77 Southern African Humanities Vol. 20 Pages 77–92 Pietermaritzburg December, 2008 http://www.sahumanities.org.za Against the ‘Khoisan paradigm’ in the interpretation of Khoekhoe origins and history: a re-evaluation of Khoekhoe pastoral traditions François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 22 avenue Victor Hugo, 91440 Bures-sur-Yvette, France; Fx.fauvelle@yahoo.fr ABSTRACT The idea that all aspects of Khoekhoe culture are better understood within the frame of the Khoisan universe can be labelled the ‘Khoisan paradigm’. Starting with a short history of this leading paradigm, the present article provides arguments to reconsider the Khoekhoe pastoral traditions, a segment of Khoekhoe culture that is crucial to understanding the origin and history of herding/pastoralism in southern Africa. It is argued that, contrary to the biological and linguistic dimensions of the Khoekhoe, these pastoral traditions testify to East African connections. KEY WORDS: Khoekhoe, Khoisan, southern Africa, South Africa, pastoralism, herding, animal husbandry We have been accustomed to think of Khoekhoe as hunter-gatherers with sheep and ceramics, and sometimes a few cattle. We would like the Khoekhoe to be slightly more than ‘Bushmen’, hunter-gatherers who became herders by accident and who display a very light and impermanent hue of pastoralism. This notion informs the scholarly paradigm of Khoekhoe origins, prehistory and post-contact history. In this article, I would like to suggest that this notion is not well rooted, and that there is another way of looking at the evidence which would point to the Khoekhoe as ‘pure’ pastoralists, in the same way we consider other African populations such as the Nuer or the Maasai of East Africa. In turn, this paradigm shift, primarily based on a careful selection and re- examination of written sources, can provide new hypotheses for the history of the Khoekhoe. ‘BUSHMEN PLUS’: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE KHOISAN PARADIGM Starting with European racial anthropology, there were intense debates throughout the nineteenth century to decide on which biological criteria ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’ were to be differentiated. The point was that these two populations displayed an apparent physical closeness, but the colonial view of the Cape held that they came from two different racial stocks. As can be shown from a review of nineteenth-century scientific literature on the Bushmen and Hottentots (Fauvelle-Aymar 1999), knowledge on these populations was elaborated within the following epistemological framework. First, a very small number of individuals, dead or alive, were closely observed; the ‘body of reference’ being that of Sarah Baartman, a woman from the Eastern Cape who was displayed in Great Britain and France in the 1810s (Abrahams 1996; Lindfors 1983, 1985; Strother 1999), and whose corpse was subsequently dissected by Georges Cuvier (1817). Secondly, there existed a very strong tie between professional naturalists and the show business milieu, the former providing ‘certificates of authenticity’ to the latter in return for permission to examine individuals closely and to obtain their corpses on