Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Broadly speaking, the people who live in South Africa who are of European descent, such as myself, arrived in 1652. That was the settlement when the Dutch East India Company arrived in Cape Town. or what is today Cape Town, to start a refreshment station for ships traveling around Africa to trade with the East.
It was initially the Dutch, and they were then joined by Germans and French especially, but some other Europeans as well. And we sometimes call them the Proto-Afrikaners because the Afrikaner people became a people obviously it's not just one singular event and then you are a people, but it happened over time when we developed our own language and culture in Africa.
So that was about 400 years ago. But what also happened in South Africa in terms of the different black groups, if you could use that term, who live in South Africa, is we had the, and still have the, what is called the Khoi and the San. A lot of people know it as the Bushmen. That's how they're also known. A lot of them prefer to be called the Bushmen.
People know them from the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy and so forth. And they are the true indigenous people. If you want to say who are the indigenous people of South Africa, it's the Khoi and the San. They lived pretty much all over South Africa. They've been there for tens of thousands of years.
I've heard that too.
And I'm very happy that you recognize this because a lot of people don't.
Yeah, but there are also groups like the South African government who would like people to believe that all black people are the same because that's their way of organizing as a collective on the basis of race.
Well, that's a very important point. So they occupied... There were several thousands. I don't know if there were 100,000. I'm not sure. We can check those numbers. But they lived pretty much all over South Africa, and they lived more to the eastern part, which is important because the eastern part is... is much more fertile land.
It's much more humid and that's where the most productive farming land is and so forth. The Western part is arid, it's more deserts and dry and so forth. So they lived mostly in the East? Yes, but they don't anymore.
And that's important because, so if you go to the Eastern parts, like the Drakensberg, you would find the cave paintings of the Koi in the sand, but they don't live there anymore because they were pushed out by groups coming in from the North who it has become a controversial term, although I don't know what the appropriate term then would be, by the Bantu people.
So the word Bantu is a word that means people. It just means people.
Exactly. So they've been known as the Bantu speaking groups, but today it's controversial to use that term. Why is that? because it's a term that refers to black people. And I think some people have used the term in the context of making derogatory remarks or something to that effect. I see, I see.
So, but that's how they were known historically. And that's the Zulus and the Khozas and the different groups that we know in South Africa today. And they came down from the north and pushed out the Bushmen. They came down from the north and they pushed out the Bushmen.
And they are fairly small also, which is one of the reasons when the bigger tribes came in from the north and there was conflict between these groups, they were pushed out. They were not able to take a stance against the Zulu people who are typically a strong nation.
Yeah, very militaristic, yes.
Exactly, yes.
And also to service the ships, building ships, repairing ships, and so forth, yes. Right. And so that they started in 1652. Eventually, they had what we call the Freiburgers or the Freeburgers, which was that some of the they were employees of the Dutch East India Company.
Some of them were then released from their contracts so that they could become farmers so that they could start developing an economy. And so there were some clashes with, for example, the Bushmen already there in the Cape between the Europeans and the Bushmen. But there was also examples of trading and cooperation and so forth.
And so these things were very complex. We had the same dynamics in South Africa with the Afrikaner people and the English as well, yes. But just to get to that point, it's unfortunate that thinking about history, history tends to overestimate or overemphasize the conflict and downplay the cooperation, because conflict is more newsworthy, you could say.
So when we think about history, we think about war and conflict, but we forget the cooperation part that's very important.
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