Moja Media
Part history lesson and part cultural reclamation, Johann Abrahams’ film is an introduction to the Khoekhoe, or Koisan, the indigenous population of southwestern Africa distinguished by language from the Bantu peoples who expanded into the region. Nomadic and pastoralist, they came to be called Hottentots by the Dutch and English settlers who seized their lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reflecting its dual character, the documentary is bookended by the story of Sara Baartman (1789-1815), a Khoekhoe woman who has become a symbol of the mistreatment of her people. As described at the start of the film, she was taken to London in 1810 and put on exhibition at Piccadilly Circus under the name of Sartjee. Abrahams closes with her recognition as a Khoekhoe icon, her grave treated as a monument and a building at the University of Cape Town renamed for her. Between the segments dealing with Baartman, Abrahams follows two on-site narrators, Jolene Martin and Rehane Abrahams, as they travel down the coast of western South Africa around the Cape of Good Hope to the southern shore. At each stop along the way, they converse with local historians and visit surviving Khoekhoe communities, while narration and graphs are employed to illustrate the movement of various Khoekhoe groups from more interior regions to the coastal areas where they settled. Using artwork, literary sources, oral testimony and scholarly commentary, the film records each group’s relations with European explorers and merchants, explaining how what were ordinarily amicable initial encounters—centered on trade and assistance rendered to damaged vessels—turned into conquest and exploitation. Though cursory mention is made of contact with Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias at the close of the fifteenth century, the emphasis is on the activities of the Dutch East India Company, whose ship the Haarlem had gone aground at Table Bay in 1647. Its agent Jan van Riebeeck followed up by establishing a fort there in 1652, from which the Dutch expanded their control of the region, establishing the colony that developed into the city of Cape Town—which in turn was conquered by the British in the early nineteenth century. It was the British who, through the so-called Caledon Code of 1809, restricted the rights of the Khoekhoe in the colony, cementing a policy of their virtual enslavement. In addition to the history of the region, The Khoekhoe Saga celebrates Khoekhoe culture with readings, performances of music and dance, artwork and cuisine. It is an effective portrait of a major episode in the age of European colonization, representing a commitment by a long-subjugated people to recover their past, reassert their dignity and demand reparations. There is also an expanded version of the film, a thirteen-part series titled The Khoekhoe Saga: Africa’s Indigenous Survivors, with a running time of approximately 312 min. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (F. Swietek)