The Original Wound: When the Land Screamed and the Lie Was Born
Gillian Schutte explores the enduring impact of colonialism in South Africa, where the myth of an empty land has perpetuated systemic injustices.
Image: IOL
The wound has never healed. Because the wound is still being inflicted. Daily. Systemically. Spiritually. It is layered in bureaucratic denial, wrapped in legal delay, and dressed with the poison of myth. A wound so vast and ancient, it swallows generations whole. And it began with a lie — that this land was empty.
That lie remains the cornerstone of South Africa's settler-colonial cosmology. The claim that Europeans found uninhabited land or a sparsely populated wilderness is the perversion that justifies every act of theft, every severing of spirit, every white hand gripping a title deed soaked in ancestral blood.
Never a misunderstanding, it was a psychological operation. A strategy. A theological inversion. A deliberate severing of people from place so that settlers could root themselves where they never belonged.
They arrived — Dutch, German, French Huguenot — not as a people called Afrikaner, but as fragmented emissaries of empire. Over time, forged in the violence of dispossession, they became something else: a racial caste defined by land hunger, myth-making, Calvinist entitlement and a haunting spiritual arrogance.
The lands they claimed were not empty. They were alive with cosmologies. The Khoekhoen, the !Xam, and the ǁKhu||ʼein had lived here since before the idea of Europe was ever whispered into being. They walked in sacred relationship with the soil, naming the stars, telling time with fire and birdcall, living in cyclical intimacy with drought and rain. Their rock art was was archive. Their breath gave shape to the world.
The other Indigenous nations — amaXhosa, amaMpondo, amaZulu, BaPedi, BaTswana, Vhavenda, BaTsonga — rooted their sovereignty in land, kinship, and memory. The land was home. The land was structure. The land was law. What the colonisers called wilderness was in fact woven knowledge. What they named absence was sacred order.
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The Curse of the Empty Land
To dispossess is one form of violence. To then say you never belonged is a deeper crime. And this has always been the foundational cruelty: to take the land and declare that those who resisted were squatters in their own cosmos.
This is the original wound — not just loss of territory, but loss of a way of being. The shattering of the self. The coloniser did not simply occupy. He re-authored. He renamed. He rerouted ancestral lineages, erased memory, desecrated graves, mocked rituals, silenced languages, and replaced all of it with a violent monologue: God gave this to us. We are the chosen ones.
To this day, the wound speaks through the silence around the Khoekhoen and the !Xam. It weeps through unmarked graves, through unpaid labour, through townships built over the bones of the displaced. Spaces the beget mote bones crushed under the weight of dispossession.
The myth that this was unoccupied land allowed white South Africans to pretend they were pioneers, not predators. It turned genocide into heritage. It turned theft into entitlement. It turned sacred ground into farmland, fenced off estates and golf courses.
It turned presence into ghosthood.
The Weaponised Lie of Mfecane
There are those who will invoke Mfecane — the great scattering — as proof that African societies were in violent flux when settlers arrived. But the truth is far more complex. Much of what was recorded as tribal skirmish and internecine slaughter was seeded by colonial manipulation, gun-running, slave raiding, and territorial provocation.
The settler narrative of African barbarism is projection — a mirror turned outward. Where colonisers found complex political life, they planted chaos. Where there were alliances, they drew borders. Where there was peace, they sowed fear. The myth of the savage justified the civiliser.
The scorched earth tactics that razed Indigenous economies, slaughtered livestock, destroyed food systems, and led to the starvation of entire peoples were not the consequence of African violence, but the strategy of white conquest. The British, the Boers — both engaged in calculated devastation. The heads of kings were taken as trophies. Cattle seized. Children abducted. Dignity obliterated. And to this day, the land carries that burn mark.
A Trauma Soaked Into the Soul
The wound is not historical. It is haemorrhaging now. It pulses in the psyche of Black South Africans, in the grief of generations uprooted, in the rage of communities forced to beg for scraps of what was once sacred inheritance.
The wound is spiritual. It is the feeling of ancestral silence. It is the scream beneath the skin of a dispossessed people. It is the splitting of self from land, self from ceremony, self from self.
Children born into this wound carry its pain unconsciously. It whispers to them that they are unworthy, stateless, transient, voiceless. It creates an internal war — and this war manifests as interpersonal violence, intergenerational trauma, cultural amnesia, fractured identity, and sometimes, self-hatred. When land is stolen, so is coherence.
To be cut off from ancestral ground is to be severed from the spiritual umbilicus of time.
Reparations Will Never Be Enough
Reparations are necessary. Restitution is long overdue. Land must be returned. But what reparation can name up to the magnitude of this genocide? What payment unburdens the soul of the!Xam? What currency returns a people to their graves, their language, their seasons? What treaty can unmake the silence?
This is not a call for reform. This is a call for reversal. The entire power structure imposed by settler rule must fall. Because white rule continues, in courts, in banks, in the economy, in the legal fictions that govern land access, in gated communities that exist atop massacre sites.
The original dispossessors hold the keys still. They live in the houses built from bones. They sip wine in valleys whose names they cannot pronounce. They hoard the memory. They police the language. They decide the pace of reconciliation while sitting atop its spoils.
This is not democracy. This is the management of a wound by those who inflicted it.
The Land Is the Memory
Reclaiming land is not only about territory. It is about memory. It is about voice. It is about the restoration of a people's way of being in the world — the right to exist fully in relation to place, spirit, and ancestry.
This is why the land issue cannot be reduced to reformist policy. It is cosmic. It is ancestral. It is revolutionary. The memory of the land must be ceased back. Not leased, not negotiated — ceased back into the hands of those it birthed, fed, and buried.
There can be no freedom while white hands hold the soil. There can be no peace while the original nations — Khoekhoen, !Xam, ǁKhu||ʼein, amaXhosa, amaZulu, and others — remain spectral in their own territories.
The land must breathe again in its rightful names. The ceremonies must return. The ancestors must be welcomed home. The resources must be owned and development must be rooted in African Knowledge and on African terms. Afrofuturism is not going back to animism. It is the merging of African cosmologies into a type of Wakandian advancement. Outside of the clutches of European restrictive enlightenment diktats.
The wound must be addressed from within the psyche, not just the courts. It must be acknowledged in the language of spirit. It must be cleansed in the fire of truth.
The Land Remembers
The land is not mute. It remembers. The trees remember. They whisper these truths. The rivers remember. They sing They sing past joys. The earth, still stained with the blood of ancestors, remembers.
It remembers the footprints of the ǁKhu||ʼein. The kraals of the Khoekhoen. The songs of the amaXhosa. The chants of resistance. The rainmaking. The funerals. The betrayal. The theft.
The land remembers what the settlers erased. And it waits.
Until that lie — the empty land lie — is publicly buried, until the sacred is returned to those from whom it was stolen, until the ruling order crumbles and a new breath rises from ancestral memory, the wound will not heal.
The land cries out for truth.
Let the primordial scream be heard.
About the Author
Long before she married her Xhosa life partner, Sipho Singiswa, Gillian Schutte was a fierce critic of whiteness — not as colour, but as structure.
When she entered Sipho's family, she was cut from the Schutte genealogy and told she was never born. She accepted that erasure as a political and spiritual severance. She writes from this rupture — exposing settler lies, reclaiming memory, and refusing complicity.
This essay is part of that refusal.
Her film, Chasing the Ancestors, made in 2005, is a literal road trip taken by Gillian, Sipho and 5 year old Kai in search of the intersections between her Dutch and Sipho's Xhosa history in the Eastern Cape and Karoo in the 1700s.
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