Khoisan activist and Bhisho MPL Christian Martin wants Stats SA to conduct an early census to determine how many South Africans identify as Khoi and San.
Martin also wants the race groups added on all official government documents pertaining to demographics.
In a letter to Stats SA, Martin said research by the University of Pretoria had discovered there were 350,000 people who identified as Khoi and San but there could be more as the statistics were based on old research.
The letter reads: “Our concern is that government recently went on public hearings on the traditional recognition of the Khoi and San Bill.
Yet there are no proactive moves from a reliable institution of your sort.
“We as the Khoi and San community would welcome an early census or at least some form or sort of exercise to determine how many self-identified Khoi and San individuals are in our country.
“This exercise would go a long way in assisting the bill when signed by the president to become an act.”While the e-mail was sent to Stats SA spokesperson Ashwell Jenneker, and others, he said they had not received any communication from Martin or the Khoisan chiefs requesting a meeting or to determine how many Khoi and San people there were in the country.
He did, however, confirm that the e-mail address that Martin said he had used was correct.
Martin has been on a mission to have the government recognise the Khoisan as the first nation of SA and also wants the Land Claims Act of 1913 and the coloured identity to be scrapped.
“We also want our language to be recognised as an official language of this country,” he has said previously.
Martin, who was part of the Khoisan Four, embarked on a 14-day hunger strike in December in a last-ditch attempt to get the leadership of the country to listen to their demands.
Last year, he and other Khoi activists marched from Port Elizabeth on Human Rights Day to Bhisho, where they handed over a memorandum lobbying for the removal of the term “coloured” from the country’s statutes.
Martin, who regards the term “coloured” as derogatory, said other terminologies such as k****r and c****e (derogatory term used to refer to people of Indian descent) had been repealed in 1991.
“The terminology ‘coloured’ is still used in all government documents. We as Khoi and San descendants see [this] as an insult and government [reneging] on its own beliefs of rectifying the past,” he said in his letter to Stats SA.
Martin has also been campaigning for the Port Elizabeth International Airport to be renamed after Khoisan chief and political activist Dawid Stuurman.
Last month, he led a march from the South End Museum to the airport and said the land the airport was built on belonged to Stuurman’s brother.