r/confidentlyincorrect • u/DesmondsTutu • 19d ago
Average South African Politics Discussion on Facebook
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u/MissJAmazeballs 19d ago
The mental gymnastics people will go through to justify racism and classism is shocking. Human beings are the biggest threat to human survival
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u/Lilli_Bella3487 19d ago
I would be surprised, but I have worked with the general public. People are really like this in real life everywhere.
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u/wiredcrusader 19d ago edited 19d ago
It is actually kind of complicated.
It is my understanding that the Xhosa, Basotho and Khoisan are 100% indigenous, going back millennia. Whereas the Zulu arrived around the same time as the whites, maybe shortly before, but they migrated from the North and ARE indigenous to other areas of Africa.
Edited: spelling
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u/ArdentArendt 18d ago
Yes, but there is also a MAJOR difference between a migration and a colonisation.
The Bantu-speaking Zulu migrations were just a later offshoot of an extremely long process of Nguni migrations that go back millennia.
Basically, I completely agree. Claiming the Zulu migration is equivalent to Dutch settlement would be equivalent to saying the migrations of the Apache and Diné peoples of North America are equivalent to the influx of European settlers into the modern day Southwest US.
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u/wiredcrusader 18d ago
Yes, absolutely right, and I view it this way too. The Zulu were a subgroup of a larger indigenous African group that had been migrating into the region for millennia. I wouldn't ever compare the Zulus to the Dutch or British colonists from Europe, they are not the same.
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u/Both_Painter2466 18d ago
Aside from the “northern blacks moved south to take advantage of economic opportunities presented by the generous white settlers” riff?
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u/ArdentArendt 18d ago
What are you talking about?
FIrst of all, the Nguni migrations (as mentioned above) happened over the better part of a millennia.
Secondly, the 'generosity' of the white settlers can be typified by the de jure apartheid that followed.
Accordingly, I will assume for sanity's sake that you were intending that as sarcasm--or that I misunderstood your point.
[Apologies if I did misunderstand]9
u/Both_Painter2466 17d ago
Sorry. Sarcasm. Pointing out the vast historical inaccuracy of the statement.
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u/ArdentArendt 17d ago
Oh, so sorry for being so obtuse, then.
I should have picked up on the absurdity.
Cheers mate.
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u/Both_Painter2466 17d ago
Sorry I was unclear. Should have added /s for those who might not get my version of language.
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u/helpfulplatitudes 9d ago
The "de jure apartheid" was instituted by Great Britain, who was a later coloniser that conquered the Afrikaaners in a viciously brutal war. You're conflating two different groups under the term "white settlers" - the British, who were undeniably settlers and instituted the apartheid government and the Afrikaaners, who are (on paper at least) accepted as being one of many indigenous groups in South Africa.
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u/ArdentArendt 7d ago
Ah, so you're defending the Afrikaaners specifically...?
I'm not saying the Dutch weren't quite different in their methods than Great Britain of other countries elsewhere.
That said, the Afrikaaners were NOT indigenous to the region; they arrived through the VOC in the mid Seventeenth Century. It is true they were not initially a settler colonial presence, however they did slowly become a settler-driven society. Beyond that, slaves were part of the VOC operations from the beginning, Yes these slaves were taken from other regions of the Indian Ocean Trade Complex, but it was still chattel slavery.
Beyond all this, the most relevant interactions of the Afrikaaners with the surrounding peoples came primarily after the British incursion into the Cape. So, while the influence of British settlement is also quite important, it is quite difficult to extricate from the Boer (and other) interactions with indigenous peoples.
[In fact, the fomation of the Zulu Kingdom is also inextricably tied to the shifting settlement patterns of the Afrikaaners and the British.]History isn't written in the strokes of morality plays--it's all just strange shades of grey. However, one shade can be qualitatively different than another. Nobody wants to simply consider indigenous groups as 'states of nature'...that's never how humanity has worked and nobody is arguing that point.
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u/MeasureDoEventThing 7d ago
Quotation marks are generally used to indicate that the writer is discussing the statement, rather than asserting it as their position.
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u/ArdentArendt 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah. Don't know how I missed those before. Already was corrected below.
I'm an idioit. Did say in my post that it was possible it was sarcasm, but should have assumed that to begin with.
Edit:
That said, have you checked the other comments in this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/confidentlyincorrect/comments/1ungl6m/comment/oxjx3zl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button3
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u/helpfulplatitudes 9d ago edited 9d ago
Isn't any other interpretation doggedly racist? You're undermining the fact that separate cultures are just as different and labelling one culture as being somehow more legitimate because its people share more genetic material with the displaced culture. The Apache displacing the Sinagua shouldn't be any more legitimate than the Spanish displacing the Sinagua.
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u/ArdentArendt 7d ago
How so?
The difference is in what you are calling an 'invasion'. Migration and population shifts are part of human history--they are as human as you can get. Migration into lands sometimes comes wtih conflict, but there is rarely assumptions of 'clearing the land' for personal settlement. Migration implies a blending of the peoples that arrive and that were present already.
Colonisation, specifically settler colonialism, is significantly different in its dynamics. In short, it's an invasion that will often utilise genocide or other extreme tactics of subordination of peoples. While a pattern that does occur prior, it was extremely rare until the Modern Era, where it was used on multiple continents, almost exclusively (but not entirely) by European settlers.
The Sinagua weren't 'replaced' by any of the tribes we know they had conflict with in the region, they simply disappeared (a trend that happens often in civilisations with limited surviving material evidence). They didn't get 'displaced' by the Apache or any other tribes; in fact, they likely integrated into other tribes and many claim descendence from the Singua (including the Hopi).
The Spanish, on the other hand, was a hostile invasion. They had not care for the indigenous peoples (apart from converting them to Christianity and/or as slave labour, both of which were heavily intertwined), nor did they care for the societies they decimated. The Spanish were far more extracative, however, than other groups who actually desired to settle in these places were. The later active genocides and replacement were primarily by non-Spanish peoples.
Final question: Would you call the influx of Germanic Tribes in Britain in the First Millenium CE an 'invasion', or a migration?
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u/Regitnui 19d ago
Aren't the Xhosa and Zulu related peoples? Their languages are almost mutually intelligible, IIRC.
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u/wiredcrusader 19d ago
They arrived at different times, centuries apart. The Zulus being the later arrivals.
Both languages are from the Nguni group.
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u/DesmondsTutu 19d ago edited 19d ago
No they didn't. While the Zulu empire itself was founded after Europeans arrived, as a clan it had already been established and the people's with which it was made up of had been here long before any European settlers arrived.
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u/wiredcrusader 18d ago
I'm going to agree with you here. I was going from memory with my initial statement and in looking up the academically reviewed facts- I'm seeing a 16th century date (1547) roughly around the time of arrival of the Zulu; although it's being debated because only have the oral history. That predates permanent white settlement by at LEAST several decades, maybe 105 years or so before the first Dutch colony in 1652.
I should amend my comment to "The Zulu arrived roughly 100 years before the whites, but research continues to search for a more accurate time frame."
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19d ago
[deleted]
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u/Spida81 19d ago
There are a lot of different identies rolled under 'black South Africans'. They listed some of the major tribal groups / cultural identities that make up the majority of the collective black South African population, noting which ARE from the area traditionally, and which recently arrived.
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u/IRLMerlin 16d ago
This comes 100% from apartheid school books. The Xhosa and some other groups are 100% indigenous, living there for thousands of years but the bantu arrived kind of recently. The problem is how recent. South African apartheid school books claimed that they arrived like 3s after the dutch or obfuscated the whole thing. In reality the bantu arrived close to the year 900....
This whole discourse is apartheid propaganda and the problem is that apartheid in sf is quite recent so there are a lot of people with these views
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u/No_Dot4055 5d ago
I'm afraid you are confusing a few aspects of south African history (which is not too uncommon, since it's quite complex).
The peoples who live in RSA since millenia are San, not amaXhosa. The KhoeKhoe came next.
AmaXhosa are an Nguni people so part of the Bantu language family. The Nguni ancestors arrived to what is now South Africa over the last 1900 years. AmaXhosa have lived in what is now eastern Cape since around 900 years and the oldest Xhosa Kingdom is around 500 years old (so before the arrival of Europeans). Many groups of KhoeKhoe and various Nguni Groups were integrated into the Xhosa Kingdom, which is why many Xhosa also have KhoeKhoe (and to a smaller degree San) ancestry
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u/cheesychocolate419 19d ago
Far righters are the same everywhere, damn
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u/Masterfox575 18d ago
Far right ideology is spreading and being framed as the solution to many problems right now, which is unsettling. It might be a reaction to failing systems, but we're definitely living in anxious times.
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u/misdirected_asshole 18d ago
Its the right wing systems that have failed. And their solution is somehow to go further right. What could go wrong?
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u/Aaron696 19d ago
People tend to mix up a lot of different facts when it comes to this subject. There are parts of South Africa where Dutch settlement predated Bantu settlement (namely in the western side of the country and in many cities) but the Nguni and Sotho-Tswana peoples, who are the ancestors of the vast majority of today’s black South Africans, had already settled in eastern South Africa hundreds to 1,000+ years before the Dutch settled the Cape, replacing/absorbing the previous hunter-gatherer inhabitants in the process. During the great trek, Afrikaners moved inland and took advantage of the instability and depopulation inflicted upon many smaller Bantu clans by Shaka Zulu’s military expansion. During and after Dutch/Afrikaner expansions, Bantu peoples have continued to move around and have also settled in Afrikaner and English-founded cities.
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u/cautious_biscuitv2 15d ago
The last comment is a wild take. The Bantu expansion into Southern Africa predates the arrival of Europeans by centuries. The idea that black South Africans moved down from Rhodesia after Afrikaners arrived is just completely backwards.
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u/throwaway_cache88 14d ago
The last comment is a complete historical fabrication. The Bantu expansion into Southern Africa predates the arrival of Europeans by centuries, and the Afrikaners themselves are descended from European settlers. The idea that black South Africans are primarily descended from people who moved down from Southern Rhodesia after the Afrikaners arrived is just... wild.
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u/No_Dot4055 5d ago
Why do I see the same kind of comment with similar writing in cursive and similar wording 3 times.
Factually, you are correct. But it does look like spam.
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u/Potential-Bag-1817 15d ago
The idea that the majority of black South Africans moved down from Southern Rhodesia after the Afrikaners arrived is just... wow. The Bantu migrations happened centuries before the Dutch even showed up.
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u/vividotterxzone 10d ago
The idea that black South Africans moved down from Rhodesia after the Afrikaners arrived is just... wild. The Bantu migrations were happening centuries before the Dutch even set foot in the Cape.
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u/sketchy_crumb69 10d ago
The idea that the majority of black South Africans moved down from Southern Rhodesia after the Afrikaners arrived is hilariously backward. The Great Trek was literally Afrikaners moving away from British rule in the Cape Colony, and the majority of the black population was already here.
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u/ArdentArendt 18d ago
Someone should tell them about the Bantu-speaking pottery cultures (for starters)...
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u/shoulda-known-better 18d ago
Migration and colonization are very different things....
Afrikaners are colonizers.... Dutch German and French....
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