Khoekhoe and San Strike for Legal Status

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These four Khoekhoe men have walked thousands of kilometres over 18 days to reach Pretoria to request an audience with President Zuma. They encamped on the grounds of the Union Buildings for two weeks before being taken to the Sunnyside police station but they returned soon thereafter and have been on a hunger strike today for the fifth day in a row. What they want essentially is for the Khoekhoe and San to be given special legal status as the First Nations of South Africa and they want their languages to be recognized legally as official languages of South Africa. For my foreign friends that aren't familiar, the indigenous people of South Africa were hunter-gatherer tribes collectively now called the San, and nomadic pastoralist tribes collectively called the Khoekhoe in the standardized Nama/Khoekhoe orthography. It's important to note that the term San is disputed because it is in fact a term used by the Khoekhoe to refer to them. The San have historically called themselves by their individual tribal names, e.g. !Kung, ?Khomani, N|u, Hai?om, Tsoa, Auen, |Xam and G?ana. San is thus used academically and politically, etc, as their default collective name. Dutch migrants that began settling permanently at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century ignorantly referred to them as Hottentotten which means 'stutterers' because their languages use clicking sounds. They called the San by another pejorative, Bosjemannen (Bushmen). The Bantu use/d various derogatory names, the most common of which is abaThwa (in the Nguni languages) or Batwa (in the Sotho-Tswana languages) originally referring to the Pygmy people of Central Africa from where the former originate. The San and Khoekhoe have inhabited what became South Africa for thousands upon thousands of years, much like the Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and the Ainu of their respective territories. The motto of the South African coat of arms is written in |Xam which is one of the Khoekhoe languages - !ke e: |xarra ?ke - which translates literally to "diverse people unite". But this national recognition is not enough. The truth is that the Khoekhoe and the San were the first people to inhabit what became South Africa and everyone else arrived much later. There are only a few groups that self-identify now exclusively as Khoekhoe and San and it is high time that they be given special recognition as the First Nations of South Africa and that their languages be given legal recognition as official languages of South Africa. Petition your MPs to put the Khoekhoe and San's requests on the parliamentary agenda.