon has characterized this initial phase in terms of the concept of alienation. He has argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between culture and racism both for the European who practises it and for the black who becomes its victim.⁶⁸ Westernized blacks were forced to accept the European's conceptions of themselves, and this meant they could only rediscover their identity by the unacceptable and complex route of first negating it, since of course they were black themselves. Their identity was conditioned by having to view their own lifestyles through the denigratory perspective of the European, and this could only lead to negation and despair. Throughout its history black identity has been powerfully bound by this unbreakable dilemma. As Fanon aptly stated, 'the black soul is a white man's artifact.'⁶⁹ So how could the blacks rediscover their identities or their souls?

Conclusion
The central feature in these early perceptions of the Khoikhoi was the conceptual opposition postulated between the European and the non-European. It was not only a negative gesture of rejection or ignorance of 'savage' life, it was founded on a specific framework of perception with its own peculiar coherence, as the discussion above suggests. Perceptions about, and judgement of, the 'savage' produced for the most part a reaction which characterised the Khoikhoi as wild, beastly, dirty, stupid, and unaesthetic, in short, saw-the Khoikhoi as a species of 'savage' in conduct and behaviour. It was a catalogue of faults or forms of 'savagery'. The perceptual grid that produced this view conceived the savage as a threat to the European social order. Thus, savagery was not perceived in isolation, but together with degeneration, disorder, and all other conjured threats to the social order. Idleness, licentiousness, immorality, and brutishness, were lumped together in one category of culpable faults, 'savagery'. Before being designated as a biologically inferior species, blacks at this early point in the trajectory of racism passed through the preparatory stages by being condemned in moral terms.