STORY 70
Featured image: Hottentots Holland Mountains
The area you live in has been called many things. The Khoikhoi called it their home, without needing a European name for it. Jan van Riebeeck’s diary first wrote down the words Hottentots Holland in June 1657. For 340 years, through Dutch rule and British rule and Afrikaner rule and the long years of apartheid, it kept that name. And then, after 1994, the new South Africa began to ask whether it should.
It is a conversation that sounds simple. It is not simple at all.
Let us start with what the name actually means, because most people have never thought about it carefully.
An entry in Jan van Riebeeck’s diary for 6 June 1657 states that the name Hottentots Holland was given to the area by the Khoikhoi themselves, who called it their Holland, meaning their fatherland, their home ground. The Khoikhoi were telling the Dutch: this is our place, our heartland, the way Holland is yours. It was not an insult. It was a declaration of belonging.
The word Hottentots in the name is where the complexity enters. The term Hottentot was coined by the Dutch Cape Colony settlers who arrived in the 1650s. The most widely claimed etymology is that it derived from a Dutch expression meaning stammerer or stutterer applied to the Khoikhoi because of the distinctive click consonants in their language. It was a name born of incomprehension and condescension. The Dutch heard a language they could not understand and named the people for their inability to understand it.
Over centuries, the word Hottentot drifted further into slang and insult. The reduced Afrikaans form, which I cannot mention, was borrowed into South African English as a derogatory term. By the late twentieth century, it carried the kind of weight that made community meetings uncomfortable whenever the hospital sign or the school sign or the mountain range sign came up for discussion.
And so, the debate began.
The Hottentots Holland area was renamed Helderberg by the City of Cape Town following concerns about possible racist connotations in the name. However, many people who live here still refer to it by its former name. That last sentence is doing a great deal of quiet work. A generation on from the official renaming, old-timers still say Hottentots Holland without a second thought. It is muscle memory. It is the name on the road signs they grew up reading, the name on the hospital where their children were born, the name their parents used and their grandparents before them.
The Hottentots Holland Hospital in Somerset West became the Helderberg Hospital following objections raised at a series of community meetings in 2006. The Western Cape Health MEC Pierre Uys said at the time that the majority of people in the Western Cape would support the name change as it allowed people to take pride in their local hospital.
The hospital renaming was one of the cleaner decisions. The broader geographical question, what to call the mountain range itself, the pass, the nature reserve, the district, was messier and is still not entirely resolved. The mountains are still officially the Hottentots-Holland Mountains. The pass is still Sir Lowry’s Pass, named after a British governor. The Nature Reserve dropped the Land-en-Zeezicht name early and became Helderberg. The administrative district became Helderberg Basin. The hospital became Helderberg.
But the mountains kept their old name. And most people over fifty still use it.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that the debate tends to dance around: the original name, properly understood, was not an insult at all. It was the Khoikhoi’s own description of their homeland. The insulting word in it, Hottentot, is the Dutch settlers’ name for the Khoikhoi, not the Khoikhoi’s name for themselves. The people it was supposedly named after would not have called themselves Hottentots. They would have called themselves Khoikhoi real people, men among men.
So, in renaming Hottentots Holland to remove an offensive term, we also removed the only remaining trace of the Khoikhoi’s own declaration that this valley was their home. There is an irony in that which deserves at least a moment’s acknowledgement.
The new name, Helderberg, clear mountain is clean, beautiful, descriptive and entirely free of historical baggage. It is the name the mountain gives the place, which is fitting. The mountain was here before all the arguments about what to call it. It will be here after.
But Hottentots Holland was first written down in 1657. The area now carries a name proclaimed in 1960. History is long and names carry more than we usually stop to notice.
Between You and Me:
My grandmother called it Hottentots Holland her entire life. My parents called it Hottentots Holland. I grew up calling it Hottentots Holland. I now live in the Helderberg. The name changed in my lifetime, in my mouthand I notice the change every time I use the new name not realising it changed, a small hesitation, a brief awareness that I am choosing the new word over the old one. I think this is probably healthy. It means I have not entirely stopped thinking about what words mean and where they come from. The Khoikhoi called this their Holland. We called it the Helderberg. The mountain had no opinion. It was already there. Please avoid calling this beautiful area the Basin, is it enamel of fine China?
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: full circle Vergelegen three centuries later and what the estate that started this book looks like from the other end of history.
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