In the beginning there was just God. After he created “The fairest Cape in all the circumference of the earth” (that’s according to Sir Francis Drake who rounded the Cape in 1580), he moved on to create the other continents. One day, in a long wide ravine, further up in Africa, some apes started to walk erect. After a few millennia, these erect guys and girls started to walk south, till they finally arrived on the white beaches of Clifton in Cape Town. Down there they called themselves, Khoikhoi — ‘Men of Men’.
The Khoi girls were a bit pissed off about this chauvinism but were told by the men that they had to wait another couple of millennia for a bit more evolution and the emancipation of woman to take its course. Anyway, to cut a long story short, by the time the V.O.C (The Dutch East India Company) corporate expansionists, in the cocky shape of Jan van Riebeeck, reached the fairest Cape, these light-brown people were merrily combing the beaches for food and tending cattle and sheep. They had made themselves a lekker paradise. Everything was hunky-dory until the Dutch settlers threw a hammer in the works (there were no spanners, back then). This is when the shit hit the fan and sprayed it all over Africa, which, according to some, is still continuing to this day. As the Dutch power grew at the Cape of Good Hope, the Khoikhoi were slowly dispossessed, exterminated and enslaved. European diseases like measles and smallpox killed thousands. Dutch, German and Scandinavian immigrants thought of the Khoi as lawless barbarians, smelly, heathenish, brutish, immoral pagans. The settlers, now called Free Burghers, called them ‘Hottentots’, because of the clicking tone in their speech, which sounded like a stutter.
Often in the past I have left the urban sprawl of the Cape peninsula and driven over the Hottentots Holland Mountains and into the open arms of the Overberg. In those early times, these mountains formed a formidable barrier, where the Khoikhoi took refuge after clashes with the European colonizers. It’s been said that the Khoi loved these mountains and the wide-open country beyond. The Dutch named these mountains after their love for their motherland and those pagan ‘Hottentots’ who lived in its ravines and the country beyond. Along a small road in the Overberg, I stopped and picked an orange flower from a wild Dagga plant, (leonotis leonurus). Wild Dagga was first used and smoked by the Khoikhoi to promote a feeling of euphoria and exuberance. I chewed a few petals and just stood there and marvelled at this landscape. I wondered whether perhaps we down here at the bottom of Africa should not just all start over again. Bring back God and the Khoikhoi and plant fields of wild Dagga.