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Wright, John --- "Book Review - Africa's Indigenous Peoples: 'First Peoples' or Marginalized Minorities?" [2002] IndigLawB 65; (2002) 5(20) Indigenous Law Bulletin 23

Book Review

Africa’s Indigenous Peoples:

‘First Peoples’ or Marginalized Minorities?

edited by Alan Barnard and Justin Kenrick
Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2001
322 p
RRP £17 plus package and posting

reviewed by John Wright

This book consists of seventeen papers, most of which were originally given at a conference held at the Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh in May 2000. The editors are both academics at the university. The contributors are mostly academics, with a sprinkling of activists from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Norway, South Africa and the United Kingdom. The conference, the editors tell us, was primarily an academic one, but was also attended by a number of representatives of Indigenous communities.

In the preface the editors raise the potentially contentious issue of what constitutes an ‘indigenous community’. They, and a number of other contributors to the volume, seem to favour using the term ‘indigenous peoples’ to refer specifically to ‘first peoples’. That is, ‘those who legitimately claim a prior origin in a territory’, as distinct from later arrivals, whether African or European. The ‘first peoples’ focussed on in this book are the Forest Peoples, or Batwa of central Africa and the Khoisan of southern Africa. The former, we learn, today number between 250 000 and 300 000, and the latter between 90 000 and

100 000.

The editors are also concerned to draw attention to the distinction, reflected in the book’s subtitle, between a view which portrays Indigenous peoples in Africa primarily as ‘first peoples’ and another which portrays them primarily as ‘marginalized’. For its opponents, this latter perspective runs the danger of denying ‘the uniqueness of first people’s history and social practice’ and of ‘their right to an independent cultural identity’. For its protagonists though, it serves to make plain the political oppression which Indigenous minorities in Africa, mostly hunter-gatherers or descendants of hunter-gatherers, have long suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of majority populations. The political implications of these different positions are discussed further by Sidsel Saugestad in the concluding contribution to the book.

The themes of cultural uniqueness and of continuing political oppression are taken up by most of the other authors. As would be expected in a book of this kind, these authors come out in support, in different ways and to different degrees, of the right of Indigenous minorities to claim the same degree of recognition from governments and officialdom as is extended to their not so Indigenous but politically better connected farming neighbours. This position is reflected in the chapters written by James Woodburn on the political status of hunter-gatherers in Africa, Keitseope Nthomang on the role of the state in the formulation of policy towards Indigenous peoples, Jacques Ngun, Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis on the problems currently faced by the Forest Peoples of central Africa, Maitseo Bolaane on relations between the tiny Khwai community and the government of Botswana, and Steven Robins and William Ellis on the politics of land claims being made by the Khomani San in South Africa.

Taking a somewhat different line, Sethunya Mphinyane analyses the problems raised for Botswanan officials when outsider activists and anthropologists emerge as advocates of the rights of San minority groups. Henry Bredekamp and Linda Waldman discuss the recent emergence of Khoisanist politics in South Africa. Joram /Useb[1] gives a revised view of traditional leadership among the Hai//om of Namibia. Effa Okupa defends customary marriage practices among the ovaHimba of Namibia against criticisms that emanate from the spread of ‘legal globalisation’. From different angles, Patrick Thornberry, Albert Barume and James Suzman discuss ways in which international law could be used to improve the status of Africa’s Indigenous peoples.

A brief review of this kind cannot do justice to the nuances and complexities of the arguments put forward in the individual papers collected in this book. It suffices to say that most of them are of high intellectual calibre, and that the volume as a whole makes an important contribution to the critical literature on the politics of oppressed and neglected minority groups in Africa today.

John Wright is a professor of history at the School of Human and Social Studies, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg.


[1] The ‘/’ denotes the clicking sound in Indigenous African dialects.


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