A tale of two Sans

Correspondent | Friday January 24, 2014 15:41

 

Long before the dark-skinned Bantu people arrived in the southern part of Africa, an ancient race of light-skinned people ruled the fertile lands of the south. They were skilled hunter-gatherers with little disposition for agriculture.

 As Bantu people encroached into their area and took over all the fertile land, most of them were displaced to the less fertile semi-desert areas where, for centuries, clad in minimalist animal skins and simple dwellings of sticks and grass, they eked out a harsh but relatively simple existence in the Great Thirst-land – the Kgala-gadi.

They are now known as the San, or Basarwa.

 The name ‘Bushmen’ – by which they are commonly known in Europe – is now considered derogatory in Botswana as it ostensibly stereotypes them as ‘primitive’.

Elsewhere – a world away from Africa – a fiercely proud civilisation blossomed in a fertile archipelago of islands in the Orient, not far from China. These were the Japanese.

Theirs was a sophisticated civilisation of ornate buildings and lavish dress. Shoguns (warlords) ruled along with their Samurai elite in an essentially feudal system where the practice of martial arts was highly regarded – as was one’s sense of honour.

What could possibly unite such a different people other than the obvious matter of their complexion which is loosely termed as “yellow”?

Is there more to these seemingly disparate races – one Negroid and the other Asiatic – than meets the casual eye?

This, actually, is what I found. My findings, at this stage, are exciting but rudimentary and more research needs to be conducted along the lines I have uncovered.

Nevertheless, I will share with the reader the few fascinating pointers I have so far unearthed – a tale of two Sans who may indeed be sons of a common, ancient ancestor.

Let me begin with the fundamental premise of genetic relationship. It is acknowledged that the San have the greatest (and thus presumably the oldest) genetic diversity in the world and they are grouped under the primary Y-DNA Haplogroup A – which is distinct from Negroid races (Haplogroup K).

The Japanese and other Mongoloid race are grouped under Haplogroup D which is believed to have emerged from Africa.

The San also have other features similar to Mongoloids such as shovel-shaped incisors and many newborns have ‘Mongoloid spots’ at the base of the spine (source: Metapedia).

It is basically the Mongoloid features and ‘yellow’ skin that provide the physical evidence of a relation between the San and certain Oriental groups.

 However, rather than associating the San people of southern Africa with Oriental people in general, I will concentrate on certain specific factors that directly link them with the Japanese people.

The first thing to note is the strange ‘coincidence’ that these two people happen to share one distinctive name: San.

Japan is one of the most homogeneous of nations in the world, with a common and distinctive culture throughout the country.

There, it is not polite to address another by name only, without adding the appendage ‘San’.

Thus, for example, Matsuo (which by the way, is a proper Japanese name but also uncannily similar to Matsue, a herd-man of San extraction who worked for my brother-in law) is not just ‘Matsuo’: he is more politely called ‘Matsuo-San’.

Quite evidently, the name ‘San’ was a name synonymous with respect, whose etymology – if it can be properly traced – may speak volumes; perhaps even unearth a long-lost history. Only time – and a little more research – will tell.

If there is to be a clincher for this seemingly unlikely association of two very different ‘San’ people, it would have to be language.

I indeed have a very interesting story to tell in that regard.

Or rather, it was my own sister who had an interesting story to tell which I never forgot. When she was doing her Tirelo Sechaba (National Service) in the west of Botswana, she obviously had some contact with Basarwa as the west of Botswana is dominated by the Kgalagadi Desert.

It came to her attention that a Japanese Peace-Corp volunteer was traumatised when he came to discover that he could actually follow a conversation between two Basarwa!

Naturally, this came as a rude shock to him because he could never have imagined that he shared a long-lost link with this largely disadvantaged group living in some of the harshest conditions in Botswana.

Quite evidently, all the Japanese volunteer had to do was to filter out the many clicks and perhaps substitute them with another utterance now more common in Japanese.

Indeed, the frequent use of clicks is what makes the Khoi-San language so distinct.

Later, of course, these clicks found their way into the Nguni and Sotho languages, and the pattern by which this occurred is quite discernible.

Logically, the further south a Bantu tribe is to be found, the likelier it is that the group arrived earlier in the south of Africa.

This is of course a ‘rule of thumb’, not a direct correlation: obviously many other factors could easily upset this basic expectation, e.g. wars and displacement, the perennial hunt for greener pastures, etc.

But, the fact that Bantu languages that use clicks are to be found further south may validate my hypothesis that such groups arrived earlier and therefore associated with the Khoi-San for a longer period – eventually incorporating their distinctive clicks.

This was evidently facilitated by the widespread proclivity of Bantu men towards marrying or having children with San women – who were deemed attractive because of their light complexion.   And since mothers generally spend more time raising children, the influence of San women on the language of the growing child cannot be underestimated.

 The adoption of clicks by the Khoi-San people is itself a linguistic mystery. It however becomes more interesting when stories exist of a marked similarity with the Japanese language.

 This would suggest either that the clicks evolved much later – after a pre-historical separation between the two peoples – or that it was the Japanese language that eventually moved away from the clicks.

We cannot, in the absence of further research, tell at this point which of the two scenarios is true.

This brings us to the next important point. If indeed genetics, language and the defining term ‘San’ all point to a common ancestor of the two peoples, what could have caused their ancient separation?

Two main scenarios emerge from this question.

I will call my first theory ‘The Lost Seafarers Theory’.

In this scenario, way back in time – perhaps six or seven thousand years ago – a contingent of Japanese sailors may have been caught up in a storm while venturing out to trade or explore in what is now the Indian Ocean.

Whatever the case, they found themselves stranded in the southern part of Africa and had no choice but to adapt to their new situation – eventually mingling with the Negroid races.

This is the easier and less problematic theory.

My second theory is the ‘Pangaea Separation Theory’. It is more complex but just as compelling.

In this scenario, China and Japan (both part of the so-called Indian Plate) were once adjoined to Africa, perhaps even southern Africa, before the Earth’s tectonic plates separated into the continents we see today.

My contention (which is in line with an emerging ‘alternative history’ findings) is that the separation – if not necessarily the fracturing – of these continental plates must have been, at one point in time, violent and sudden. I will provide more evidence of this below.

The evident effect of this sudden separation would be to dramatically divide whole races and populations – if these population groups happen to straddle the fracture.

The Yellow People, according to my second theory, are very likely candidates for such a scenario.

In this scenario, the African branch of the Yellow People remained with continental Africa, and the Indian Plate section went with it as it violently crashed into Asia, creating the Himalaya Mountains.

This left the two peoples to ‘evolve’ separately through increased interaction with others.

Naturally, for my second theory to be more credible, I need to provide evidence of why this separation may have occurred not millions of years ago as conventional science teaches us, but less than 12,000 thousand years ago.

Firstly, there is hard geological evidence that the last Ice Age – which ended about 12,000 years ago – ended catastrophically with the mass extinction of many species of plant and animal.

The catastrophe marked the end of the Pleistocene epoch and the beginning of our present Holocene epoch.

What showed that this catastrophe was sudden and violent is the fact that wooly mammoths (which were elephant-like but larger) died out suddenly when a bright summer day suddenly changed to a winter of sub-zero temperatures.

Many of them were found with fresh buttercups in their mouths and stomachs, which plants grow only in summer.

Only a sudden and massive shift in latitude could account for this.

Buttercups only grow in temperate latitudes; they do not grow in the polar latitudes in which the mammoths’ bodies were found.

Moreover, the meat of these animals was still edible after 11,000 years and for this to happen it must have frozen suddenly in sub-zero temperatures because even at around zero degrees Celsius meat will quickly spoil due to certain factors that disrupt the structure of the cells.

Scientists also have no explanation for how fossilised palm trees (which grow in tropical areas) can be found in Spitzbergen in the Arctic Circle which sees no sunlight for much of the year.

In the south, coal deposits are to be found in Antarctica – a place where nothing grows any longer – and coal comes from trees.

Indeed, ancient maps (even the famous Piri Reis map compiled in AD 1513 from several other maps including, evidently, far more ancient ones) show geological features that were ‘unknown’ until lately: features such as the coastline of Antarctica (now permanently covered in thick ice) – which confirms that it moved from a more temperate latitude – and the fact that Greenland is actually made up of two separate islands joined by an ice-cap. 

Many of these maps once populated the ill-fated Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt which was burnt down in two major campaigns and its documents looted or destroyed for plainly religious purposes.

As revealed in my books (please visit http://pitoronet.com) the campaign to obfuscate and debunk anything that departs from a certain approved view of history is still underway and in my books I take time to rebut such debunking on the basis of facts.

A last factor to consider is that major language differences tend to evolve slowly over time.

Given this, if Japanese and San languages indeed exhibit strong similarity, the date of their separation cannot be many tens of thousands of years old.

So, whether one supports the first or second theory – or none of them – the fact is that we do not have to look very far back to come to a time when these people were one. This brings me to another major point.

During the course of my research into the primordial roots of mankind (and more specifically of the Sotho-Tswana group), I came to the realisation that there is a still-discernible protolanguage that we once all spoke – even as recently as the so-called Neolithic era (which ended about six to eight thousand years ago with the sudden emergence of sophisticated cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt).

I outlined distinctive signs of this protolanguage in a recent article published in Mmegi of Friday 6th December, 2013, using extracts from my still-expanding already 300+ word Dictionary of Protolanguage Terms.

I also confirmed that Sotho-Tswana features strongly in this protolanguage and showed in a second article published in Mmegi of Friday 13th December, 2013, that it sounds and means much like Sumerian, arguably the oldest written language.

My contention, therefore, is that the Japanese and San languages are not exempt from this discernible protolanguage and I will proceed to demonstrate this using Japanese.

Tsu in Setswana means ‘pointed’ or ‘sharp’, as in mo-tsu. It also means a fold or wrinkle as in tsu-tusu-bana.

Thus, tsu-fala (become old) literally means “become wrinkled’ - hence the tsu (‘old man’) in the Chinese term ‘Lao-Tzu’.  Tsu-nami is thus a ‘wrinkle’ of the sea (a giant wave) that spreads out (nama in Sotho-Tswana) into the land.

A well-used Japanese greeting between businessmen is “mokka-mokai’” which supposedly means “are you making money?”

In Setswana this would be mooka (a ‘cream’ or ‘attractant’: thus ‘money’) mo-kae? (where is it?) Naturally, over time, the exact grammar will have changed somewhat.

Sotho-Tswana is a Bantu language and the name ‘ntu’ was also a Sumerian name for the ‘gods’. As it also means ‘house’ in most Bantu languages, we can discern that the body, a person, was literally seen as a house for the Spirit (Life).

Thus, the Japanese term Shinto is literally se-ntu: ‘the way of the gods’ (but, as my ‘alternative history’ research has shown, it also means ‘humane way’). 

The Egyptian term for ‘Spirit’ was khu – literally the ‘Great One’. The Akhus (gods) of Egypt (Ma-Akhu: now, , Makgoa) were thus the ‘Great Ones’. 

Khu is the evident root of kgolo and of the Sotho word mo-khu (School Principal) – and also of “a-ccu” (which means: ‘is khu-like’), as in ‘accumulate’ (make a great collection) as well as akgola and accolade (the magnifying [of] someone). As such, Kho-i-khoi (the name of the people who merged with the San to create the Khoi-San ethnic group) could also mean ‘Great of the Greats’ rather than just ‘Men of Men’.

In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear that we are all bound together by a little known and mysterious past – a past I am still unearthing but whose major pieces have now fallen well into place.

*L.M. Leteane is an independent researcher, author and columnist.