Owning the Body, Embodying the Owner: Complexity and Discourses of Rights, Citizenship and Heritage of Southern African Bushmen

This article investigates the problematic position of Bushman heritage. Acknowledging the importance of this heritage in itself, but further as unmissable against the backdrop of calls for the decolonisation of knowledge in South Africa, a discourse of indigenous rights appears as the most just and suitable tool for analysis and critical reflection. Indigenous rights, however, proves to be quite problematic unto itself. This article offers a critique of the framework of indigenous rights, and offers an alternative theorisation through the lens of citizenship. Through critiquing the dominant discourses of rights and ownership which seem to underpin the majority of current debates. citizenship moves the paradigm from the centre of simplicity to the depths of complexity?emphasising the fallacy of ownership, the essentialism of rights and the importance of a shared knowledge and heritage. Citizenship, in contrast with rights and indigeneity, opens to a third space?a space of both conceptual and practical decolonisation.