What is a Strandloper?
The word Strandloper goes
back to the beginning of European settlement in Southern Africa, to a time when
the people who lived in this part of the world didn’t wear clothes.
Now that’s a strange thing to say, you might think.
The African people of Southern Africa all wear clothes, and have as many
hang-ups about them as white folk. But that’s something that came with white
settlement and the work of missionaries – earnest individuals who believed that
the naked savages they had been sent to work among were going straight to hell
because they weren’t dressed.
Before Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652,
the peoples of Southern Africa wore animal skins, or karosses, for warmth, and
for decoration they wore beads and a variety of other items, including pieces
of ostrich egg shells and bits of metal that they had either mined or traded
for.
In their own eyes they were not naked, because when
they had taken off their decorations they were in a state of undress. Some of
them, especially important men, wore so many small animal skins hanging around
their waist that they might have been described as wearing skirts.
But they didn’t wear bloomers, and they only put
their karosses around their shoulders when it was cold. This is a warm country,
most of the time, and they were blessed with God’s sunshine.
When the Dutch arrived in Table Bay, the first
people they had to deal with were a group under the leadership of a man called
Autshumato or Haddah. Able to speak English, he was also called Harry.
Autshumato’s people were a small band of outcasts
who had been expelled from the Khoikhoi hordes who roamed the grazing lands of
the Cape West Coast with their cattle, called Kaapmans by the Dutch. Autshumato
had no cattle, so he was regarded by the Kaapmans as being San (a demeaning
Khoikhoi word used to describe Bushmen).
Autshumato’s people fended for themselves wandering
along the seashore, and were called Strandlopers – beach-walkers – by the
Dutch.
Later the colonists found other people living along
the seashore, who were real Bushmen – the indigenous people of the land who
lived by hunting and gathering, especially gathering the food the sea provided
for them. These seaside Bushmen were also called Strandlopers.
The cultural remains left by the Strandlopers (the
Bushman variety) are of great interest to archæologists, and careful attention
is paid to what has been discovered in so-called Strandloper middens, the Stone
Age rubbish dumps they left in the dunes.
There is a great deal of curiosity about these
people, and a mystique has grown up around them – so much so that white people
who love the seaside, and who love walking the beaches, often label themselves
as Strandlopers.
During South Africa’s apartheid years, for white
people associate themselves with people of other races was regarded by the
ruling authorities as demeaning. So in adopting this name, white men and women
were identifying themselves with the aboriginal inhabitants of this country and
rejecting apartheid. Taking on the name was an act of non-racial defiance.
So here I am: a lover of the seaside, and a lover of
enjoying God’s sunshine as God created me – a Strandloper.
– Strandloper
