Negotiating Contemporary Indigeneity: Cultural Aesthetic and Communicative Practices among Contemporary! Xun and Khwe San Youth of Platfontein, South Africa

Abstract

The San or Bushmen of South Africa have been represented in popular literature and media as hunter-gatherer primitives who live nomadic lives and whose history predates that of all later immigrants to the country. While the ubiquitous representation and myth provide incentives in the form of cultural/ecotourism and engenders much international interest, it has rarely translated into any form of sustainable socioeconomic benefit for the impoverished Bushmen. Rather, it obfuscates accounts of modern acculturation, hinders the process of self-determination and contributes to a systemic socio-political and economic exclusion, repression, and marginalisation of contemporary San in South Africa. The San youth who seem to have suffered the most as a result of this essentialised representation are appropriating modern popular cultures (such as hip-hop) to project self-identity, counter-narratives, and position themselves as a modernised people. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and informal interviews from 2014 to 2018, this article examines the complex, multi-layered composition of contemporary!Xun and Khwe San identity, which places the youth at the nexus of competing expectations thrown up by imperatives of social change, global influence, dominant social paradigms, poverty, joblessness, and indigeneity. The analysis of their identities in the late-modern South Africa, provokes the question whether contemporary Indigenous people are “indigenizing modernity or modernizing indigeneity.”