Hottentot

The dynamics of colonialism commonly generate a predictable agenda of stereotypes, whereby the colonized or dominated peoples are presented as savages living in a barbaric state of nature without religion, their speech being caricatured as incomprehensible and subhuman gabbling. The term barbarian itself is rooted in this agenda. Hottentot , used to refer to one of the aboriginal native peoples of South Africa now known as the Khoikhoi or the San, is a classic example of this process. “Hottentot is a word meaning ‘stutterer’ or ‘stammerer,’ applied to the people on account of their stuttering speech,” according to Olfert Dapper, a Dutch explorer, in his Beschryvingh der Afrikansche Gewesten (Description of the African Deserts 1670). To this William Dampier added in his Voyage Round the World (1697) this inherently implausible explanation: “Hottantot … is the name by which they call to one another … as if every one of them had this for his name” (I, 536). The point of incomprehension lay in “the peculiar ‘clicks’ which gave their speech its distinctive character” (Schapera 1930, 44). These clicks are, of course, alien to the phonetic systems of most other languages. The word itself is derived from Dutch Huttentut , “stammerer” or “stutterer” possibly related to German hotteren-totteren , meaning “to stutter.” Jan van Riebeek, the first Dutch governor of the Cape, used the forms Ottentot and Hottentoo in his Journal (January 1652). The stereotype of cultural difference is encapsulated in the history of the so-called Hottentot Venus, Saartjie Baartman (1789–1816) who was taken to Europe and shown off as a freak, mainly because of what was called the Hottentot apron or “enlarged labia pudendi” ( Oxford English Dictionary ).

There subsequently developed the predictable deterioration to mean “a person of inferior intellect or culture.” However, this sense is first recorded not in Holland, the original colonial power, but in England, before Britain had shown much interest in South Africa. In an unexpected context, Nicholas Amherst’s Terrae filius: or the secret history of the university of Oxford (1726), the writer was “Surprized to find a place, which he had heard so much renown’d for learning, fill’d with grey-haired novices and reverend hotentots” (xxxv, 190). Even more surprising is the provocative description of Dr. Johnson as “a respectable Hottentot” by Lord Chesterfield in a letter to his son (February 28, 1751).

Long obsolete in this sense in the United Kingdom, Hottentot still survives in South Africa as a general term of insult. The Dictionary of South African English (1996) carries the following usage note: “The word ‘Hottentot’ is seen by some as offensive and Khoikhoi is sometimes substituted as a name for the people, particularly in scholarly contexts. However the use of ‘Hottentot’ does not seem to be avoided in the names of plants, fish, birds, etc.” (The dictionary lists about twenty such items.) The term also survives in the abbreviated form hotnot , recorded with comparative neutrality from the early nineteenth century, but now regarded as “an offensive mode of address to a coloured person.” The Cape Times (July 8, 1949) carried a report referring to “His uncouth remarks about ‘Hotnots, Coolies and Kaffirs.’”