The human, the humane, and even the humorous - untold stories from the Anglo-Boer War in the Karoo, Professor Mike de Jongh

Fri Feb 26, 16:00 - Fri Feb 26, 17:00

Piesang Valley Community Hall

ABOUT

Well-known Anthropology Professor and author Mike de Jongh will discuss the Anglo-Boer War in the Karoo and reflect on the question as to what drives humans to war and how we might find each other again in peacetime.


Professor de Jongh has studied intensively two communities of what are known as “First People” by the United Nations. The first community he described in a marvellous book on the Karretjie mense of the Great Karoo, published by the UNISA Press and available at the African shop in the Old Nick complex. Now itinerant sheep shearers, the Karrietjie mense are the direct descendants of the /Xam (popularly known as “Bushmen” or “San”) who roamed the Karoo before the coming of any other language speakers.

The second community is that of the Hessequa, whose story he has captured in another book, published by the Watermark Press in Plettenberg Bay. Part of what the old history books called “Hottentots”, these are members of what is more correctly called the “Khoekhoen” (“Men of Men” in the Nama language). Before the European colonists arrived, the Hessequa pastured their cattle along the south-east Cape coast all the way from modern-day Swellendam to Albertinia. Their closest relatives were the Attaqua, who traded their cattle with the survivors of the São Gonçalo shipwreck at Plettenberg Bay.


In the current, dynamic debate around land rights, however, the voices of their descendants have not been heard, nor have they been recognised, and so we describe them as “forgotten” by the powers that be. By writing about them and taking up their cause, Professor de Jongh hopes to “open a window” on their history, their current lives, and their rightful place in the the modern Republic of South Africa.


Having grown up in the small town of Vryburg, Professor de Jongh matriculated at Queen's College, after his father was transferred to the Eastern Cape as a regional inspector of schools. He says that “many of my kaalvoet friends in Vryburg spoke different languages, such as Sesotho, and as a small boy I travelled to remote places with my father ... in all these places I was exposed to people with what appeared to me to be very different and new languages, customs, and traditions.


“I suppose, this stuck in the back of my mind to become an abiding interest in human culture and diversity. Although I started a medical degree, I soon found that my passion was indeed less for the bio-physical aches and pains, and more for the positive stuff, so I augmented my medical studies with social science disciplines and discovered anthropology at Rhodes, Stellenbosch and post-graduate studies in the United States.”


More recently, Professor de Jongh published another book under the Watermark Press imprint: The Forgotten Front, about the Anglo-Boer War in Colesberg, while he is currently working on a book about the “Buysvolk”, descendants of the legendary frontiersman, The Coenraad de Buys.

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The human, the humane, and even the humorous - untold stories from the Anglo-Boer War in the Karoo, Professor Mike de Jongh
Piesang Valley Community Hall
Green Point Ave, Plettenberg Bay, 6600
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