An analysis of how violence to the Kalahari Bushman was either verbally, physicall inflicted by outsiders (such as Boers and other white outsiders) who had u - Essay Example

More than 300 years ago, when the Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope, Africa saw incursions by Europeans, which could also be termed as a war of aggression, dispossession, exploiting of natural and human resources and also the conquest of the local people. Adam Smith, the great British anthropologist foresaw in 1776 itself “the savage injustice of the Europeans”, which would make the mutually beneficial process of exchange between two cultures, destructive by being enacted.

The ravages wrecked by Western European colonialism touched almost all of Western and Southern Africa. As early as 1657 the colonizers began to kill all those whose lands they wished to possess, an act often referred to as the Salami tactic (Pringle). During the British era in Africa, the San or the Bushman were subjected to massive plunder and destruction. The men of this tribe were herded into the kraal, where they were killed, while the women and children were taken captive. With the British occupation of the Cape, the Boers moved inwards and occupied by force the land belonging to the San, who had lived there from time immemorial.

Anthropological studies reveal that the Bushman had existed in these areas as far back as 23000 years. European ethnocentrism was to a large extent responsible for the unjust treatment meted out to the Bushman. In the 1820’s, phrenology, or the study of the brain and its shape was gaining new ground and European colonists argued that since the shape of the brain regulated social behaviour, the peculiar cranium of the San was justification enough for subjugating them. The genocidal war which the Europeans unleashed on the San was justified, as the extinction of lower races, in order to make way for the higher races.

Among the huge multitude of native tribes found in Africa, the Bushman have been brutalized, oppressed and made unwitting victims of the bloodied progress of