ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the paradox that indigeneity has increasing political leverage for Fourth World communities, but has fraught political status in African contexts. For this reason, it advocates an internally divided understanding of the indigenous. Using Southern Africa as a case study, it interrogates the history of settler imaging of indigenous communities. The initial colonial discourse of the ‘lazy’ and ‘unproductive’ indigene provided a justification for settler occupation of and productivity on the land. Settler genocide and land enclosure forced indigenous communities to assimilate into the agricultural economy. Even as this movement was completing itself, the chapter argues, indigenous farm labourers were used for body casts in San museum tableaus of bucolic pre-historic hunter-gatherers. As indigenous presence lapses, therefore, it is invented in settler-colonial fantasy. Moreover, this image of the indigene as ‘natural man’ gathered pace following the international success of the Tarzan movies and Ernest Cadle’s Denver Africa Expedition.
The stereotype of the indigene as ‘natural man’ was so powerful that it played out through 1950s documentaries and 1980s feature films, leading to the late Apartheid fantasy of the militarised ‘Bushman’ as a political ally against national liberation movements. The chapter concludes by identifying a nostalgia for the indigenous within post-Apartheid institutions, but also the hybridising effects of indigenous influence to avoid ethnic identitarianism in post-Apartheid literature. These cultural developments have accompanied post-Apartheid indigenous activist political advances, such as successful community land claims and the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
