Who Writes the Caption? Skinjo and Lacuna on Khoekhoe Naming

The evening lamp catches the edge of a printout. Skinjo holds it by the margin, leaving the old colonial caption visible between the two chairs.

Skinjo: “The caption calls the people pictured ‘Hottentot.’ We no longer use that label. Where did it come from—and what changes when we replace it?”

Lacuna: “It came into European usage through Dutch colonial encounters in southern Africa in the seventeenth century. It is generally explained as a mocking imitation of speech Europeans heard, especially the click sounds in Khoekhoe languages. The exact derivation is disputed, so we should not present one neat origin story as settled. But the contempt attached to its use is not a minor uncertainty.”

Skinjo looks from the caption to the image.

Skinjo: “A listener fails to understand a language and makes the failure someone else’s name.”

Lacuna: “Yes. European writers applied the label to the Khoekhoe, Indigenous pastoralist peoples of southern Africa, including the Western Cape. It then circulated through travel accounts, official records, pictures and caricatures. Repetition gave an outsider’s label the appearance of an objective classification.”

Skinjo: “A caption can look very modest. A few words beneath a picture. Yet it tells you what you are supposed to see.”

Lacuna: “And whose account you are supposed to trust. The people become a category supplied by the observer, rather than people with names, languages and political lives of their own. The term is now considered offensive because that degrading colonial history is part of its meaning—not simply because an old word has gone out of fashion.”

Skinjo lowers the sheet to the table.

Skinjo: “So why Khoekhoe?”

Lacuna: “It is a name from the people’s own language, often translated as ‘people of people’ or ‘real people.’ You will also encounter the spelling Khoikhoi. Using Khoekhoe moves away from a mocking name imposed from outside. It does not mean every community is interchangeable, or that one broad name replaces the need to learn a particular community’s preferred identification.”

Skinjo: “What would you do with this caption? Erase it?”

Lacuna: “Keep the historical wording available as evidence, with an explanation of its offensive use. But distinguish that quotation from the words we use ourselves. A present-day description can identify the people as Khoekhoe where the evidence supports that identification. If the old caption is our only evidence, we should say what remains uncertain. Correcting a label is not permission to invent certainty.”

Skinjo: “Leave the record legible. Stop letting it write the next caption.”

Lacuna: “Exactly. Preservation need not mean endorsement. And respectful naming is a beginning, not a claim that the damage is repaired.”

Under the lamp, the printed words remain unchanged. What has changed is their authority: the caption is now something to question, not an instruction for seeing.