A San woman ('Bosjesman'), 1820

Samuel Daniell (1775 - 1811)

RA Collection: Art

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This image depicts a woman from the San indigenous group of hunter-gatherers, one of the oldest cultures in southern Africa. Her attire is highly decorative, and she wears bracelets, anklets and necklaces adorned with beads and fragments of ostrich shell.



This etching is an illustration from a book titled 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 word ‘Bosjesman’ in the caption is a term imposed by the Dutch colonialists of southern Africa, meaning ‘outlaw’ or ‘bandit’. This was in reference to the San resistance to colonial control and violence. The word ‘Bosjesman’ became widely used by British and Dutch colonialists to refer to the San people and is the root of the outdated English term ‘Bushmen’. In the 19th century, the labelling of indigenous people according to Western groupings was a form of colonial control which sought to homogenise the complex and varied cultures present among the populations of southern Africa.