Juliet’s rhetorical question to Romeo in the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s play is one of the Bard’s most quoted and abused lines of poetry. She may be a Capulet and he a Montague, but she loves him nonetheless.
A sage contributor invoked this line in a recent discussion around news that the proposal to rename two birds found in South Africa – the Hottentot Teal and the Hottentot Buttonquail – had been approved by the naming committee of BirdLife South Africa and the International Ornithological Congress (IOC). The new names appear in IOC version 11.1, which was published in January 2021. And while it is true that what we now call a Bluebilled Teal would be as beautiful by any other name, it is also true that there is, in fact, a lot in a name.
For some birders, the change of names represents nothing more than political correctness run wild, a vain project of ‘verbal cleansing’ by leftist intellectuals, to quote conservative writer Thomas Sowell.
The simple truth, however, is that the word ‘Hottentot’ is offensive and always was. Intentionally so. It was a term coined by Dutch settlers that mimicked the rhythms and sounds of indigenous language families such as Khoe, Kx’a and Tuu. The settlers’ inability to understand the languages meant they were, to European ears, not languages at all but rather the mere ‘clucking of turkeys’. And so ‘Hottentot’ became a term of indiscriminate dismissal of a number of distinct indigenous cultures. In a widely circulated mail on the topic, Professor Adrian Koopman has provided a dense overview of the origins of the word ‘Hottentot’ and its use in bird guides of the 20th century in particular.
Denne historien er fra March/April 2021-utgaven av African Birdlife.
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Denne historien er fra March/April 2021-utgaven av African Birdlife.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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EXPLORING NEW HORIZONS
Keith Barnes, co-author of the new Field Guide to Birds of Greater Southern Africa, chats about the long-neglected birding regions just north of the Kunene and Zambezi, getting back to watching birds and the vulture that changed his life.
footloose IN FYNBOS
The Walker Bay Diversity Trail is a leisurely hike with a multitude of flowers, feathers and flavours along the way.
Living forwards
How photographing birds helps me face adversity
CAPE crusade
The Cape Bird Club/City of Cape Town Birding Big Year Challenge
water & WINGS
WATER IS LIFE. As wildlife photographer Greg du Toit knows better than most.
winter wanderer
as summer becomes a memory in the south, the skies are a little quieter as the migrants have returned to the warming north. But one bird endemic to the southern African region takes its own little winter journey.
when perfect isn't enough
Egg signatures and forgeries in the cuckoo-drongo arms race
Southern SIGHTINGS
The late summer period naturally started quietening down after the midsummer excitement, but there were still some classy rarities on offer for birders all over the subregion. As always, none of the records included here have been adjudicated by any of the subregion's Rarities Committees.
flood impact on wetland birds
One of the features of a warming planet is increasingly erratic rainfall; years of drought followed by devastating floods. Fortunately, many waterbirds are pre-adapted to cope with such extremes, especially in southern Africa where they have evolved to exploit episodic rainfall events in semi-arid and arid regions. But how do waterbirds respond to floods in areas where rainfall - and access to water - is more predictable? Peter Ryan explores the consequences of recent floods on the birds of the Western Cape's Olifants River valley.
a star is born
It’s every producer’s dream to plan a wildlife television series and pick the right characters before filming.
