Hugh Brody - The anthropologist: acknowledging suffering and redressing the loss

Hugh Brody, Honorary Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, explores the role of the anthropologist.

About Hugh Brody
"Hugh Brody, Honorary Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, explores the role of the anthropologist."

Key Points

• After the N|uu language was thought to be extinct, one of the last remaining people to speak it was eager to share her stories and send a message to Nelson Mandela.
• Acknowledging the suffering, brutality and trauma of indigenous and minority groups in the imperialist process is one significant goal of anthropology.
• Ultimately, industrial societies have a lot to learn from indigenous peoples, and their loss is humanity’s loss.

In the 1990s, I began work on a mapping project with the people known as the Khomani, with the San or the Bushmen, of South Africa – people who lived on the border of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. But it’s the community in South Africa that I was working with, and we were attempting to map with them their relationship to their world. Along the way we realised it would be tremendously helpful if we could find people who spoke the original language of that community, the language N|uu, which had been declared extinct 20 years before by very thorough scholarly academics in South Africa.

To our amazement, we heard that there was one person alive who did speak this language, a woman called Elsie Vaalbooi. I went with our colleagues, our team, including Elsie’s son, to visit her. She lived in a shack. She lived sort of under a lean-to at the side of a little shack in a dusty, dry zone on the right, in South Africa, very close to the Namibian border in the Northern Cape. And there she lay on a sort of pallet, very old, very frail.

She turned out to be about 100 years old at the time, not able to see very well. But when she heard that we had come to talk to her about her language, she was very, very excited and immediately started speaking in this language, which we thought to be extinct, and we quickly identified that it was indeed the N|uu that had been recorded in the 1930s. She told words and she began to tell stories in the language. After a while she was getting tired, but she said she wanted to record a message to Nelson Mandela.

This was 1997, not long after the ANC and Mandela had come to power.