San – praag.org

I was still pondering the implications of “black colonialism” as set out in a previous column when it struck me that some of South Africa’s ethnic categories are completely wrong.

Afrikaners were the first group in the country to refer to themselves as “Africans”, as long ago as 1707 when Hendrik Biebouw said: “Ik ben een Afrikaander.” However, today Afrikaners have been defined as an out-group by South African legislation that simply classes them as “whites”.

Most of our affirmative-action legislation has been imported from the USA and BEE is just an adapted form of what is called “minority procurement” over there. So there is nothing “African” about the current race-classification system!

In German, “Afrikaner” means simply “African”, yet the current laws define Afrikaners as Europeans. The ultimate irony is that ANC and especially SACP ideology has been constructed by recent immigrants from Lithuania (like Joe Slovo) and, of course, Britain.

Imposing racial quotas on everything from the medical schools at Afrikaans universities to the Blue Bulls rugby team is bad enough. But stripping us of our age-old Africanness by legislative fiat represents the ultimate insult, making us interlopers in our own country.

Searching for answers, I reread Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech, but it is simply a fanciful restatement of American multiculturalism, with echoes of (Swedish) Gunnar Myrdal’s “melting pot” idea. So nothing “African” there, either.

We urgently need to bring back the term “Bantu” and I have begun to recommend its use on social media and everywhere else. There seems to be a certain squeamishness about using this word, meaning “people”, which is unfathomable. Even the famous Xhosa definition of “ubuntu” contains it: “Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu.”

Anthropologists, linguists and other people in need of proper definitions have never stopped referring to the “Bantu peoples”, “Bantu languages”, etc. Even Bantu education has been rehabilitated by such leading authorities as Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and a lecturer at Wits Business School, Mr. Rabelani Dagada, both of whom consider it better than the current schooling system.

The first ANC-supporting newspaper in the 1920s was called Abanthu-Batho and today there is a clothing brand which is thus advertised: “Abantu is a ladies wear brand which creates timeless pieces which speak to the South African audience.”

The Bantu peoples inhabit East and Southern Africa. For them or their Lithuanian theorists to arrogate unto themselves the sole right to being called “Africans” is not only intellectually unsound, but also unfair. After all, there are 200 million North Africans, including Egyptians, Arabs, Berbers, Copts and so on, who are Africans, by definition. West Africa too, is given the cold shoulder by Bantu imperialism.

In the nineteen-twenties some leading German and French anthropologists claimed, upon the basis of very ancient mining activity in these parts, that whites may have inhabited both South Africa and Zimbabwe as long ago as 3500 B.C. They must have been the first Afrikaners and we should venerate them as our true founding fathers, together with the Khoi and San.

Either we must qualify for affirmative action like other “Africans” – and even the Chinese! – or the Bantu must clearly announce their pretensions to being a kind of continental nobility with special privileges.

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This column also appeared as a letter in Business Day.

Pigmy villagers in Uganda near Lake Bunyonyi

According to a news report of the scientific journal Nature, “our ancestors bred with other species in the Homo genus, according to a study published… in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹. The authors say that up to 2% of the genomes of some modern African populations may originally come from a closely related species.”

Palaeontologists have long wondered whether modern humans came from a single, genetically isolated population of hominids or whether we are a genetic mix of various hominid species.

Last year, an analysis comparing the Neanderthal genome sequence to that of modern H. sapiens showed that some interbreeding did take place between the two species in Europe some time between 80 and 30,000 years ago and that, to a certain extent, Neanderthals ‘live on’ in the genes of modern humans².

It has been a mystery whether similar genetic mixing took place among Homo species even earlier, before the populations that became modern humans left Africa.

To find out, evolutionary biologist Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues studied DNA from two African hunter-gatherer groups, the Biaka Pygmies and the San, as well as from a West African agricultural population known as the Mandenka.

Each of these groups is descended from populations that are thought to have remained in Africa, meaning they would have avoided the genetic bottleneck effect that usually occurs with migration. This means the groups show particularly high genetic diversity, which makes their genomes more likely to have retained evidence of ancient genetic mixing.

“We need to modify the standard model

of human origins.”

To find signs of infiltration from other Homospecies, the researchers looked at 61 non-coding DNA regions in all three groups. Because direct comparison to archaic specimens wasn’t possible, the authors used computer models to simulate how infiltration from different populations might have affected patterns of variation within modern genomes.

Then they looked for such patterns of variation in the DNA of the three African populations. On chromosomes 4, 13 and 18, the researchers found genetic regions that were more divergent on average than known modern sequences at the same locations, hinting at a different origin.

Mixing things up

Hammer and his colleagues argue that roughly 2% of the genetic material found in these modern African populations was inserted into the human genome some 35,000 years ago. They say these sequences must have come from a now-extinct member of the Homogenus that broke away from the modern human lineage around 700,000 years ago.

Hammer says this disproves the conventional view that we are descended from a single population that arose in Africa and replaced all other Homo species without interbreeding. “We need to modify the standard model of human origins,” he says.

Geneticist Sarah Tishkoff, who studies population genetics and human evolution at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is more cautious. “This raises the possibility that there may have been ancient admixture with archaic populations,” she says.

But some researchers will require yet more convincing. “The authors model differences in very small parameters, such as the difference between no admixture and 1-2% admixture with an archaic population,” says anthropologist Brenna Henn, a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “The ability to discern complex models of demographic history with such a small data set, when many of the basic features of African genomes and history remain unknown, concerns me.”

Tishkoff would also like to see further work. “Analyses of whole genome sequences of these populations will be necessary to more definitively test this hypothesis,” she says.

References

Hammer, M. F. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USAhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1109300108 (2011).
Green, R. E. et al. Science 328, 710-722 (2010). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |

Tag: San

Bantu imperialism

Native Africans ‘interbred with another species 35 000 years ago’: scientists

Mixing things up

References