Hottentot is a term that was historically used to refer to the Khoikhoi, the non-Bantu indigenous nomadic pastoralists of South Africa. The term has also been used to refer to the non-Bantu indigenous population as a whole, now collectively known as the Khoisan. Use of the term is now deprecated and considered offensive, the preferred name for the non-Bantu indigenous people of the Western Cape area being Khoi, Khoikhoi, or Khoisan.
Etymology
The term Hottentot originated among the "old Dutch", that is the settlers of the Dutch Cape Colony who arrived in the region in the 1650s, and it entered English usage from Dutch in the seventeenth century. However, no definitive Dutch etymology for the term is known. A widely claimed etymology is from a supposed Dutch expression equivalent to "stammerer, stutterer", applied to the Khoikhoi on account of the distinctive click consonants in their languages. There is, however, no earlier attestation of a wordhottentot to support this theory. An alternative possibility is that the name derived from an overheard term in chants accompanying Khoikhoi or San dances, but seventeenth-century transcriptions of such chants offer no conclusive evidence for this. An early Anglicisation of the term is recorded as hodmandod in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form hotnot has also been borrowed into South African English as an offensive term for black people.
Usage as an ethnic term
In seventeenth-century Dutch, Hottentot was at times used to denote all black people, but at least some speakers were careful to use the term Hottentot to denote what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned Kaffirs. This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by the French anthropologist François Bernier. The idea that Hottentot referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples of southern Africa was well embedded in colonial scholarly thought by the end of the eighteenth century. The main meaning of Hottentot as an ethnic term in the 19th and the 20th centuries has therefore been to denote the Khoikhoi people specifically. However, Hottentot also continued to be used through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in a wider sense, to include all of the people now usually referred to with the modern term Khoisan. In George Murdock's Atlas of World Cultures, he refers to "Hottentots" as a "subfamily of the Khoisan linguistic family" who "became detribalized in contact with Dutch settlers in 1652, mixing with the latter and with slaves brought by them from Indonesia to form the hybrid population known today as the Cape Coloured." The term Hottentot remained in use as a technical ethnic term in anthropological and historiographical literature into the late 1980s. The 1996 edition of the Dictionary of South African English merely says that 'the word "Hottentot" is seen by some as offensive and Khoikhoi is sometimes substituted as a name for the people, particularly in scholarly contexts'. Yet, by the 1980s, because of the racist connotations discussed below, it was increasingly seen as too derogatory and offensive to be used in an ethnic sense.
From the eighteenth century onwards, the term hottentot was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to barbarian or cannibal. In its ethnic sense, it had developed connotations of savagery and primitivism soon already in the seventeenth century: colonial depictions of the Hottentots in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian"; and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus it is possible to speak from the seventeenth century onwards of a European, colonial image of "the Hottentot" which bore little relation to any realities of the Khoisan in Africa, and which fed into the usage of hottentot as a generalised term of abuse. Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for a black person". Use of the derived term hotnot was explicitly proscribed in South Africa by 2008. Accordingly, much recent scholarship on the history of colonial attitudes to the Khoisan, or on the European trope of 'the Hottentot', puts the term Hottentot in scare quotes.
Other usages
In its original role of ethnic designator, the term Hottentot was included into a variety of derived terms, such as the Hottentot Corps, the first Coloured unit to be formed in the South African army, originally called the Corps Bastaard Hottentoten, organised in 1781 by the Dutch colonial administration of the time. The word is also used in the common names of a wide variety of plants and animals, such as the Africanis dogs sometimes called 'Hottentot hunting dogs'; the fish Pachymetopon blochii, frequently simply called hottentots; Carpobrotus edulis, commonly known as a 'hottentot-fig'; and Trachyandra, commonly known as 'hottentot cabbage'. It has also given rise to the scientific name for one genus of scorpion, Hottentotta, and may be the origin of the epithet tottum in the botanical name Leucospermum tottum. The word is still used as part of a tongue-twister in modern Dutch, "Hottentottententententoonstelling", meaning a 'Hottentot tent exhibition'.
