Griqua people

rdf:langString Griqua people

rdf:langString Griquas

rdf:langString (Griekwa)

rdf:langString March 2021

rdf:langString Griquas

rdf:langString (Griekwa)

rdf:langString If they a mixture of African and European, then how were they known as anything before European arrival?

rdf:langString Coloureds, Khoikhoi, Basters, Oorlam, Afrikaners, Tswana, Xhosa

rdf:langString various Protestant denominations, especially Dutch Calvinist ones

rdf:langString Unknown

rdf:langString The Griquas (/ˈɡriːkwə/; Afrikaans: Griekwa, often confused with !Orana, which is written as Korana or Koranna) are a subgroup of heterogeneous former Khoe-speaking nations in Southern Africa with a unique origin in the early history of the Cape Colony. Under apartheid, they were given a special racial classification under the broader category of "Coloured". Similar to the Trekboers (another Afrikaans-speaking group of the time), they originally populated the frontiers of the nascent Cape Colony (founded in 1652). The men of their semi-nomadic society formed commando units of mounted gunmen. Like the Boers, they migrated inland from the Cape, in the 19th century establishing several states in what are now South Africa and Namibia. Griqua was the name given to a mixed-race culture in the Cape Colony of South Africa, around the 17th and 18th Century (Taylor, 2020). They were also known as Hottentots before Europeans arrived into their lands where they lived as close-knit families. They are a racially and culturally mixed people who are primarily descended from the intermarriages and sexual relations between European colonist men and primarily Khoikhoi slaves. The Griquas could trace their forefathers to two clans, the Koks and Barendse, the first made up mainly of Khoikhoi and the second of mixed European descent. Genetic studies of the 21st century have shown these people also had Tswana, San, and Xhosa ancestry. Later, the Europeans chose mixed-race women of the Khoikhoi, who were living in the Cape during the 17th and 18th centuries. As time went on, mixed-race people began to marry among themselves, establishing a distinct ethnic group that tended to be more assimilated to Dutch and European ways than tribal peoples in separated villages. During apartheid, the Griqua were called "Coloured" by Europeans (Taylor, 2020). Slavery was practised in the Dutch East India Company-controlled Cape Colony, and the mixed-race groups which developed in the early Cape Colony as a result of white settler interaction with captured Khoe people who began to work around the farms, eventually opted different names for themselves, including Bastards, Basters, Korana, Oorlam or Oorlam Afrikaners, and Griqua. Like the Afrikaners or "Boers" as they were known in that time, many of these groups migrated inland when the British took over the colonial administration. The word "Afrikaner" itself was originally (for over 350 years) used as a description for not white Boers but a mixed-race bastard child. Note that the name Baster and Bastards were not derived from the English word "bastard", but rather the Dutch word meaning "hybrid". It was only around 1876 that a group of Boer intellectuals, who named themselves "The fellowship of real Afrikaners", decided to use the term as a new means to describe the Boer peoples, as part of the project to create a new national identity for pioneer Boer people during the First and Second Boer Wars and for more powerful political legitimacy. This is why today many Afrikaans-speaking white people are still known as Afrikaners, as this message was powerfully conveyed as a national identity during the times of the South African Union (1910-1961) and the apartheid years of the Republic of South Africa. According to the 18th-century Dutch historian Isaak Tirion, the Khoi name Griqua (or Grigriqua) is first recorded in 1730 in reference to a group of people living in the northeastern section of the Cape Colony. In 1813, Reverend John Campbell of the London Missionary Society (LMS) used the term Griqua to describe a mixed-race group of Chariguriqua (a Cape Khoikhoi group), Bastaards, Korana, and Tswana living at the site of present-day Griekwastad (then known as Klaarwater). The British found their "proud name", Bastaards, offensive, so the LMS called them Griqua. The term Bastaards refers to a group of people of mixed origin (Jody, 2021). The actual name was derived from the Chariaguriqua people whose princess became the wife of the first Griqua leader, Adam Kok I (Taylor, 2020). Adam Kok was a liberated slave, who figured out how to acquire burgher rights and a ranch close to the present Piketberg, established the most incredible blended local area. Because of a common ancestor named Griqua and shared links to the Chariguriqua (Grigriqua), the people officially changed their name to the Griqua.