ABSTRACT
The Dutch encountered both Khoekhoe and San, whom they called sometimes Bosjesmans and sometimes Saoqua or Sanqua, which is the masculine plural form of ‘San’. By the 1790s the Dutch East India Company was in financial trouble, and Holland itself fell to French forces. British troops were landed near Cape Town in 1795 and quickly took the Cape Colony. The first utterly clear distinction between Bushmen and ‘Hottentots’ came just a few years later, with Henry Lichtenstein, a young German doctor who accompanied the new Dutch governor and wrote his own account of travels in the interior. The brutality that existed was, of course, at least as much the making of whites as it was of Bushmen. Whites killed Bushmen for sport, chased them into mountainous areas of the interior, or enslaved them. Literary images by Enlightenment figures began to focus on Bushmen as hunter-gatherers once they built their theories of society on an economic foundation.
