Days of Commitment Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #75)

of the Khoi Khoi themselves as a distinct community. Our knowledge of their history is accordingly derived from the writings of prejudiced white historians and sociologists who had little or no sympathy for the aspirations of the Khoi Khoi. But even such one sided accounts cannot hide the fact that the Khoi Khoi have a long and proud record of armed struggle against agression by the whites, and their courageous exploits in battle nevertheless emerge from the standard history books and is preserved in the oral traditions of the Griquas. But it was the Bantu speaking people who offered the tougher opposition. They had the advantage of greater numbers and could raise larger armies than either the Bathwa or Khoi Khoi. Unlike the Bathwas or the Khoi Khoi who were nomads, the Bantu speaking people were already a settled community that ploughed the land and reared livestock. Their social system was more developed and weapons more effective, advantages which enabled them to contest the advance of the whites for more than a century. But the superior arms the whites used, their greater economic resources and better organisation gave them the edge in these conflicts. The gun was mightier than the spear and the ox shield, the arrow and the bow. The advance of capitalism could not be repulsed be a primitive social system relying on equally primitive weapons. In spite of the daring energy and skill with which our forefathers fought, they were beaten in the end and, in the process, we lost the right to run our own states, to command our own armies, arrange our own external relations and the most precious of all liberties the right to be a man. The defeat of the black armies towards the end of the nineteenth century marked the end of