Ausi Told Me 

Keeping Feminist ‘Ausi’ Khoi-San Climate Change Resilience Knowledge Alive In The Cape Region Of South Africa

We are no longer able to ignore the devastating impact of climate change or the important Iindigenous knowledges of ecologies that have been systematically erased (directly or indirectly; willfully or unintentionally). With fires currently ravaging Europe and temperatures reaching extra-ordinary levels, there is both vocal and silent agreement in societies at large that it can’t be ‘business as usual’.  One area of intervention is within Iindigenous feminist methodologies which attempt to make important global connections to address the limitations of Eurocentric approaches to knowledge production about the deep pasts and our therefore limited understanding of interconnected links to present crises. How could such understandings assist us in attaining sustainability for all humanity in a shared and increasingly precarious earth? 

One of the areas neglected by mainstream conventional scholarship is in understanding this interconnected and deep pasts is located in the south western tip of Africa, between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans  - an area of 470 kilometres squared known as the Cape Peninsula. Famous for its penguins, endemic floral kingdom and medicinal plants known as ‘fynbos’ (meaning ‘fine bush’ in Afrikaans), the Cape Peninsula is home to little known and little acknowledged Iindigenous people of South Africa who were randomly labelled ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) under Apartheid.  The region is often described in colonial texts as sparsely populated ‘empty’ land and with often misguided claims in some white scholarship that contemporary inhabitants labelled ‘Coloured’ had little connection to the indigenous Khoi-San people who were presumed to be largely ‘extinct’ since the smallpox epidemic of the 1700s. The assumptions of the largely ‘extinct’ Khoi-San people and the existence of ‘authentic’ Iindigenous communities as regionally bound to the northern regions of South Africa flourished into recent times in scholarship.

The lack of inclusive acknowledgement and recognition within indigenous knowledge systems in South Africa emerged starkly in black nationalist public discourse within the second decade of our democracy: about who was ‘indigenous’ and who was ‘African’. When Nelson Mandela became the new president in 1994, it was assumed globally that Indigenous South Africans were only those speakers of Zulu and Xhosa languages. There was little awareness and knowledge of ‘Coloured’ people at the Cape as indigenous and African people. This was further compounded by the fact that Khoi-San descendant people suffered genocide and ethnocide following the Dutch colonial invasion and settlement in the region from the 1600s onward. There was therefore little (if any) connection made between ‘Coloured’ people and the ancient San languages, and the later indigenous Khoekhoegowab (still spoken today in Namibia). 

To restore the imbalance in how indigeneity is understood in an inclusive sense in South Africa we established the A/Xarra Restorative Justice forum in the Centre for African Studies at the historically white University of Cape Town in 2018. The initiative for the establishment of the forum came from the intergenerational Khoi-San identified community after the #Rhodes Must Fall student protests and removal of the statue from the university’s main campus. We established a co-design knowledge and research partnership with several civic and traditional Khoi and San structures involving some 100 members nationally and including also the bordering countries of Namibia and Botswana. The forum had functioning research commissions in land, language, human remains, women and youth. It also went on to established a Covid 19 research commission and played a leading role in transformation of the historically white university itself. The forum included lead environmental activists who challenged the Amazon headquarters building construction development on the Liesbeeck River flood plain from around 2020. The forum also co-established with research scholars the university’s first San and Khoi Centre to (amongst others) create a knowledge archive of erased and endangered southern African Khoi-San languages as part of the restorative justice against colonialism and linguicide. 

After 2015, as a research scholar, I delved into research of people’s long ignored knowledge of medicinal plants, landscape and healing on the Cape Flats. My work focused on the surviving knowledge of the matriarchal Cape ‘Ausi’, one of the few surviving Khoi-San words in the region in  thein the aftermath of colonial linguicide. Like many people on the Cape Flats, my own mother, grandmother and great grandmothers were known as ‘Ausi’. Ausi holds ‘deep past’ indigenous feminist knowledges and stories that trouble the ‘extinction’ and ‘disconnected people and culture’ discourse. As Khoekhoegowab name for older sister, the ‘respected’ one ‘with the knowledge’, Ausi holds invaluable intergenerational and deep-time knowledge of landscape, plants, and related ‘artefacts’. Ausi knowledge resiliently survived colonial displacement from land, and violent extractive collection practices by Europe. Yet, strikingly, Ausi knowledge contributions have been absent from acknowledgment in the scientific and heritage disciplines. The Ausi narrates deep-time intergenerational knowledge of landscape and changes (e.g. the regions and soil levels of the medicinal buchu, a widely used and well known ancient ‘Ausi’-knowledge herbal species endemic to the south western Cape mountain region – used for urinary tract and kidney diseases, and for high blood pressure.). Today, buchu is widely appropriated by pharmaceutical and commercial enterprises in the west without acknowledgement of, or economic benefits and ownership granted, to Cape communities. Access and benefit sharing models in the use of ‘Ausi’ plants such as globally commercialized ‘red bush tea’ remain economically and structurally in favour of white landowners and farmers. 

Today, women of the Cape who hold this deep-time intergenerational knowledge of plants and landscape are emerging to take their place in knowledge taxonomies and to make their knowledge count in partnership with indigenous feminist scholars. These works include Sylvia Vollenhoven’s The Keeper of the Kumm (2016); .June Bam’s Ausi told me: Why Cape herstoriographies matter (Jacana Media, 2021); Bernadette Muthien and June Bam, Rethinking Africa: indigenous women re-interpret Southern Africa’s pasts (Jacana Media, 2021).

The keeper of the Kumm by Sylvia Vollenhoven | Waterstones

Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter - Jacana

Rethinking Africa: Indigenous Women Re-Interpret Southern Africa's Pasts - Jacana

There are further exciting developments to share.

During my tenure as director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg we also started  to collate podcasts with the ‘Ausi’ knowledge holders as the ‘Ausi Told Me Collective’. 

Listen to a panel on Ausi knowledge here

Furthermore, we have started to produce a children’s book series based on Ausi Told Me Why Cape Herstoriographies. This multilingual book series (in several African languages) is a first for South African children on Khoi-San feminist knowledge and climate change resilience.

Ausi told me: the secrets of nature - Jacana