AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

RESEARCH ARTICLES
Essentialism and the Indigenous Politics of Recognition in
Southern Africa
Sylvain
Renee

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore familiar tensions between anthropological theories of identity and activism on
behalf of indigenous causes, with special attention to strategic uses of theoretically dubious forms of essentialism. I
examine the contradictions between essentialism and constructionism, and between recognition and redistribution,
in light of San struggles for rights to traditional territories in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana. I
begin by outlining how the politics of theorizing in an apartheid context imposed a false choice between essentialist
and deconstructionist views of identity. I then discuss the controversial relocation of San from the CKGR and how
the opposition between an essentialist politics of recognition and a deconstructionist emphasis on redistribution
framed public debates. I show how the competing positions shared a racial epistemology that requires us to see
San as prepolitical people transitioning into a modern world, and in conclusion, I suggest that this shared epistemology sustains a racialized politics of recognition. [indigenous peoples, southern Africa, Botswana, essentialism,
recognition]

RESUMEN En este ensayo, exploro tensiones familiares entre teoras antropologicas

de identidad y activismo en
a usos estrategicos

nombre de causas indgenas, con especial atencion

de formas sospechosas de esencialismo.
a la
Examino las contradicciones entre esencialismo y construccionismo, y entre reconocimiento y redistribucion,
luz de las luchas de los pueblos San por derechos a territorios tradicionales en la Reserva de Caza Kalahari Central

(CKGR) en Botsuana. Empiezo bosquejando como

la poltica de teorizar en un contexto de apartheid impone una
entre puntos de vista esencialistas y deconstruccionistas de identidad. Luego discuto la relocalizacion

falsa eleccion

entre una poltica esencialista del reconocimiento

controversial de los pueblos San de la CKGR y como
la oposicion

enmarco los debates publicos.

y un enfasis
deconstruccionista en redistribucion
Muestro como
las posiciones en

conflicto comparten una epistemologa racial que nos requiere ver los San como pueblos prepolticos en transicion
sugiero que esta epistemologa compartida sostiene una poltica racializada
a un mundo moderno y, en conclusion,

del reconocimiento. [pueblos indgenas, sur de Africa,

Botsuana, esencialismo, reconocimiento]

ndigenous identity politics have inspired anthropologists

to reflect with anxiety on the challenges of reconciling
political engagement, as supporters of indigenous causes,
with the critical engagement required for sound theorizing
(Fortun et al. 2010; Hale 2006; Speed 2006; Tsing 2005).
It is widely acknowledged that indigenous movements advance important moral projects. Indigenous activism chal-

lenges us to broaden our moral scope and reconsider our

assumptions about issues such as inclusion and citizenship,
sovereignty and political legitimacy, development and ecological sustainability, and collective historical responsibility
(Gow 2008; Jung 2008). While most anthropologists highlight the emancipatory potential of indigenous movements,
problems with essentialist strategies frequently employed by

C 2014 by the American Anthropological

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 2, pp. 251264, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12087

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 2 June 2014

these movements have been widely noted. Some anthropologists attempt to reconcile scholarly reflection with political
engagement by arguing that indigenous essentialism inspires
theoretical innovation and constitutes creative forms of resistance (Escarcega 2010:4; Hale 2006:98; Speed 2006:73).
Others accept the political utility of essentialism but deny
that strategic essentialism contributes to building better theories (Nyamnjoh 2007:305).
Anthropologists typically address essentialist representations of indigenous identities by examining the contexts
that make essentialism strategically advantageous. Thus,
ethnographies commonly focus on complex processes involved in the social construction of essentialist images of
indigeneity. Theoretical nuance and ethnographic complexity, however, have not yet assuaged our worries about how
our constructionist ethnographies cohere with the essentialism strategically promoted by much indigenous activism.
Jean Jackson and Kay Warren wonder how we might represent the complexities of indigenous movements without
giving ammunition to enemies (2005:566; see also Jackson
1989). Dorothy Hodgson notes that some anthropologists
are wary of critiquing indigenous movements for fear of undermining their political support and agendas (2002:1044;
see also Briggs 1996).
Essentialists view a category of persons as having a
stable set of traits that are required for inclusion; they
therefore think of contemporary members of indigenous
groups as linked to their ancestors by those shared traits.
The contrasting social constructionist (anti-essentialist) idea
is that the criteria for inclusion in a category of persons
are contingent, changing, and subject to social and political negotiation. Essentialists tend to see significant transformation as constituting a loss of identity, while antiessentialists tend to view indigenous groups as inventions
or artifacts, for whom significant transformation is possible without loss of the more tenuous continuity needed
for an indigenous identity. Strategic essentialism is an insincere presentation of an identity, in terms of essentialist
stereotypes, for purposes of a scrupulously visible political
interest (Spivak 1993:3). It reflects an uneasy compromise
between accepting the postmodern deconstructionist view
that identities are fictions and acknowledging the need to
pretend that identities are real to achieve political goals
(Spivak 1988).
While anthropologists disagree about the merits of indigenous essentialism, there is wide agreement that it is
useful for securing resources. The consensus seems to be
that we should refrain from directly critiquing indigenous
essentialism. The general rule, as Charles Hale explains it,
is that postmodern critique is only acceptable as long as the
heavy weapons of deconstruction are aimed at the powerful (2006:102). Steven Robins (2004:92) adopted this rule
when he was commissioned by a multilateral agency to produce a report on the status of San (Bushmen) in South Africa
and found himself caught between writing an accurate report
and producing one that would help San get funding.1 Robins

explains that, while it was accepted practice to debunk essentialist bushmen myths, he was uncomfortable with
using sophisticated anthropological modes of deconstruction to undermine the San (2004:92). It is understandable
that Robins would have felt the tension between political engagement and theoretical commitment so acutely in South
Africa. Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis (2004:8) suggest
that, in southern Africa generally, a special hostility toward
the essentialism of indigenous claims is owed to academic
reactions to apartheid and to the extreme polarization
caused by the Kalahari debate, which was a debate largely
about San identity.
San have a prominent place in the Western imagination, and they have also been significant subjects of anthropological theorizing. They are, however, a very diverse
group. Many San are generational farm laborers and domestic servants working on the cattle ranches and cattle
posts of more powerful racial-ethnic groups; others eke
out a living as casual laborers in squatters villages on the
edges of urban and periurban centers. Only a small minority
live primarily as hunter-gatherers. The diversity among San
communities has made them the subjects of heated theoretical debates among anthropologists and activists. Academics and activists disagree about whether San are essentially hunter-gatherers or only an underclass whose foraging
identity is merely a myth. San activism thus occurs within
a field especially fraught with tensions between essentialism and constructionism and between identity politics and
class politics. Their location in a region historically dominated by apartheid states has also made them central figures
in debates about whether indigenous activism represents a
progressive politics of recognition or a regressive reversion
to apartheid-era racialism.
This article is an attempt to take seriously the questions
anthropologists pose about how we should handle essentialist strategies and how we ought to use our theoretical
weapons. I begin with an overview of common relations
between anthropological theory and the politics of indigenous activism. Because one way to reconcile scholarly criticism with indigenous activism is to make a virtue of the
tragic necessity of essentialism (Strong and van Winkle
1996:560), I examine the tensions between essentialism and
constructionism and between recognition and redistribution
in light of San struggles for rights to traditional territories in
the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana.2
I outline how the politics of theorizing in an apartheid context imposed a false choice between essentialist and deconstructionist views of identity. I then discuss the relocation
of San from the CKGR and how the opposition between
an essentialist politics of recognition and a deconstructionist emphasis on redistribution helped frame public debates.
Finally, I show how the competing positions that framed
the controversy reflected a shared racial epistemology that
sees San as prepolitical people transitioning into a modern
world, and I suggest that this shared epistemology sustains a
racialized politics of recognition.

Sylvain Essentialism and Recognition in South Africa

THE INTERSECTIONS OF THEORY, POLITICS, AND
JUSTICE

Much of the literature on indigenous movements addresses

the intersections of theory, politics, and justice. When transposed from anthropological theory to politics, the debate between essentialism and constructionism becomes a disagreement between identity politics, for which justice requires
recognition, and class politics, for which justice requires
redistribution.
Early work on indigenous activism in Amazonia worried
that essentialist strategies trap indigenous people in unrealistic identity scripts (Conklin 1997; Ramos 1994; Turner
1991). Studies from a wide range of ethnographic settings
express concerns about the potential for indigenous essentialism to distract from socioeconomic injuries and capitulate to neoliberalism (Hale 2005; Jackson and Warren 2005;
Kapila 2008; Keesing 1991; Li 2000; Pelican 2009). Anthropologists working in Asia and Africa are especially sensitive
to the potential for indigenous identity politics to exacerbate local ethnic conflicts (Li 2002; Pelican 2009; Shah
2010). Studies of indigeneity in Australia, Latin America,
and North America highlight the potential for a politics of
recognition to reinscribe the very colonial systems of exclusion and discrimination that claims for recognition seek
to overcome (Coulthard 2007; Englund 2004; Hale 2002;
Povinelli 2002).
Anthropologists commonly address essentialist representations of indigenous identities by illustrating how identities are products of positioning and the articulation of
local and global discourses and dynamics.3 Social constructionist accounts of indigeneity need not be at odds with
indigenous activism, especially when they emphasize the
agency and creativity of indigenous actors. Deconstructionism, however, goes further and often implies that cultural
(racial, ethnic) identities are fictions that mask real classbased identities. When social constructionism is conflated
with deconstructionism, anthropological theory is put at
odds with political activism. Debates among Oceanists and
Africanists, for example, amply reflect the widely noted
difficulties of reconciling the essentialism deployed in indigenous struggles with the invention-of-tradition critique
commonly used to discredit claims to identities (Barnard
2006; Gagne and Salaun 2012:385).4
As Warren and Jackson (2002:9) note, the inventionof-tradition approach is often seen as a challenge to the
authenticity and sincerity of indigenous activists who deploy
essentialism to advance identity-based claims. The disempowering implications of deconstructionism have led anthropologists to question the usefulness of concepts like authenticity (see Warren and Jackson 2002:10) and to focus
on contexts in which indigenous peoples engage in modes of
self-representation that accord with Western stereotypes
in order to seek recognition and demand rights (Hodgson
2002:1040). Because recognition of indigenous peoples in
such analyses is often synonymous with their authentication by powerful nonindigenous actors, it is easy to see

253

how a politics of recognition would require that indigenous

identity itself be turned into a strategy, usually for securing
resources (Jackson and Warren 2005:554). It is also easy to
see indigenous actors as duplicitously turning a politics of
recognition into class politics by other means. I suggest that,
because strategic essentialism requires sacrificing sincerity,
it becomes an obstacle to the moral projects that indigenous
activism promotes. Furthermore, as I will show, anthropological complacency about the use of essentialism leaves
problematic features of deconstructionism intact and, thus,
inhibits our ability to engage in sound advocacy.
As Hale (2006:114) notes, not all forms of indigenous essentialism are strategic. Many essentialist expressions of identity are sincere attempts to gain recognition in a morally robust sense. Communitarian arguments
for multiculturalism, most famously advanced by Charles
Taylor (1994), emphasize the importance of recognition for
individual and group self-realization and psychological wellbeing. While attention to psychosocial harms of misrecognition has broadened our appreciation of social justice issues,
critics argue that communitarian approaches put the goals
of recognition at odds with the goals of distributive justice
(Fraser 1997). Furthermore, when a politics of recognition reproduces systems of discrimination and exclusion, it
involves more than strategic roleplaying by indigenous activists; it becomes a system of governmentality that relies
on strategic misperceptions and formal misconstruals of
indigenous identities (Conklin and Graham 1995:696697;
Povinelli 2002:39).
While anthropologists generally adopt a skeptical attitude toward a politics of recognition, few explicitly confront
the ways in which recognition politics are racialized (but see
Hale 2002, 2005) or the ways in which dominant misconstruals are connected to racial epistemologies. In the analysis that
follows, I explore the interrelationships among essentialism,
constructionism, identity politics, class politics, recognition,
and redistribution by highlighting the racial epistemologies
implicated in public debates about San rights and identity.
THE KALAHARI DEBATE AND INDIGENOUS
IDENTITIES

There is a long tradition of political engagement among South

African anthropologists. Robert Gordon notes that white
South African Afrikaans-speaking anthropologists have had
an impact on government policy out of all proportion to
their numbers (1988:535). These anthropologists established the Volkekunde school of anthropology, which offered essentialist, racialized conceptions of culture as ideological support for the apartheid system (Gordon and Spiegel
1993:92, 95). Liberal and Marxist scholarship emerged in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to challenge apartheid by debunking nationalist myth-making (Posel 2002:75). White,
mainly English-speaking, liberal, and Marxist anthropologists developed the genre of expose anthropology to demystify and deconstruct essentialist Volkekunde notions of
culture and ethnic group (Gordon and Spiegel 1993:92).

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According to expose anthropology, ethnic distinctions are a

product of colonial class formation, and race and ethnicity
are politically vicious fictions that mask class inequalities.
The Kalahari debate was sparked by expose interventions into Kalahari hunter-gatherer studies, and it produced
two deeply polarized perspectives on San identity. The first
view, often called traditionalist, is associated with Richard
Lee and other members of the Harvard Kalahari Research
Group (Lee and DeVore 1976) and has roots in cultural
ecology and evolutionary theory. According to traditionalists, San culture developed in relative isolation and is an
adaptation to the harsh environment of the Kalahari. The loss
of a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle means the loss of identity
as San. The second, revisionist, view, outlined primarily by
Edwin Wilmsen (1989), argues that Kalahari foragers were
created when disparate groups of Bantu-speaking pastoralists
moved into the Kalahari and consolidated their hegemony in
the form of powerful Tswana kingdoms. The people today
called San were turned into an underclass within the regional political economy, either in the form of foragers who
were driven deep into the Kalahari or in the form of serfs
who worked for Tswana pastoralists. The racial-ethnic category Bushmen was constructed when foragers and serfs
became the subjects of colonial discourse about primitive
tribes (see Gordon 1992).5
Each side of the Kalahari debate claims better politics.
The traditionalist approach, with its emphasis on foraging and
cultural autonomy, lends itself to cultural survival projects,
a preservationist ethic (Appiah 2005), and a politics of recognition. From this perspective, revisionist deconstructionism
is morally objectionable because, as Lee explains, it is used
to call into question the claims to authenticity of small peoples (1992:36). The revisionist approach, with its focus on
political economy, lends itself to class politics, antiracist debunking projects, and distributive justice. Wilmsen objects
to the difference politics of indigenous movements because
they promote politically dangerous claims to authenticity
and are assertions of neo-racism (2002:839).
Never really resolved, the Kalahari debate evolved into
the indigenous peoples debate (Barnard 2006) when Adam
Kuper (2003) launched a revisionist attack on indigenous
rights. According to Kuper, the term indigenous has simply
replaced the older, colonial term primitive, and thus arguments for indigenous rights appeal to uncomfortably racist
criteria for favouring or excluding individuals or communities (2003:395). He particularly objects to essentialist
ideologies of culture and identity because they could have
dangerous political consequences (Kuper 2003:395). For
Kuper, to be antiracist means being anti-essentialist, and
this means accepting that identities are made-up, invented,
unstable fictions (1999:239).
Because the traditionalist position is very serviceable to activist agendas and deconstructionism appears
aloof from the daily struggles of indigenous actors, the
Kalahari-indigenous peoples debate seems to reflect a deep
dichotomy between activist and academic anthropology

(Pelican 2009:54). However, as the debate played out in

academic and public venues, the forced removal of San from
the CKGR in Botswana reanimated revisionist and traditionalist arguments and inspired the strategic use of both
positions in activist and state engagements.6
ANCIENT SAN IN AN AFRICAN EDEN

In 1958, George Silberbauer, an anthropologist serving as

a Bushmen Survey Officer for the British colonial government, was appointed to investigate the situation of San in
the Bechuanaland Protectorate. In 1961, Silberbauers survey resulted in the establishment of the CKGR to protect
wildlife resources and reserve sufficient land for traditional
use by hunter-gatherer communities of the Central Kalahari
(Fauna Conservation Proclamation, Cassidy et al. 2001:26).
At this time, the CKGR was home to approximately 4,000
people (Cassidy et al. 2001:26), including G/ui, G//ana,
and Kua San as well as Bakgalagadi, who are Sekgalagadispeaking, small-scale agropastoralists (Hitchcock 2002:802,
805).7 San and Bakgalagadi have interacted for hundreds
of years: in some cases, relations were symbiotic; in others, San lived in servitude, working as herders for Bakgalagadi and paying tribute to Bakgalagadi headmen (Hitchcock
2002:803). Attention to the particularly disadvantaged San
continued briefly after Botswana achieved independence in
1966. In 1974, the Bushman Development Programme was
established with the aim of addressing problems unique to
Bushmen citizens (Wily 1982:306). By 1978, however, the
Government of Botswanas (GoB) increasing commitment
to difference-blind nation-building inspired the replacement
of the Bushmen Development Programme with the Remote
Area Development Programme (RADP), according to which
San and poor Bakgalagadi were classified as ethnically neutral
Remote Area Dwellers (RADs).
The RADP, as a poverty-alleviation program, promoted
sedentarization to facilitate the delivery of services and development resources. From 1970 to 1980, 15 boreholes
were sunk in the CKGR, and San and Bakgalagadi began moving to permanent settlements inside the reserve
(Sapignoli 2009:249). Xade, the largest settlement in the
reserve, formed around a borehole that had been sunk in
1962. A clinic and a school opened in 1984, transportation infrastructure was developed, agriculture and livestock
raising activities increased, and a cash economy emerged
as San earned money in road construction and craft sales
(Tanaka and Sugawara 1999:198). From 1964 to 1996, the
population of Xade had more than tripled (Hitchcock and
Babchuk 2007:4), and the depletion of bushfood and the intensification of agropastoralism caused fundamental changes
to the traditional economic system (Tanaka and Sugawara
1999:198).8
By the mid-1980s, the GoB decided that human and
livestock populations in the CKGR threatened the local
ecosystem and that delivering development resources and
services to RADs inside the reserve was prohibitively expensive (Hitchcock 2002:805).9 Development in the CKGR

Sylvain Essentialism and Recognition in South Africa

was frozen, and the GoB began to pressure the San and
Bakgalagadi to leave the reserve. Relocation was achieved
through a combination of enticement and coercion. San were
promised money, livestock, plots of land, and access to services as compensation for leaving the reserve. Three waves
of forced removals in 1997, 2002, and 2005 ultimately relocated over 2,000 San from the CKGR to the settlements
of New Xade and Kaudwane outside the reserve (Hitchcock
et al. 2011:69; Saugestad 2011:41). During the 2002 removals, the borehole at the settlement of Mothomelo was
sealed, and government officials destroyed all vessels that
could carry water (Hitchcock et al. 2011:73).
As government pressure escalated, local NGOs began mobilizing in earnest. Local organizationsincluding
the Botswana-based human rights NGO Ditshwanelo, the
Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa
(WIMSA), WIMSA-Botswana (WIMSA-Bots), the Kuru
Family of Organizations (KFO), and First Peoples of the
Kalahari (FPK)formed a coalition with international organizations such as the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Norwegian Church Aid, Dutch Global Ministries, and the Saami Council (Saugestad 2011:42). In April
2002, with the assistance of the NGO coalition, Roy Sesana,
a San cofounder of FPK, and 242 displaced San brought an
application to the High Court of Botswana. The initial focus
of the claim was securing land rights and restoring services
inside the CKGR; however, as the case evolved, the issues
broadened to include the Sans right to define their own
development goals and maintain their culture and identity
(Hitchcock et al. 2011:66; Saugestad 2011:42). A series of
delays caused disenchantment among San with their South
African legal team; thus, in 2004, FPK and WIMSA-Bots
accepted an offer from the London-based INGO, Survival
International (SI), to fund the case and provide legal counsel
(Saugestad 2011:4345).
In December of 2006, Botswanas High Court ruled that
the San had been forcibly removed from land they lawfully
occupied in the CKGR. Sidsel Saugestad notes, however,
that the Sans victory was largely symbolic (2011:38; see
also Solway 2009; Taylor 2007). The ruling restricted the
right of return to the remaining 189 applicants and their
children; in addition, the right was not extended to future
generations (Saugestad 2011:38). All other relocated San
required permits to reenter the reserve (Saugestad 2011:38).
Furthermore, the ruling did not oblige the GoB to restore
services and water resources in the CKGR.10 Jacqueline
Solway (2009) convincingly argues that the GoBs narrow
interpretation of the High Courts ruling was a punitive
reaction to the interventions of SI.
SI began protesting the GoBs efforts to remove the San
from the CKGR in the late 1980s, but its interventions accelerated in 2000, after allegations that San had been beaten
by police and members of the Department of Wildlife and
National Parks antipoaching unit (Hitchcock 2002:819). As
SI amplified its media campaign, it deployed familiar romantic and zoological tropes designed to move public sen-

255

timent toward protecting endangered cultures as though

they were endangered species. An April 2006 bulletin describes how San were relocated to settlements where a traditional life as hunter-gatherers is impossible, which resulted
in unemployment, poverty and alcoholismand probably
the extinction of the San (SI 2006). SI director Stephen
Corry claimed that, by keeping their land, some remote
Bushmen tribeslike the Gana and Guiescaped destruction during colonial conquest and retained their identity.
Those San who lost their land were largely destroyed
(Corry 2003).
Corrys commitment to essentialist notions of a pristine
and ancient hunting-and-gathering San culture blinded him
to the existence of the vast majority of San in Botswana who,
dispossessed and landless, have long ago ceased to hunt and
gather. While traditionalist ethnography may have lent some
credibility to its campaign (Odysseos 2004:24), SI refashioned a cultural ecology perspective into a Laurens van der
Poststyle narrative of Bushmen living as pristine First People in an African Eden and possessing an authenticity and
purity of soul that has been lost to modern man (Wittenberg
2005:13).
THE KALAHARI DEBATE IN ACTION

As the CKGR controversy unfolded, the debate between

traditionalists and revisionists could no longer be confined
to the realm of scholarship. SIs interventions peaked with
the initiation of its Bushmen Arent Forever campaign,
which accused the GoB of relocating San to facilitate diamond mining in the reserve. Many observers claim that the
strategy was ill-conceived (Odysseos 2004; Saugestad 2005;
Taylor 2007), and Solway (2009) describes how local NGOs
joined the GoB in publicly disavowing SIs blood diamond
campaign.11 Ian Taylor and Gladys Mokhawa (2003), however, suggest that SI adopted this strategy at a time when the
GoB had made itself vulnerable by promoting its Diamonds
for Development campaign and when blood diamonds were
an international cause cel`ebre. Even if SIs tactics involved
little more than cynical opportunism, the form its blood diamond campaign took, as Louiza Odysseos notes, reflected a
strong commitment to contemporary global primitivism,
which is a particularly romantic mode of thought that juxtaposes indigenous peoples against an immoral and destructive
world capitalist system (Odysseos 2004:26; see also Haley
1999:9192). SIs Bushmen Arent Forever campaign adhered to a narrative that pits innocent noble savages against
a corrupting modern industrial machine.
Despite the lack of credibility locally, SIs accusations
resonated globally and caused an international scandal that
eventually drew the diamond-mining corporation, De Beers,
into the fray. In a letter responding to SIs request that it
take up the San peoples cause, De Beers appealed to the authority of revisionist ethnography and claimed that leading
anthropologists, including Adam Kuper, Edwin Wilmsen,
and James Suzman, oppose in principle the granting of
special privileges or status on the basis of ethnic identity

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because doing so would reproduce the same discredited

social theorizing that justified apartheid (Roberts 2003).
James Suzman, a committed revisionist and vocal critic of
SI, drew from Kupers polemic to argue that indigenous
rights are inappropriate in Botswana, where memories
of apartheid ensure that there is staunch opposition to the
granting of special rights to any group solely or even primarily on the basis of their ethnicity or ancestry (Suzman
2002:6). He also expressed concern that indigenous rights
narratives relegate socioeconomic issues to only secondary
importance (Suzman 2002:6).
The Kalahari debate was not only echoed in public disputes, it also featured in courtroom deliberations (Sapignoli
2009). During his testimony on behalf of the San applicants,
George Silberbauer was obliged to refute claims that San
had historically been pushed into the reserve by encroaching
Bantu pastoralists, as the GoBs lawyers drew from revisionist arguments to claim that the San are (and were) really just
a poor underclass (Sapignoli 2009; Tutwane 2004). Maria
Sapignoli describes how, in this confrontational situation,
Silberbauer was required to advance a simplified traditionalist argument and to emphasize hunting-and-gathering activities to support the claim that contemporary San need
their ancestral land in order to live as foragers (Sapignoli
2009:256258). Throughout the controversy, the GoB and
its lawyers proved remarkably adept at strategic deconstructionism. Drawing from the vocabulary of revisionist
ethnography, then-President Festus Mogae claimed that the
romantic fictions of Laurens van der Post (author of the Lost
World of the Kalahari) and the racial comedy of Jamie Uys
(The Gods Must be Crazy), along with others of the same
genre, have never been an authentic part of Botswanas indigenous identity (2004:5). Mogae went on to say that
rural poverty, no matter how romanticized, is a condition,
not a culture (2004:5).
Given Botswanas proximity to former apartheid
regimes, it would have been reasonable to expect the GoB to
share the revisionist view that ethnic and racial identities are
politically vicious masks for class and so to reject indigenous claims for recognition (see Sapignoli 2009:265; Suzman
2002:3). Indeed, Saugestad considers the possibility that the
GoBs hostility to ethnic concerns may provide grounds to
leave the inconvenient concept of indigenous groups aside
and focus instead on economic inequalities and the class
structure of Botswana (2001:170). But she ultimately rejects the suggestion on the grounds that ignoring ethnicity
easily implies a tacit acceptance that the problem of indigenous peoples is one of poverty only (2001:171). Saugestads
conflation of class and poverty is in keeping with the GoBs
neoliberal developmentalism. While SI sees San poverty as
a result of culture loss, the GoB attributes poverty to the
Sans hunting-and-gathering culture (Suzman 2002:3). In
both cases, blame is deflected from the regional class system. Although deconstructionism can be used to undermine
San claims for recognition as an indigenous ethnic group,
it has not inspired serious attention to the racialized class

inequalities that keep San in conditions of poverty. Just as SI

failed to see the majority of the San underclass in Botswana,
class, as a political relationship of inequality and exploitation,
remains largely invisible to the GoB.
As we see, the class politics prioritized by revisionists can
be easily neutralized by talk about conditions of poverty,
and the image of San as pristine primitives can be strategically
deconstructed just as easily as it can be used to advance San
rights. Furthermore, strategic essentialism can be turned
against the San. In 2010, when the San launched a claim
to restore water rights in the CKGR, the GoBs lawyer
suggested that San should live a nomadic life like their
grandfathers [and] use their traditional ways of finding water
(Piet 2011).
TO PRESERVE OR MODERNIZE THE SAN

The public confrontation between SI and the GoB encourages the view that they are ideologically opposedthat SI
is primitivist while the GoB is modernist. In his attack
on SIs romantic rhetoric, Suzman (2002:3) claimed that,
unlike Westerners, who see San as icons of noble savagery, most Tswana consider San to be impoverished,
under-developed, and living a way of life incompatible with
modernity. Similarly, Saugestad (2005:7) claims that while
many Europeans, embracing the van der Post tradition, see
Bushmen as the last representatives of values and lifestyles
that have long been lost in Western civilization, Tswanas
tend to see San as people of the past who represent an age of
hardship and deprivation. Odysseos suggests that the GoBs
policies toward the San reflect its broader modernization
framework. Conversely, SIs activism, as we have seen, constitutes a form of global primitivism (Odysseos 2004:26).
Solway suggests that people outside Botswana tap into a
deep Euro-Romanticism when they see San as examples
of stone-age culture and the noble savage (2009:334).
Former president Mogae, however, indulges in modernist
hubris when he describes Bushmen as stone-age creatures
who might perish like the Dodo if they dont move with
the times (Solway 2009:341). Mogae was not alone in this
opinion. While agents of the state offered deconstructionist
arguments at strategic moments to discredit the San, government officials also publicly claimed that the San in the CKGR
had to be removed from a primitive way of life (Hitchcock
2002:807, 818). The common perception that the GoB and
SI held competing views obscures the significant ideological
commonality: while SI sees Bushmen as noble savages, the
GoB sees them as backward primitives. The disagreement is
not over the evolutionary status of the San but, rather, over
whether primitives should be preserved or modernized.
While the GoB and SI argued about primitives and noble savages, SI also engaged in a public and acrimonious
dispute with local NGOs. In a BBC radio broadcast entitled
Crossing Continents, a San member of the KFO claimed that
SI is holding the whole nation at ransom (SI 2005a). The
founder of KFO, (the late) Braam LeRoux, explained that
SIs tactics were inappropriate in Botswana and expressed his

Sylvain Essentialism and Recognition in South Africa

displeasure at SIs arrogance (SI 2005a). WIMSA, meanwhile, issued a press release claiming that SI did not represent the San. SI and the First Peoples of the Kalahari then
accused LeRoux and WIMSA of exploiting the San and destroying San culture (SI 2005b, 2005c). These disputes and
power struggles had significant consequences for San and
local NGOs. FPK was alienated from other NGOs, and after legal support for the land claim ended at the conclusion
of the court case, the organizations office closed (Saugestad
2011:51). NGOs dedicated to San causes struggled to remain
viable as nervous donors withdrew (Saugestad 2011:51). San
affiliated with local NGOs had expressed an interest in pursuing a more conciliatory strategy with the GoB, particularly
by exploring opportunities to collaborate on CommunityBased Natural Resource Management projects in the reserve;
however, according to some San speculations, these options
were precluded as SI encouraged Sesana to commit to total
victory and complete ownership of the reserve.12
Saugestad (2011:54) suggests that a significant problem with SIs intervention was its imposition of a dominant
narrative that did not resonate with local concerns. While
SIs narrative may have been at odds with local priorities,
it was faithful to the widespread view, even among some
local NGOs, that San are people of the past, or at least
that they are not yet modern. The picture of San as premodern hunter-gatherers transitioning into a modern lifestyle
is a recurrent theme in the grey literature produced by
NGOs dedicated to San issues. The perspective of the KFO
provides an important example because it is a network of
advocacy organizations built around the Kuru Development
Trust (KDT), the oldest San advocacy NGO in Botswana.
The KDTs Progress Report for 199495 attributes problems with income-generating projects to the inevitable difficulties involved in the transition from a hunter-gatherer
existence to a cash economy and claims that the concept
of agriculture is an alien one to a hunter-gatherer society
(KDT 19941995:14,18). This theme continues in later
KFO reports: programs are needed to assist the San as they
cope with the transition from being hunter-gatherers to a
more modern lifestyle (KFO 2002:38); the continued dependency of San on Kuru projects in the village of DKar is
owed to the fact that the San have not sufficiently bridged
the gap from their recent hunter-gatherer existence (KFO
2005:31). This last illustration is especially surprising because development activities at DKar were initiated 30
years ago for San generational farmworkers from nearby
white-owned cattle ranches (see Guenther 2006).
Of course, not all NGO staff see San as hunter-gatherers
struggling to enter the modern world. Even when San themselves adopt this problematic vocabulary, they often insist
that they can be both modern and traditional at the same
time. One San man who works with local NGOs in Botswana
gave me a common perspective: People must survive with
their thingstheir culture and their goats. We want to go
and farm, like other people, to be a farmer, but we must
keep our culture alive also. We must also go to the bush

257

(conversation with author, June 15, 2008). During a group

discussion with San in DKar, some of whom had lived in
the reserve in the past, a woman claimed, We are used to
the modern world. We cant go back to [only] hunting and
gathering. She explained that we can be in the modern
world, but we wont lose our culture (conversation with
author, June 17, 2008).
Although attitudes vary from case to case, a dominant
perspective in much NGO work endorses the traditionalist
position in the Kalahari debate and embraces the modernization framework of the GoBs developmentalism. Roger
Chennells, a South African lawyer who served as a legal advisor to the San in the CKGR, expresses a widespread NGO
position on the San (and anthropology) this way: Without
entering into the Kalahari debate about primordial identities, it is suggested that the San people today . . . are still essentially a hunter-gatherer society in transition (2007:22).
The developmentalist framework shared by the GoB and
(I)NGOs plots traditional San and modern Tswana at
the opposite ends of a continuum of evolutionary status
and racial achievement. The disagreement between the GoB
and (I)NGOs over whether San should be modernized or
preserved reflects a philosophical difference about whether
the historical condition of foraging San represents Hobbess
brutish State of Nature or Rousseaus idyllic State of Nature.
But both based their arguments on the shared assumption
that contemporary San are premodern and prepolitical.
Social contract imagery is often invoked in the literature
on the San, as well as indigenous peoples generally (Garland
1999). Charles Mills (1997:13) points out that early social
contract theorists (i.e., Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) made
explicit use of South African Hottentots to embody a state
of nature that established the permanently prepolitical status of all nonwhites.13 The social contract, Mills argues,
is thus better understood as a racial contract, which is in
turn sustained by an epistemological contractthat is, an
agreement to misinterpret the world (Mills 1997:18). In
the CKGR controversy, we see just such agreements underwriting disputes between the GoB and (I)NGOs.
Four years after the High Court ruled in favor of the
Sans land claim, the GoB and SI were still exchanging insults and accusations. In December of 2010, at the launch
of a major mining project, President Seretse Khama Ian
Khama accused SI of trying to keep the San in a life of
backwardness that appeals to the racist mentality of having
people in Africa live a primitive life of deprivation (2010).
Stephen Corry countered that the presidents description
of San as backward and primitive has sinister echoes of
racial supremacy which should have no place in any modern democracy (2010). Both the GoB and SI, along with
other San advocacy NGOs, endorse an epistemological contract that provides the framework for racialized models of
modernization and development. Within the framework
of this agreement to misperceive them as premodern primitives, undistorted recognition of contemporary San becomes
impossible.

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American Anthropologist Vol. 116, No. 2 June 2014

SINCERITY AND RECOGNITION

Recognition is a key goal of indigenous peoples movements,

and the moral projects they promote depend upon it. But
caution is needed here, because when anthropologists and
NGOs deploy the vocabulary of recognition, there is more
than one thing they might have in mind. When anthropologists examine how contexts of recognition form opportunity
structures for indigenous activism (Merlan 2009), their focus
is generally on how indigenous peoples gain state recognition of rights to self-determination, resources, and cultural
protections. Saugestad describes recognition issues among
San as involving unequal distributions of power and sees
modes of redress as interventions designed to achieve distributive justice (2004:35, 40). Here, the primary aim is
recognition of rights to resources.
Recognition has a more robust significance, however,
when it involves what Charles Taylor calls the Ideal of
Authenticity, where authenticity requires being true to
oneself, or, in the case of a group identity, a Volk should be
true to . . . its own culture (1994:31). Recognition in this
more robust sense is important because, as Taylor explains,
Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or by its absence
. . . Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can
be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false,
distorted and reduced mode of being (1994:25). The goal
in this case is recognition of identities.
For those concerned with the recognition of rights to
resources, strategic essentialism is deployed for the purposes
of redistribution. It is justified as an effective way to achieve
immediate politicaland mostly economicgoals. Identities only matter in determining who may legitimately use
strategic essentialism. Richard Lee, for example, defends
the beauty and utility of strategic essentialism as a tool in
the arsenal of indigenous peoples struggles (2006:152). He
addresses Kupers worries about essentialist rhetoric in this
way:
While acknowledging . . . that all ethnicities are to a certain
degree fictional, [indigenous peoples] would argue that there is
a world of difference between reclaiming and reconstitution of
rights by dispossessed San people . . . and the assertion of a greater
German (or American) national identity. To conflate the two is
to erase the critical difference between oppressor and oppressed.
[Lee 2006:149]

In their critique of deconstructionist, expose ethnography,

John Sharp and Stuart Douglas (1996:329) argue that San
who play the Bushman card are engaging in a sound
strategy because they know that foreign donors are more
likely to provide resources to the Bushmen of the Western imagination. As these proponents illustrate, strategic
essentialism concedes ground to the deconstructionist view
that identities are fictions (see Alcoff 2000:323). This concession reinforces the idea that the only indigenous identities
worth caring about are the strategically displayed essentialist
and fictional ones. And so, just at the point where a better
understanding of identities is needed to bolster the claims
of indigenous peoples to recognition and rights, strategic

essentialism yields ground to those who want to deny the

very identities on which those claims depend.
A further duplicity characterizes strategic essentialism
insofar as it tacitly accepts that the real issues are socioeconomic. To the extent that the rhetoric of recognition is
deployed only to achieve redistributive goals, indigenous
struggles are not about genuine recognition after all. The
conditions of material deprivation faced by the San are the
result of the mutual imbrication of racial, ethnic, and class
inequalities, and so they cannot be addressed without confronting the racial stereotypes of them as primitive premoderns (Sylvain 2011). To address those stereotypes is to take
seriously the importance of genuine recognition. But where
strategic essentialism attends to matters of recognition at all,
it manipulates racial stereotypes without challenging them;
worse yet, it does this in a way that concedes the deconstructionist idea that indigenous identities are not real and,
so, that issues of recognition need not be taken seriously. In
the same dissembling move by which strategic essentialism
conceals who the San are, it tells us that, for the purposes of
activism, it does not matter who they really are.
Essentialism is strategic when it is insincerethat is,
when the presentation of an indigenous identity conforms to
an imposed script and when such compliance becomes the
test for authenticity. Sincerity presumes a liaison between
subjects (Jackson 2005:17); it is critical to effective dialogue
and mutual influence, and it is important to any cooperative
endeavor that requires the pooling of information and altering of dominant assumptions, such as alliance building and
mobilizing support for a cause (Williams 2002:80). Without
sincerity, San may engage in sentimental manipulation but
not moral persuasion. Given the insincerity that defines it,
strategic essentialism demotes indigenous activism from a
significant moral project to merely ethnic politicking.
Many NGOs are not merely engaging in cynical ethnic politicking: they are sincere essentialists about identities
and take seriously the harms that befall those whose cultural
identities are distorted by misrecognition. They see recognition, specifically the reevaluation of stigmatized identities, as
a significant moral project and accept that without a secure
cultural framework we would be psychologically destabilized and disoriented (Taylor 1989:27). NGO rhetoric is
replete with claims about the psychological consequences of
culture loss. For some, the Sans very physical health is
put at risk when culture loss undermines their self-esteem
(Chennells 2007:22). SI takes this concern to extremes when
it claims that unless they are able to live on their ancestral
lands, the Bushmens unique societies and way of life will
be destroyed, and many of them will die (SI n.d.).
Cindy Holder and Jeff Corntassel note that communitarian arguments depoliticize recognition issues so that protest
by indigenous groups becomes an allegory for a need felt by
all human beings, and their claims are assessed on the basis of universal facts about the human psyche, rather than
on the basis of specific historical and social wrongs which
they have endured (2002:138). Activist discourse about San

Sylvain Essentialism and Recognition in South Africa

illustrates this trend. For example, Chennells explains why

San resist government-imposed advancement by referring
to Hugh Brodys book, The Other Side of Eden (2000), which
equates humankinds mindless quest to conquer and control
the world with the curse that God placed on Adam and his
descendants (2007:21). While Brody and Chennells cast indigenous peoples as allegorical figures in a biblical narrative,
Lee emphasizes universal psychological needs. He claims that
ethnic revivalism in post-apartheid South Africa signals the
resurgence of primordial attachments that are needed for
psychological well-being and can be likened to the breaking of a dam, the unleashing of long-suppressed yearnings
of a deeply emotional nature (Lee 2003:100). Because indigenous rights are required to fulfill a psychological need
shared by all humans, the important distinction Lee emphasized earlier between oppressor and oppressed collapses
as both politically vicious and politically progressive identities are entitled to recognition on the same grounds (see
Appiah 2005:133; Coulthard 2007; Holder and Corntassel
2002:137).
Maintaining the view that San are disoriented refugees
from an African Eden requires distorting the redistribution
issues at stake in their struggles for recognition. During the
CKGR controversy, San were struggling to secure socioeconomic rights to resources, such as land, water, and social
services, and they were resisting relocation to rural slums,
where unemployment, alcoholism, violence, and disease are
rife (Hitchcock et al. 2011:80). These mundane matters
are redescribed to suit the cultural preservation agenda of
NGOs. A 2002 report by the Kuru Family of Organizations
explained that relocation to New Xade resulted in alcoholism
and increased rates of TB and AIDS because the San were not
prepared for such a change (KFO 2002:45, emphasis added).
This explanation reflects the significance NGOs attached to
the psychological investment San are supposed to have in a
traditional way of life and the psychological destabilization
believed to be caused by their integration into the modern world. According to this view, the problems San face
are owed to their own deficienciesthat is, their inability to adapt to modernityand not to their conditions of
deprivation. Such rhetoric illustrates how the epistemological contract shapes how we see the issues at stake in San
struggles. Jiro Tanaka and Kazuyoshi Sugawara described
the conditions in what is now called Old Xade, inside the
CKGR, since the 1980s this way:
Sedentarization around the water bore, the new availability of
sugar for brewing, and dramatic changes to the lifestyle contributed to the rapid spread of alcohol consumption and attendant social problems such as community violence. [Tanaka and
Sugawara 1999:198]

During the CKGR controversy, (I)NGOs reserved these

descriptions for New Xade, even though the social problems
in both Old Xade and New Xade were tragically similar.
Such distortions, especially by powerful (I)NGOs, reflect
genuine concern for San; unfortunately, they also sustain a

259

racial epistemology in which members of the dominant racial

and ethnic groups learn to see the world wrongly but do
so with the validation of a global white epistemic authority
(Mills 1997:18) such as the international donor and activist
communities.
CONCLUSION

The CKGR case illustrates how constraints to activism are

not necessarily a result of a confrontation of opposing views.
In this case, the dominant actors share a commitment to
essentialist and primordialist standards of San identity. This
convergence of commitments made it difficult for San and
their supporters to represent the actual diversity of San interests and visions. Each of the dominant perspectives requires
that we privilege either redistribution goals or recognition
claims, and so we lose sight of the mutually imbricating systems of racial-ethnic class inequalities that marginalize and
oppress San. Furthermore, while critics accuse indigenous
activists of harkening back to apartheids pernicious racial
myth making, there is no corresponding acknowledgment of
how the difference-blindness of liberal states sustains racial
inequalities, and so the status injuries that result from misrecognition remain unaddressed (see Fraser 1997).
As the positions in the Kalahari debate got translated
into public discourse, we were left with the false choice
between naive essentialism and deconstructionist excesses.
Either we accept stereotypical images of San as pristine primitives or we accept the deconstructionist view that identities
can only be contrived and counterfeited, inauthentic artifices (Levi and Dean 2003:14; Sahlins 2002:3). We are
left with no way to advocate for identity-based rights other
than by offering insincere arguments for the preservation of
fictions. Indigenous activism, meanwhile, remains vulnerable to strategic deconstructionism, which relies onand
reinforcesthe same racial epistemology as strategic essentialism: both agree that failure to conform to essentialist imagery constitutes ground for dismissing claims to indigenous
identity. Our plausible and sophisticated social constructionist theories of identity translate in practice into unreflective
deconstructionism, and so our ability to articulate a more
theoretically sophisticated argument for social construction
realism about identities is inhibited.
Jerome Levi and Bartholomew Dean (2003:23) note
that when indigenous people are heard as political actors,
they slip out of the savage slotthat place from which
they may speak with moral authority. They also note that tensions between essentialist and constructivist perspectives
place heavy constraints on indigenous speech (2003:14).
Strategic deconstructionism did, indeed, threaten to undermine San activism. The common lesson taken from deconstructionist threats is that strategic essentialism secures the
safe ground of the savage slot. This view is particularly
compelling in an environment in which sincerely essentialist
views about identity are already widespread. There is no call
for strategic essentialism except in an environment in which
the assumption is already in place that indigenous identities

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are essential and primordial, and so, strategic essentialism

sustains the very stereotypes that make it necessary.
Effective activism may require staying on message and
minimizing complexities in public representations of indigenous issues; however, if our larger goal is empowerment,
then indigenous peoples must achieve greater political presence in public deliberations. This goal cannot be achieved
if recognition requires that indigenous peoples advance insincere arguments by deploying strategic essentialism or if
it requires that they submit to a racial politics of recognition by embracing essentialist notions of identity. The
moral visions advanced by indigenous activists may themselves rely on racial epistemologies; however, the potential for indigenous activism to refashion identity categories
along more emancipatory lines is precluded when indigenous people are obliged to adhere to imposed identity scripts
and an asymmetrical, racialized politics of recognition (see
Coulthard 2007).
Reconciling critical theory with activist anthropology
remains an important challenge. A number of anthropologists have sensibly argued that we ought not to unthinkingly
embrace indigenous rhetoric nor should we unreflectively
endorse postmodern theories of identity; rather, we should
seek a viable compromise (Hale 2006; Ramos 2003:398).
But before we can develop better theories, we must allow
ourselves to be more vocally critical of dubious strategies,
even if they are favored by segments of an indigenous community or an activist organization. Most anthropologists recognize that theorizing is in itself a political act, but this is
increasingly taken to mean that our theories must be compromised by the demands of effective politicking, or at least
must be subordinated to political interests. I suggest that
our theoretical commitments are at odds with our political
goals only when we commit ourselves to flawed theories or
to questionable politics.
Sylvain
Renee

Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada; rsylvain@

uoguelph.ca

NOTES
Acknowledgments.

The research on which this article is based

was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. I am very thankful to the editor of American Anthropologist,
Michael Chibnik, for his guidance and advice and to the anonymous
reviewers for their thoughtful and thorough feedback. I am also
grateful to Jacqueline Solway for stimulating discussions about San
issues and to Robert Hitchcock and Maria Spaignoli for sharing their
vast knowledge about the CKGR. I also thank Rocky Jacobsen for
his many insightful comments on earlier drafts. Finally, as always, I
am deeply grateful to the San people and NGO staff in Botswana,
Namibia, and South Africa for their generosity with their time and
assistance.

1. Kalahari foragers and former foragers are known as San and

Bushmen and, in Botswana, as Basarwa. I use San because
it is preferred by San and NGO staff I worked with for 15 years.
2. I do not offer an account of interpersonal politics among activists and NGOs. Very good NGO-ographies already exist (see
Biesele and Hitchcock 2011; Hitchcock 2002; Saugestad 2011).
My examination of (I)NGO-driven activism is inspired by discussions with San and NGO staff in Namibia, Botswana, and
South Africa since 1996 but especially during multisited fieldwork conducted in 2007, 2008, and 2009 in Namibia, Botswana,
and South Africa. While I consulted with San in Botswana, my
analysis is not based on sedentary fieldwork but on interviews,
discussions, and observations across a regional network of San
and NGOs.
3. Examples of ethnographic accounts of becoming indigenous
include Li (2000) and Tyson (2011) for Asia; Speed (2002) for
Latin America; and Hodgson (2011), Igoe (2006), and Lynch
(2011) for cases in Africa.
4. A vivid example of the tension between scholarly deconstructionism and Native nationalism is provided by the debate in
Pacific studies between scholars advancing an invention-oftradition critique (see Keesing 1989, 1991; Linnekin 1991) and
a Native Hawaiian activist-scholar who challenged the authority
of anthropology to undermine the authenticity of indigenous
traditions (Trask 1991).
5. The terms traditionalists and revisionists are common shorthand
for broadly opposing positions. The debate itself involved theoretical nuance and empirical detail well beyond the scope of this
article.
6. See Current Anthropology 44(3) (published in 2003), 45(2) (published in 2004), 47(1) (published in 2006); Social Anthropology
14(1) (published in 2006); Anthropology Today 20(2) (published
in 2004); and New Humanist 118(3) (published in 2003).
7. Hitchcock (2002:805) gives the following population breakdown of the CKGR in 197980: G/ui, 26.3 percent; G//ana,
36 percent; Bakgalagadi, 25.2 percent; and others (e.g., Kua),
12.4 percent.
8. There is disagreement about the historical role of agropastoralism in San socioeconomic systems. Regardless of subsistence
patterns prior to the RADP, the introduction of development
inputs and services certainly brought about significant changes
to the Xade area.
9. Critics note that delivering services to the reserve would be
no more expensive than resettling the San (Odysseos 2004:17;
Saugestad 2005:6; Taylor and Mokhawa 2003:276).
10. Water rights were restored after a court ruling in January of
2011.
11. Saugestad argues that it would have been unnecessary to relocate
a small community of San to accommodate mining in such a large
reserve and that many applicants see mining as an employment
opportunity (2005:8).
12. In 1997, FPK, WIMSA, KFO, the Botswana Council of
Churches, and Ditshwanelo formed a Negotiating Team to work
with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in the development of a management plan. Talks broke down in 2001
after SI began its own interventions (Solway 2009:328; Suzman

Sylvain Essentialism and Recognition in South Africa

2002:4). San I spoke to in the Ghanzi District of Botswana in

July of 2008 expressed a great deal of respect for Sesana but also
expressed dismay at the crazy politics of SI and FPK.
13. Hottentot is the colonial term for Khoesan peoples, who include
foraging San and Nama pastoralists.
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