The KUTYKUM Factor or TIT FOR TAT – under Western Eyes and Southern Skies: Occidental Accidents of History

THE KUTYKUM FACTOR or Tit for Tat[1] – UNDER WESTERN EYES & SOUTHERN SKIES: OCCIDENTAL ACCIDENTS OF HISTORY

By Mansell Upham

“I had often heard that if one said to them Kutykum they at once lifted the sheepskin and showed their little under-parts …”

“It happened early one morning that a Hottentot woman came in front of my lodging, to whom I said Kutykum: she stretched out her hand and said Tabackum, at which I went and got a scrap of tobacco, and came back and gave it to her. When she had it in her hand she asked Kutykum? I replied Yes, and therewith she raised her sheepskin high up and let me have a good look, and then laughed and went off.”

“If one wishes them to dance, one need only give them a pipeful of tobacco, and then they stiffen their legs and continually leap up and down, and meanwhile sing Hottendott Brukwa[2]  … and this is the beginning and end of their continual song.

If one says to them Koros [3] op Zey they push the scrap of sheepskin from before their privities to the back, and let the whole gear be seen, and laugh therewith …”

– David Tappen[4] recounting his visit to the Cape of Good Hope (1682)

Have South Africans made peace with their genealogical past?

The seadog[5] David Tappen is not oblivious to the fact that perhaps the last laugh is on him …

Collusion and complicity cannot be excluded from the colonial equation when assessing the degree of intercourse between coloniser and colonised, the contact between victors and vanquished, perpetrators and victims, the ambivalent relationships that ensued and the offspring.

Occidental historiography – even when made inscrutable and counter-ideological by Edward Said’s Orientalism and thereafter socially re-engineered by Thabo Mbeki’s Africanism reborn – still tends to ‘actively affirm’ the underdog … so much so that we are still left with a seemingly unbridgeable divide between THEM and US …

Somehow African, Australasian, Asian and American indigenes / aborigines / autochthons are exempt from accountability or granted amnesty – even when the historical record, albeit the colonial testimony of the victors, shows that these `First Nations` contributed to their own colonisation, enslavement and demise.

Jean O’Brien in her Dispossession by degrees: Indian Land & Identity in Natick, 1650-1790, argues that Native Americans have been rendered invisible because they aided and abetted their paleface invaders thereby constructing the myth of ‘Indian’ extinction.

This is a compelling argument that tries to reverse the diatribal assault on Western civilisation. Crudely reduced: this would include the view that holds the white man (male?) to be solely responsible for all that is deemed wrong in our world today.

Swiss historian Urs Bitterli in Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492-1800, by way of `Geistesgeschichte` (a untranslatable cross between history of ideas and history of mentalities), has helped us to transform colonial history into cultural history: cultures collide and it is in the conflict that we can contextualise our ancestors. Not all cultural encounters are the same. According to Bitterli, however, these generally take the form of contacts, collisions and relationships.

American historian Richard Elphick’s cautious multi-causal, open-ended – but constraining much ado about nothing – assessment of our own initial cultural close-encounters-of-a-first-kind in his Khoikhoi and the founding of White South Africa, is worthy of revisionist scrutiny:

“Thus, the leading features of Khoikhoi decline were the complex interconnections of its many causes, and the predominance of broad processes over discrete episodes of diplomacy and conquest. For these reasons Khoikhoi decline was a mystery both to the Europeans who initiated it and to nineteenth-century investigators who vainly sought to explain it by a single cause, be it genocide or plague. For these reasons, too, the story has hardly ever been told in recent times; it has few villains, fewer heroes, and little of the drama that attracts novelists and historians to later phases of settler-native conflict in southern Africa. Yet the process of Khoikhoi decline should be understood, and not only because brown and white South Africans still live with its consequences today. For it is a fact worth pondering that the European subjugation of southern Africa began, not because statesmen or merchants willed it, nor because abstract forces of history made it necessary; but because thousands of ordinary men [sic], white and brown, quietly pursued their goals, unaware of their fateful consequences … “

Truce and Reconciliation? Have South Africans reconciled themselves zetetically and truthfully to their genealogical past?

Is it still necessary, as implied by Thabo Mbeki, to protect the enclave of ‘European civilisation’ perched precariously at the Cape of Good Hope and advance the purposes of the then temporary sojourners?

Perhaps the answer lies, not only in responding to the exhortations of Kutykum! and Koros op Zey! – but to then laugh and walk away …

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[1] Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable states: J. Bellenden Ker says the Dutch Dit vor dat (‘this for that’); Quid pro quo.  Heywood uses the phrase Tat for tat, perhaps the French phrase, tant pour tant.

[2] Dutch brok, ‘piece of’ eg ‘of bread’.

[3] In modern Dutch: Kaross op zij – ie ‘[move] your skins to the side’ … Raven-Hart  in his Cape Good Hope 1652-1702: The First 50 Years of Dutch Colonisation as seen by Callers“, states that Koros (more correctly Kul-karos, derives from the words for ‘penis’.  The word, however, more likely derives from the French cul, ie ‘bum’ or ‘arse’. The word kul is now used idiomatically in modern Dutch to mean ‘rubbish’ or ‘nonsense’ and ‘cloak’. The word kaross [Afrikaans = karos] appears to derive from the Khoe word caros and came to be used for any covering, blanket, cloak made by the Cape aborigines from skins.

[4] Translated from his Fünftzehen-Jährige … Reisebreschreibung … published at Hanover and Wolfenbüttel (1704). Tappen left his native Halle (1667) to join the VOC. He returned (20 December 1681) from the East … with his young wife (about 18 or 19 years old), he being of some 80 years … leaving Batavia on the Vryheid and sighting the Cape of Good Hope (30 March 1682).

[5] We know this to have been a term (also perjorative) used by the Cape Khoekhoe when referring to (newly-arrived) Europeans.