Claiming Place Through Visual Sovereignty—Articulations of Khoisan Belonging in Contemporary Cape Town

Abstract

This article explores the reclamation of Khoisan identities in South Africa as a multifaceted process of cultural, spatial, and political resurgence. Framed within the country’s constitutional vision of a “Nation of Nations,” the research examines how Khoisan communities—historically marginalised and classified under apartheid as “Coloured”—are reasserting their Indigenous heritage through acts of cultural revival and place-based activism. Centred on Cape Town, the ancestral homeland and symbolic epicentre of both colonial encounter and Indigenous resurgence, the article theoretically investigates how creativity, heritage, and activism intersect in processes of reimagining, renaming, and retaking of place. Drawing on theories of visual sovereignty and re-placement, it analyses how visual and performative practices—ranging from protest art and language revitalisation to heritage occupations—function as decolonial acts that reclaim both the image and meaning of place. The article situates the Khoisan revival within broader global movements of Indigenous self-representation and argues that reclaiming place constitutes a living form of sovereignty, restoring relational networks between people, land, and identity. Ultimately, it demonstrates that contemporary Khoisan activism transforms visibility into agency, using culture and creativity as tools to rewrite belonging and to decolonise South Africa’s cultural landscape.

1. Introduction

The reclamation of Indigenous identity and heritage in South Africa has become a vital dimension of the nation’s ongoing decolonial project. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa’s Constitution has framed the nation as a “Nation of Nations,” committed to cultural recognition, restitution, and redress. Within this pluralistic, but utopic, ideal, the Khoisan peoples—South Africa’s first inhabitants—occupy a uniquely complex position. Once rendered invisible through colonial dispossession and apartheid’s racial classifications, many people previously identified as “Coloured” are now reasserting Indigenous roots and reclaiming Khoisan identities. This movement is not a nostalgic return but a contemporary act of re-placing—a reimagining, renaming, and retaking of land, culture, and heritage suppressed for centuries.

In global scholarship, the intersections of Indigeneity, place, and visual sovereignty have become important frameworks for analysing how Indigenous peoples resist colonial erasure. Alfred and Corntassel (2005) define Indigeneity as an identity rooted in place-based struggle against colonial domination. Coulthard (2010) contrasts Indigenous spatial worldviews with Western temporal frameworks, positioning land as a living relational field rather than a commodity. Similarly, Larsen and Johnson (2012) describe Indigenous landscapes as storyscapes—cosmological and social terrains resonant with memory and identity. Barker and Pickerill (2012) conceptualise “re-placement” as both a political and cultural process of decolonial restoration. Yet, in the South African context, tensions persist: some scholars question whether revivalist movements risk romanticising or essentialising Indigenous identity (De Wet 2006; Jansen 2019), while others argue that such processes enact living, evolving forms of cultural sovereignty.

This investigation positions Cape Town as the epicentre of Khoisan cultural revival and place activism. As the site of both colonial origin and ancestral homeland, the city embodies the paradox of dispossession and resurgence. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of visual sovereignty (Blalock et al. 2015; Tsinhnahjinnie 1998; Brigido-Corachan 2017), the article examines how Khoisan creatives, activists, and heritage practitioners mobilise visual and performative practices—murals, ceremonies, digital imagery, language revitalisation, and occupation—to assert Indigenous presence and reclaim meaning in contested spaces.

Ultimately, this article argues that Khoisan activism transforms acts of cultural expression into decolonial strategies of visual and spatial sovereignty. Through imagining, naming, and taking place, Khoisan people are not only reconstructing heritage but reshaping the very cultural geography of post-apartheid South Africa. The principal conclusion underscores that reclaiming place is inseparable from reclaiming identity—it is both a political act and an artistic affirmation of survival and belonging.

2. Theoretical Positionality

This article is written from the positionality of a white South African scholar working within the fields of heritage, place-making, and visual culture. It emerges from a sustained academic and personal interest in the intersections of culture, power, representation, and land in Cape Town, a city profoundly shaped by colonialism and apartheid. My engagement with Khoisan cultural activism is therefore not grounded in lived Indigenous experience, but in a critical examination of how heritage practices operate within unequal socio-political contexts, and how these practices are challenged, reworked, and expanded by Khoisan actors themselves.

I approach Khoisan cultural activism as a site of knowledge production rather than as an object of advocacy or representation. Where Khoisan viewpoints, narratives, and positions are discussed, they are derived from public statements, cultural practices, creative works, and interviews by individuals and groups who self-identify as Khoisan. This research acknowledges the Khoisan as socially and politically agentive, actively shaping their own agendas, identities, and futures, rather than as passive subjects of heritage discourse.

The work does not claim to speak on behalf of Khoisan communities, nor to resolve internal debates or differences within them. Instead, it seeks to learn from Khoisan heritage practices and place-based activism, and to consider how these interventions unsettle dominant, often Eurocentric, models of heritage, authorship, and spatial authority. In doing so, the article reflects critically on my own positionality within inherited structures of power; the research is a situated, partial contribution to broader conversations about decolonisation, recognition, and the politics of place in South Africa.

3. Reclaiming Khoisan Identities in South Africa

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) refers to a Nation of Nations: a melting pot of diverse cultures and peoples. It establishes the right of each of these cultures to preserve and enhance its own identity and cultural practices. It also requires of citizens to nurture and respect the culture of others. It upholds the protection of cultural rights and holds that there be redress and restitution for, as well as recognition of those marginalised under colonial and apartheid rule.

As South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, cultures previously marginalised and supressed re-emerged to claim their place among the nations of the Nation. Similarly, the previously dominant cultures had to find their place in an invigorated constellation of cultures. This entailed a revisioning and rearticulation of heritages in the process to find a balance between what the past represented and what the future should represent for everyone. Not only through formal processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but also through small revelations of everyday lived experiences and realities, the obscured and separated worlds of those previously kept apart was slowly revealed and, at least ideologically, asked to come together. In this ongoing process of cultural (r)evolution, Khoisan peoples occupy a unique position as a ‘multicultural’ culture, reaffirming and repositioning themselves within the South African nation.

Khoisan groups are estimated to make up approximately 1% of South Africa’s population of around 60 million people. The collective term Khoisan comprises two main groups: the San and Khoi-Khoi/Khoe-Khoe. The main San groups include the Khomani San, the Khwe and the Xun. The Khoi-Khoi consist of the Nama, the Korana, Griqua and the Cape Khoekhoe. Khoisan culture therefore cannot be dealt with as a master concept as it holds many different identities, cultures and places. However, Khoisan represents an overarching political identity of a group of people who claim lineage, descent, social and/or political association with Southern Africa’s Indigenous peoples (Jansen 2019).

South Africa’s democracy allows for self-identification and, especially in relation to the previously racially determined apartheid classification of “Coloured”, some people are now reclaiming an Indigenous identity as San or Khoi. This has resulted in a resurgence in Khoisan cultures. This resurgence does not refer to a return from someplace else, rather it refers to the re-placing and reaffirmation of identities, cultures and heritages that were marginalised and negated for a very long time under colonial and apartheid rule. Revivalist Khoisan refer to those people who began to publicly identify themselves as Indigenous Khoisan from 1997 onwards (De Wet 2006).

I am particularly interested in the Khoisan’s agencies and agendas, directed through the reclaiming of place—imaginary and real—and the intersection thereof with visual culture. Khoisan creatives and activists are enforcing and substantiating an association between places and indigenous cultural heritage as a form of visual sovereignty. I am interested in this process as a form of cultural heritage place retrieval, and in the imagined and real places as sites of meaning with the potential to make culture visible.

4. [Re]placing Cape Town

The Khoisan’s present-day heritage position in South Africa reflects the fundamental shift in heritage in a postcolonial, and for us post-apartheid, world. Under democracy and the right to self-identify one’s culture, many people have reclaimed a lineage or association with Indigenous cultural roots and are claiming a social and political position as Khoisan. This resurgence, also referred to as a revival, represents, I would argue, a deep slow-motion revolution in Cape Town’s Khoisan cultural heritage, and per se, in Cape Town’s cultural heritage.

Cape Town has become the central focus of Khoisan place activism because it represents both the site of their ancestral homelands and the heart of South Africa’s colonial beginnings. The city occupies land traditionally belonging to various Khoi groups, and it was one of the first regions to experience the violent dispossession and erasure of Indigenous presence under European settlement. This history makes Cape Town a powerful location for reclaiming identity, visibility, and land. As the legislative capital and a global city, Cape Town offers activists a highly visible platform to demand recognition, land restitution, and cultural rights. Sacred sites such as Table Mountain and the confluence of the Liesbeek and Black Rivers have become symbolic battlegrounds where Khoisan activists assert spiritual and historical connections to the land. Moreover, many people of Khoisan descent in the Cape were historically reclassified as “Coloured,” a label that suppressed Indigenous identity; the contemporary Khoisan revival movement emerging from Cape Town seeks to reverse this legacy by reclaiming indigeneity through both protest and cultural expression. Thus, Cape Town embodies the intertwined histories of dispossession and resurgence, serving as the stage where Khoisan people visually and politically reassert sovereignty over their ancestral landscape. This article explores their sovereignty as expressed in three themes of place contestation as reimagining one’s place, renaming one’s place and retaking one’s place. Each theme is explored through the lens of visual sovereignty.

4.1. [Re]Imagining One’s Place

A Khoisan ancestral landscape is powerfully imagined in an image on the webpage of the Khoi & San Active Awareness Group (KSAAG)1. KSAAG is active in raising awareness of and reviving cultural identity amongst Khoisan descendants. Besides cultural events around storytelling, healing and dance, the organisation also supports creativity through the promotion of Khoisan arts and crafts. The webpage landing image offers a view of a pre-colonial ur-landscape of what is currently known as Cape Town. All traces of colonial settlements have been wiped away with a Khoi kraal being the only evidence of human inhabitation of the place. The ur-place is reclaimed and reinserted into the viewer’s imagination and consciousness. The image, I argue, serves as a form of visual sovereignty.

Visual sovereignty is defined as a distinctly Indigenous mode of self-representation that reclaims control over how Native peoples, their cultures, and their objects are seen and understood (Blalock et al. 2015). The concept builds upon the idea that sovereignty extends beyond political or territorial autonomy into the realm of cultural expression and image-making. Visual sovereignty thus becomes an assertion of Native authority over visual narratives—a refusal to be objectified through colonial or anthropological lenses and an insistence on self-determination through visual art.

Blalock et al. (2015) situates visual sovereignty within a broader decolonising framework. They explain that throughout colonial history, Indigenous peoples have been denied the ability to represent themselves authentically. Photography and museum display—both central tools of colonial anthropology—have often decontextualised Native cultural objects, stripping them of their spiritual and communal meanings. Acts of visual sovereignty intervene in this colonial gaze by restoring agency to Native artists and communities, enabling them to tell their own stories through their own visual languages.

I would argue that visual sovereignty is linked to broader cultural works that serve as contestations of colonial cultural constructs. The contemporary making and claiming of Khoisan identities through open-ended fluid processes include a wide range of cultural, social, political and institutional projects. At the core of these projects is the search for social identity and cultural presence, and the importance of heritage in identity-building. The projects mentioned also show how the ongoing revival of Khoisan cultural practices is embedded in and reinterpreted through contemporary lenses. The following discussion is by no means a comprehensive survey of contemporary Khoisan cultural works; rather, it aims to represent the breadth of the range of creative endeavours that contribute to the Khoisan cultural revival.

Afrikaaps refer to various cultural expressions: the name given to the creolised language spoken in parts of Cape Town; the Afrikaaps (2009) protest ‘hip-hopera’; and finally, Afrikaaps, the documentary (2010), an award-winning film that documented the process around the making and staging of the theatre production. An apt quote from Afrikaaps goes as follows:

Vandag noem kenners en kritici my nostalgie soos iets vergete en uitsterflik

en bind my spore in museums met universiteit en intellek sement. Né?!

Imperialistiese drekspul met hul titels van importance. Huh!

Die storie sal vertel word.2

Today experts and critics name me nostalgia, like something forgotten and extinct and binds my trails to museums with university intellectual facts. Né!3

These imperialistic bastards, with their titles of over-importance. Huh!

The story will be told.4

Contemporary Khoisan creatives are increasingly using visual culture and artistic practice to craft and tell their stories on their own terms. Much like the Afrikaaps productions, initiatives such as the Khoi Kulcha clothing brand and the Koena Art Institute seek to promote and celebrate Indigenous Khoi and San heritage by asserting cultural distinctiveness within, rather than outside of, modern urban life. These projects challenge reductive stereotypes that confine Khoisan identity to the precolonial past. As Khoi Kulcha explains, their aim is “to create awareness of our heritage and culture all over the world and to show the world we are not only running around in the wild covered in animal skin… We are alive and we are a modern people.”5 Such initiatives use creativity as a form of agency—a means of shaping social and political narratives around contemporary Khoisan presence and belonging in Cape Town.

Language work forms an equally vital part of this cultural resurgence. As Van Sitters (2014) asserts, “The strength of a culture is the strength of its language,” emphasising that multicultural democracies can only function effectively when distinctive groups are visibly supported in preserving their identities. Language, for him, is a core vehicle for cultural survival. Brown and Deumert (2017) similarly argue that language stands at the centre of Khoisan activism, not only as a marker of authenticity but as a creative, heteroglossic performance that brings activists, artists, intellectuals, and community members into a shared cultural project. In their view, Khoisan activism expresses a desire for an identity “historically rooted and meaningfully created in the present” (Brown and Deumert 2017, p. 571). Language revitalisation, therefore, becomes both political and aesthetic: a practice of asserting presence, forging continuity, and rekindling suppressed histories. As Khoisan communities repeatedly stress, questions of language are inseparable from broader struggles for recognition; without linguistic revitalisation, cultural narratives cannot be authentically shared, and heritage is weakened.

The visual dimension of this resurgence strengthens these linguistic and cultural efforts. Drawing on the foundational ideas of Seminole/Diné artist-scholar Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Blalock et al. (2015) describes visual sovereignty as a mode of confidence and responsibility—a refusal to seek permission to appear within dominant representational systems. Instead, it involves reinterpreting and re-signing visual forms that once objectified Indigenous people, turning them into expressions of living Indigenous worldviews. Visual sovereignty thus frames the creative work of Khoisan artists as an assertion of presence: a reclaiming of how Khoisan people and cultures are seen, understood, and remembered. It is not simply a corrective to past misrepresentation but a forward-looking practice of cultural continuity enacted through new images, performances, and media.

These intertwined forms of creative, linguistic, and visual activism are evident in the initiatives of Khoisan cultural practitioners. Bradley van Sitters’ journey from Cape Town to Namibia in search of his Khoi roots exemplifies identity recovery as movement across landscapes. His ongoing promotion of Khoi culture and Khoekhoegowab, especially among young people along the corridor from Cape Town to the !Gariep River under the slogan “It’s Cool to be Khoi,” blends language revival with youth empowerment and public visibility. This work reframes Indigenous identity as something not only inherited but actively built.

Similarly, Emile YX? Jansen—cultural activist, teacher, hip hop artist, and founder of the Heal the Hood Project—incorporates Khoisan stories, dance, and music into contemporary artistic forms. His 2020 children’s book Reconnecting the String draws on the recurring white line in San rock art, a symbol of interconnectedness across the spiritual, human, and natural realms. By exploring how hip-hop culture can carry Indigenous heritage into new creative spaces, Jansen asks how youth can cultivate identity and character through creativity grounded in ancestral knowledge. His work demonstrates that Indigenous cultural resurgence does not require rejecting modernity; instead, it thrives through innovative and hybrid forms of expression.

Taken together, these projects illustrate the multiple ways in which Khoisan identity and culture are being emplaced in Cape Town. Heritage is never abstract: it is always rooted somewhere—in physical sites, spiritual practice, creative expression, or digital circulation. The examples above reveal how Khoisan presence is asserted across diverse domains: the imaginative, through storytelling and artistic reinterpretation; the cultural, through performance and language revival; the institutional, through organisations such as Koena Art Institute; and the digital, through clothing brands and media platforms that circulate Indigenous aesthetics globally. In each case, contemporary Khoisan communities claim space by inserting their histories, symbols, and voices into public and creative spheres from which they were historically excluded.

This multifaceted reclaiming of heritage demonstrates that Khoisan cultural resurgence is not confined to activism in the streets or on the land. It unfolds equally through art, language, fashion, music, and digital media—all of which serve as powerful tools for shaping how Khoisan people situate themselves within the city and within broader narratives of South African identity. Through visual sovereignty, linguistic revitalisation, and creative practice, Khoisan individuals and collectives are asserting that their culture is not a relic but a living, adaptive presence. They are crafting a narrative in which they are both rooted in deep histories and actively participating in hybrid modernities. In doing so, they re-establish themselves as visible, knowledgeable, and self-defined agents within Cape Town’s cultural landscape.

4.2. [Re]naming One’s Place

Toponymy, from the Greek tópos (place) and onoma (name), is the study of the origins and meanings of place names. Naming is integral to claiming place, and by extension, to claiming heritage. In South Africa, we have become familiar—and even comfortable—with the idea that place names can and should change to reflect the country’s diverse cultures and the heroes of its long struggle for equality and democracy. This remains an ongoing process: for instance, the University of Cape Town only recently renamed its central ceremonial hall the Sarah Baartman Hall, replacing its colonial-era dedication to Jameson.

Yet naming and renaming are never neutral acts. As Harley (1989) notes in his discussion of the politics of mapping, names are forms of knowledge that reveal the presence of political power and social forces. If toponymy represents the power to claim by naming, then the absence of Indigenous place names constitutes what Helander (2009) calls toponymic silence. Such silence erases histories, identities, and relationships to land, replacing them with narratives aligned with colonial authority.

Indigenous toponymy has therefore emerged as an important field documenting efforts by Indigenous peoples worldwide to insert themselves back into place by reclaiming names long suppressed. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (in Helander 2009) reminds us that renaming the land is as ideologically powerful as transforming the land itself; it asserts rights to language, identity, and history. Within this context, Khoisan activists in Cape Town have used toponymy not only to honour their past but also to assert contemporary Indigenous presence.

In June 2012, Khoisan activists held a ceremony to reinstate Cape Town’s original name: ||Hui !Gaeb, “the place where clouds gather.”6 Speaking on behalf of the Institute for the Restoration of the Aborigines of South Africa (IRASA), Tania Kleinhans explained that the action recognised the city’s Khoisan history. The group erected a billboard with the name outside the Castle of Good Hope, symbolically reclaiming not only the city but also one of its most potent colonial landmarks. Sponsored by Nando’s as part of a campaign addressing xenophobia—famously declaring that all people in South Africa except the Khoisan were “foreigners”—the billboard inserted Khoisan identity into the daily consciousness of Cape Town’s residents. The act coincided with the City of Cape Town’s broader review of its place names, illustrating how Khoisan activists strategically align their agenda with municipal processes to assert political visibility.

As Bradley van Sitters argues, Indigenous place names are not arbitrary sounds but repositories of cultural memory and ecological knowledge. Recovering and sharing names that have fallen out of use requires revitalising entire bodies of knowledge and belief systems. For Van Sitters (2012), preserving Indigenous place names enriches the cultural landscape of South Africa as a whole: they contribute to a “rich tapestry of cultural landscaping” that benefits both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

A Khoisan toponymy of Cape Town includes, alongside ||Hui !Gaeb, names such as Huri ‡oaxa (or Hoerikwagga), meaning “mountain in/of the sea,” referring to Table Mountain, and Camissa, “the place of sweet water,” referring to the freshwater streams that historically flowed from the mountain to the sea. Importantly, these terms do not represent renaming but restoration: an attempt to reinsert the ur-place—the original cultural and linguistic landscape—into contemporary consciousness.

These interventions reveal how place-based activism intersects with visual sovereignty. When Indigenous activists occupy, mark, or visually reinterpret landscapes, they reclaim both territory and representation. Murals, banners, photography, performances, and digital media become tools for asserting authority over how land is seen and understood. Such acts counter colonial narratives that render Indigenous geographies invisible or commodified, re-inscribing landscapes with Indigenous worldviews that link land, identity, and community.

Blalock et al.’s (2015) interpretation of visual sovereignty builds on Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s insight that sovereignty includes a “consciousness rooted in confidence” expressed through cultural and visual presence. Visual sovereignty rejects the need for permission to appear within dominant representational systems; instead, it embraces the responsibility to continue Indigenous traditions by reinterpreting and re-signifying imagery that once objectified Indigenous peoples. Through visual acts—whether renaming a city, occupying a mountain, or installing a billboard—Khoisan activists transform resistance into a form of storytelling, asserting that the land holds ancestral memory and ongoing cultural significance.

In this way, place-based activism becomes both a political and aesthetic practice of sovereignty. It centres Indigenous voices, reclaims silenced histories, and visually communicates the continued presence and rights of Indigenous peoples. By naming, occupying, and representing place, Khoisan activists shape how their lands, histories, and identities are seen, remembered, and imagined. In doing so, they enact visual sovereignty in motion—reasserting Indigenous belonging not only through words but through the very visibility of place itself.

4.3. [Re]taking One’s Place

… to authorities it is called an occupation. To us, it is called restoration.

(Khoisan activists quoted in Jethro 2017, p. 360)

Occupy is a strong word. How do you occupy what belongs to you? Where is the law that we have broken? Because it belongs to us historically.

(Khoisan activist, Anna, quoted by Verbuyst 2015, p. 125)

Khoisan place activism is an open-ended heritage practice through which Khoisan communities claim and physically occupy sites of cultural significance. This is a politically complex phenomenon: in Cape Town multiple Khoisan groups pursue diverse heritage agendas, and one group’s claim may not align with another’s priorities. My focus here is on the phenomenon itself—the places being claimed and the strategies behind these claims—rather than the internal politics among groups. The sites discussed are not the only ones reclaimed; rather, they illustrate deliberate tactics in how and why particular places are occupied. I use occupy in the sense shaped by the global Occupy movements of the early 21st century, where key spaces were reclaimed to confront social and political issues. Here, I focus specifically on occupations in Cape Town.

Activism is defined by public action aimed at political or social change. Heritage activism typically emerges at grassroots level in efforts to protect threatened heritage, often centred on tangible remains such as archaeology, architecture, or historic landscapes. Indigenous heritage activism, however, tends to target deeper issues of recognition, belonging, and the restoration of culturally, spiritually, and environmentally meaningful places. Khoisan place-based activism in Cape Town emerges from profound frustration with the limited social and spatial transformation since democracy—transformation that has failed to acknowledge the Khoisan’s deep-rooted relationships with these landscapes long predating the city’s establishment.

On 24 October 2020 a Khoisan collective occupied Cecilia Forest on Table Mountain7. Representing the Cochoqua, Goringhaiqua, Goringhaicona and Gorachouqua tribes, the group described the site as a cultural space for discussion and renewal. Their spokesperson, Shaun (|khaeb) Macdonald, framed the occupation as aligned with global Indigenous struggles and as a response to the state’s slow progress in addressing historical injustice:

Hoerikwaggo, now known as Table Mountain, has a strong spiritual link to our people. We are occupying the mountain to create a space where we can again learn and practise our culture, traditions and language in the same spaces our ancestors did.8

Macdonald argued that international Aboriginal title law and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) protected their right to occupy the land. Future reclaimings and expansions across Table Mountain were already being discussed. SANParks responded by opening a case of land invasion, and on 1 January 2021 twelve members were arrested for housebreaking, malicious damage to property, and trespassing. Their advocate, Venice Burgins, countered that the group was being criminalised for practising their culture—“a gross violation of their human rights.” Activist Tazlin Maasdorp emphasised the broader struggle for Aboriginal rights, land, and cultural freedom, noting the sense of isolation in a country that claims diversity.

Indigeneity is inherently place-based, defined through enduring relationships to land and resistance to colonial dispossession. Alfred and Corntassel (2005) argue that Indigenous identity is both spatial and political, grounded in land, culture and opposition to erasure. Coulthard (2010) contrasts this with Western notions of linear progress, noting that Indigenous worldviews centre land as a living web of reciprocal relations. Larsen and Johnson (2012) extend this by describing Indigenous places as storyscapes—landscapes imbued with memory, meaning, and ancestral presence—which colonialism seeks to sever and overwrite. Barker and Pickerill (2012) describe re-placement as the political and cultural work of restoring these ties.

Place activism arises directly from this worldview: reoccupying and protecting ancestral spaces becomes an act of decolonial restoration, reasserting visibility, identity, and sovereignty. To reclaim place is to reclaim self-determination.

Brigido-Corachan (2017) connects visual sovereignty to place activism by showing how Indigenous artists and activists use visual practices to assert relationships to land and history. Visual sovereignty—Indigenous control over representation—naturally extends into place-based activism because both reclaim Indigenous perspectives within colonially defined spaces. Through photography, installations and other visual media, Indigenous creators transform witnessing into political expression, making Indigenous presence, memory, and continuity visible. These visual acts do more than depict land; they affirm Indigenous epistemologies and resist displacement through creative self-representation. In this way, visual sovereignty and place activism share a common aim: to reclaim both the image and meaning of Indigenous homelands. By shaping how place is seen and remembered, Indigenous artists enact visual sovereignty as a living, land-rooted form of activism.

Visual sovereignty then is not only about representation but also becomes performative. Khoisan place activism is well reported in the media. Through place activism, Khoisan people are embedding their agendas and identities in the consciousness of Cape Town’s residents. They are claiming a recognition long withheld from them.

5. Conclusions

The reclamation of Khoisan identity in post-apartheid South Africa represents a profound act of cultural, spatial, and political resurgence. This article has theorised that the processes of reimagining, renaming, and retaking place are central to the ways in which Khoisan people are actively reconstructing their identities and asserting sovereignty over heritage and representation. In doing so, they challenge centuries of colonial dispossession and epistemic erasure that once rendered their presence invisible within South Africa’s national narrative. The revival of Khoisan culture is not a mere act of remembrance; it is a living, evolving project of decolonial reclamation, rooted in contemporary expressions of art, language, performance, and activism.

Through the lens of visual sovereignty, this work has demonstrated how creative and performative practices—whether in protest art, heritage occupations, or digital imagery—function as powerful instruments of place-based activism. Following scholars such as Blalock et al. (2015), Tsinhnahjinnie (1998), and Brigido-Corachan (2017), it is argued that these visual expressions allow Indigenous people to reclaim control over how they are seen and understood, transforming visibility into a form of resistance. For Khoisan creatives in Cape Town, visual culture becomes a tool to re-inscribe Indigenous knowledge systems within the urban landscape, making heritage both visible and lived.

At the same time, the complexities within the Khoisan revival movement are recognised. Diverse genealogies, languages, and political affiliations mean that there is no singular Khoisan identity. Rather, what emerges is a plurality of belonging, where activism, creativity, and spirituality intersect to create dynamic forms of Indigenous self-determination. This diversity reflects both the strength and the challenge of the movement: its open-endedness allows for inclusivity and reinvention, but it also reveals tensions over representation, authenticity, and authority.

Ultimately, this theoretical investigation argues that reclaiming place is inseparable from reclaiming identity. Cape Town, as both a colonial and ancestral site, has become a stage on which the Khoisan enact sovereignty through acts of imagination, naming, and occupation. These practices extend beyond local heritage debates to contribute to global conversations on Indigenous resurgence and decolonial aesthetics. By asserting cultural agency through place-based activism and visual sovereignty, Khoisan communities are not only reshaping South Africa’s cultural landscape—they are reconfiguring what it means to belong, to remember, and to be seen as Indigenous in the twenty-first century.

This article offered a theoretical reading of a complex socio-cultural scenario. It has shown how the intersections of theoretical readings of place and visual sovereignty can productively serve to deepen an understanding of Khoisan activism. Future work can focus on grounding this work more concretely and critically in relation to everyday visual and place practices.