With a Foreword by Prof. Asbjørn Eide, a former Chairman of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Chairman of the UN Working Group on Minorities, President of the Advisory Committee on National Minorities of the Council of Europe Following the internationalization of the indigenous rights movement, a growing number of African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and other communities have channelled their claims for special legal protection through the global indigenous rights movement. Their claims as the indigenous peoples of Africa are backed by many (international) actors such as indigenous rights activists, donors and some academia. However, indigenous identification is contested by many African governments, some members of non-claimant communities and a number of anthropologists who have extensively interacted with claimant indigenous groups. This book explores the sources as well as the legal and political implications of indigenous identification in Africa. By highlighting the quasi-inexistence of systematic and discursive – rather than activist – studies on the subject-matter, the analysis questions the appropriateness of this framework in efforts aimed at empowering claimant communities in inherently multiethnic African countries. The book navigates between various disciplines in trying to better capture the phenomenon of indigenous rights advocacy in Africa. The book is valuable reading for academics in law and all (other) social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, as well as for economists. It is also a useful tool for policy-makers, legal practitioners, indigenous rights activists, and a wide range of NGOs. Dr. Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda is Associate Professor at the International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

A comprehensive and fascinating account of all the major groups of southern African hunter-gatherers.

The San or Bushmen of southern Africa have exerted a fascination over generations of writers and scholars, from novelists and anarchists to ethnologists and geneticists, and also occupy a special place in the popular imagination as the First People and the contemporary remnant of spiritual and natural man. The ways in which particular groups of people from southern Africa have been traditionally categorised and positioned as objects of scrutiny by a range of academic disciplines is increasingly being contested and questioned. There is a growing awareness of the cultural, economic and genetic entanglement of the peoples of the region. This book examines how San and Khoe people are represented, by others, as well as by those who identify as San or Khoe. The book interrogates the ways in which disciplines, through their methodologies and ways of authorising knowledge, not only "discover" or "reveal" knowledge but produce it in ways that involve complex and often ambiguous relationships with power structures and forms of intellectual, symbolic and cultural capital. One major trend that emerges is that the San and Khoe can no longer be seen as people of the past but have to be acknowledged as contemporary and socially situated individuals and communities who are increasingly contesting the representations which others have imposed on them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies.

Drawing on various disciplines and case studies from several corners of the world, this volume offers insights about the breadth and complexity of the (inter)relation between the socio-economic partcipation of minorities and their right to (respect for) identity.