The Ghost of Theal: Representation of the Khoe-San in SA School History Books

摘要

Stereotypes about the Khoe-San1 The term Khoe-San is used in this article instead of Khoisan partly because the spelling ‘Khoekhoe’ is more compatible with orthographies adopted for some of the Khoe languages, such as Namibian Khoekhoe. Hyphenating the two terms takes into account the objection San that they should not be subordinated to, or subsumed within Khoekhoe groupings politically as well as in the conjunction of terms. The term ‘Khoesan’ has another function in linguistics where it is used as a cover-term for all click languages that are neither Cushitic nor Bantu. Hyphenating the term is problematic in linguistics as there are San communities who speak languages that belong to the Khoe language family. The term Khoe-San became used in a self-referential manner in the main after 1994. View all notes as pre-modern, unusual, and virtually extinct in South Africa have been socially pervasive. School history is one very important medium through which such views have been reproduced, spread and sustained. This article examines the way the Khoe-San people have been depicted in South African school history books from the late 1800s into the post-apartheid period. It shows that there has been great consistency of degrading representations of the Khoe-San from the late 1800s, with significant changes occurring only during the 1980s. It also shows that despite the momentous shift in the representation of the Khoe-San in post-1994 books, pernicious ideas, which perpetuate Khoe-San marginalisation, have been reproduced.View full textDownload full textKeywordsKhoe-San, representation, school history, colonialism, apartheid, ideologyRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2011.557576