Portrait of a Khoikhoi man ('Gonah Hottentot'), 1820

Samuel Daniell (1775 - 1811)

RA Collection: Art

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This image depicts a Khoikhoi (or Khoekhoe) man; the Khoekhoen are a non-Bantu speaking indigenous nomadic group located in modern-day South Africa. He wears a jackal’s fur and ears as a headdress, a token of his achievement of a successful hunt.

This etching is an illustration from a book called Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa (1820), originally drawn by Samuel Daniell and published posthumously by his brother William Daniell RA. The book was part of a British colonial tradition of ethnographic research and demonstrates deep inherent racial prejudice, seeking to categorise indigenous groups into a Western-imposed knowledge structure. Samuel Daniell based this drawing on his encounters with indigenous people when he travelled to South Africa between 1799 and 1802. This expedition was only possible due to colonisation of the land and peoples by Dutch and British forces.

The illustration includes the caption ‘Gonah Hottentot’. ‘Hottentot’ historically referred to the Khoekhoe people, and the word ‘Gonah’ may refer to the specific tribe he belonged to within the Khoekhoe group. Today ‘Hottentot’ is an offensive and derogatory term in the English language. When this illustration was published, the term was used by colonialists to identify this specific ethnic group, but throughout the 18th and 19th centuries it became increasingly pejorative and took on connotations of violence and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour. Even in the context of the 19th century, the labelling of indigenous people according to Western groupings was a form of colonial control that homogenised complex and varied cultures present among the populations of southern Africa.