It was not until the end of apartheid that steps were taken to return

It was not until the end of apartheid that steps were taken to return her remains to South Africa. The women, in particular, were deemed to have an almost animalistic sexual appeal. Colonial records show that at least two Khoekhoen women, including most famously Saartjie Baartman, were taken to Europe in the early 19th century and displayed as part of a bizarre and demeaning exhibition called “The Hottentot Venus”.Ms Baartman was told she was travelling to Europe to find fame and fortune, but it soon became clear that she was taking part in nothing more than a human freak show for the entertainment of Europe’s chattering classes.After her death in 1815, Baartman’s body was put on display in a Paris museum and only removed in 1976. Monsters include the Aigamuxa, a man-eating creature with blazing eyes on the instep of its feet.But it was the appearance of the Khoekhoen themselves which most intrigued colonialists. Their most powerful deity, Gaunab, the god of the sky, is thought to kill people by shooting arrows from his seat in the stars. From the first encounter, the ‘Hottentot’ embodied a kind of society so different from Western patterns that they threatened the West’s conception of its own status as the very embodiment of a universal ‘humanness’.”To the eyes of the white settlers, the Khoekhoen were like no human beings they had ever encountered, a mystique that was compounded by the vast array of gods and monsters that formed part of their beliefs. According to Professor Nicholas Hudson, a historian at the University of British Columbia in Canada, the Khoekhoen became the “most vilified people on Earth”.”They were seen as the least civilised and brutish example of the human species, indeed barely human,” said Professor Hudson “I think that’s because they stirred fears in Westerners.

It swiftly became simply a disparaging term for anyone who was black and living in the Cape. Gradually, they lost more and more of their grazing lands.Droughts combined with cattle disease caused further problems, and when a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1713, decimating their numbers, their way of life came to an end.The word “Hottentot” is derived from the Dutch word for stutterer. In 1659, both sides fought over grazing land and the Khoekhoen lost.As the Dutch expanded throughout southern Africa, many of the Khoekhoen ended up as slaves, working on farms or in the Cape Colony. Who then, with the greatest degree of justice, should give way? The natural owners or the foreign invaders?” But the natural owners were forced to give way. According to van Riebeck, they said: “You get many cattle, you come and occupy our pasture with them, and then say the land is not wide enough for us both. Jan van Riebeck, the explorer who led the first Dutch settlement, is quoted in Kevin Shillington’s History of Africa, describing how the Khoekhoen objected to the colonialists’ desire for land.

Whenever they came across other tribes, the only conflict arose from stealing the other group’s cattle and protecting their own.They lived relatively peacefully until the mid-17th century and the arrival of the first white Dutch colonialists in 1652, who set to work building a more permanent base on the Cape, establishing the Dutch East India Company.The Khoekhoen needed a large amount of land on which to graze their cattle, but the Dutch refused to recognise their rights. While the Khoekheon were herders, the San branch were hunter gatherers. Roaming the Cape with their herds of cattle, the Khoekhoen lifestyle rarely came under threat. But it still leaves much of the land that once belonged to the pastoralist Khoekhoen out of reach. For tens of thousands of years, the Khoekhoen, also known as the Khoi Khoi, lived a nomadic existence in the Cape region of what is now South Africa.Meaning “men of men” or “people people”, the Khoekhoen were part of a larger group spread across southern Africa, called the Khoisan. Later this month, the South African government is set to announce a multi-billion rand compensation deal and the return of land the South African courts have deemed was stolen under racist mineral-rights laws in the 1920s.About 4,000 members of the Richtersveld community in the north-west corner of South Africa sued for 2.5bn rand in damages last year after the Constitutional Court ruled in 2003 that state diamond group Alexkor was mining on their land.The victory ends an eight-year legal battle. Many were even brought to Europe during the 19th century to be paraded naked for the entertainment of the London and Paris elites.They have suffered 350 years of shame and degradation, but, at last, the descendants of the first people to meet southern Africa’s white settlers may be able to return to the land that was once theirs.

The pastoral peace which they cultivated for generations was shattered. Much of the tribe died out; those who remained were forced into poorly paid manual work. Not even their name would remain; rather they were dubbed “Hottentots” by the Dutch – a pejorative term loaded with the derision with which they were viewed.
As a people, the Khoekhoen were ridiculed as a collection of backward curiosities. Almost everything the tribe had established over the previous 30,000 years was gradually taken away from them. The land they had roamed for centuries was taken over by white settlers. The Western colonialists were going to be a permanent fixture of the landscape – and they would change the lives of its indigenous people forever.

From the moment they encountered the Dutch Afrikaaners in 1652, the nomadic Khoekhoen realised these visitors were not like anyone they had encountered before. They are South Africa’s first people, but since the first Europeans set foot on their soil, they have always been last in line. Later, scientists started to use silver iodide because it was more effective than dry ice.. The right clouds are needed for cloud seeding to work.The earliest attempts at cloud seeding involved dropping pellets of crushed dry ice, or carbon dioxide, into the top of a cloud. The process involves injecting particles into a cloud, which act as freezing nuclei.