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CHAPTER 1

Africa: Beginnings and challenging narratives

This chapter aims to cover in broad strokes the progression in the peopling of southern Africa and the civilisations of southern Africa from 3 000 years ago until the beginning of European colonisation in what is now South Africa. The discussion will be structured under the following themes:

•The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives

•The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives

•The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives

•Perspectives on the San foundation people

•Perspectives on the Khoe foundation people

•Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people

•A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from about 800 CE

•Slavery epochs as an influence on early migrations and identity formation

From the time of the emergence of Kemet (ancient Egypt) about 5 000 years ago,1 African civilisations spread to include Nubia, Punt, Kerma, Kush, Carthage, Nok and Mauritania by 431 CE, and by this time the foundations of organised southern African societies were being established.

Here it is important to differentiate between the emergences of what are called advanced organised societies or civilisations, and the earliest emergence of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) and the many evolutionary phases through to Homo sapiens sapiens and then on to early Neolithic proto-societies. The Neolithic periods leading to the emergence of the various great civilisations started approximately 12 000 years ago and had different timelines in different parts of the world. ‘Neolithic’, or the later part of what archaeologists call the Stone Age, refers to the period when humans had started farming and domesticating animals, but still used stone instead of metal for making weapons and tools.

These proto-societies were the precursors of what we call ‘civilisations’: well-developed states of human society marked by numerically large numbers of organised people living in advanced built environments under cohesive conditions. Other features of such states include developed forms of food production and distribution, political orders, governance, cultural cohesion, industry, common social norms, and keeping some form of written, graphic or symbolic record.

The early civilisations on which the later Western European civilisation modelled itself were mainly those of Greece, Persia and Rome, which were accordingly foregrounded in educational institutions. Other, and in some cases even older, cradles of early civilisations that had emerged in Africa, Arabia-Eurasia, India, China and South America were ignored or received little attention. The Eurocentric approach to the study of human civilisations is largely a colonial distortion that requires us to get back to the idea of ‘universal study’ at universities instead of the highly colonial approach that still tends to prevail in South African institutions. In southern Africa, the Mapungubwe state marks a similar emergence of an era of great states or civilisations – Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Thulamela, Khami, Mutapa and Rozvi – which in turn were the foundations and catalysts for the spread of many great social formations. This chapter will deal with the emergence of these states.

Certainly in southern Africa we can establish the emergence of proto-societies between 300 CE and 850 CE, when the beginnings of southern African states and kingdoms, starting with the Mapungubwe state, can be evidenced. We can also show how even earlier the foundation peoples – the San, the Khoe and the Kalanga – were part of the building of these states.

It is during this period that we also see southern African societies trading with Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and China, and producing steel,2 at a time when Europe had not yet done so. The Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Monomutapa kingdoms evidence the emergence of an advanced African civilisation in southern Africa long before the entry of European colonialism into the continent.

The prehistory period: Archaeological perspectives

Blombos Cave, which is situated about 300 km from Cape Town on the southeastern coast, has been an ongoing archaeological site since 1991 where deposits dated from between 120 000 to 70 000 years ago right up to 300 years ago have been found. In the popular arena, the name of Blombos Cave and its findings are frequently quoted by laypeople in a manner that does not distinguish between the different eras of Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens development markers found here and at other South African sites.3 Again, in the popular arena there is also not much distinction made between modern humans and older archaic human species that go back to before Homo sapiens emerged, and which indeed for periods of time existed alongside Homo sapiens up to about 18 000 years ago.

The Blombos findings particularly provide insights on Homo sapiens, early Homo sapiens sapiens, and human societies and social formations of the past 3 000 years to 300 years ago.4 The site’s importance is underlined by the fact that successive colonies of societies with a dominant hunting-and-gathering economic mode, from archaic humans through to Homo sapiens and pre-San Homo sapiens sapiens and on to San and to a much lesser extent to Khoe, can be studied in one progression over a long period of time. A 73 000-year-old drawing made with an ochre crayon that could be classed as prehistoric art, and possibly symbolism, has added a new dimension to the development history of early Homo sapiens before they are dated as having spread out to Eurasia.5

The artefacts, prehistoric art and other markers found at Blombos Cave6 can be divided into a range of early Homo sapiens deposits, and both early and older Homo sapiens sapiens deposits. The deposits of the past 3 000 to 300 years do not necessarily form a continuum of one hominin group from the older past to the present, regardless of the fact that the modes of living relate to different colonies of hunter-gatherers. (The term ‘hominin’ includes modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors.)

It is my perspective that if we want to understand southern African social history, we must be careful not to conflate these different periods. The early European visitors to South Africa used the same lack of differentiation, a recurring theme in South African history, to imply that the Africans they met were a primitive mix of archaic humans and modern humans, which anthropologists called Capoids (a term and concept seldom used today).

European philosophers and historians called their derogatory construct of indigenous Africans of the Cape ‘noble savages’. This was done to pin down the San and Khoe peoples that they met as being ‘uncivilised’ and without any social formation or economy of significance. Europeans casually and in records referred to the San and Khoe as ‘beasts’. This disparaging theme has persisted to this day, and is now often camouflaged by patronising romanticism and attempts to project the San and Khoe as a ‘species branch of humanity’, alternatively as a ‘race’.

Henshilwood and Van Niekerk7 give us a glimpse of the complexities of human evolution in terms of the origins of human behaviour and timelines using the Blombos findings. In a technical overview, McCreery8 illustrates how the Blombos findings are reshaping archaeological understanding of the origins of modern human behaviour and the capabilities of early Homo sapiens and the African Middle Stone Age. This does not change the basics of archaeological science, nor do the early Homo sapiens deposits at archaeological sites negate the other archaeological findings from the past 12 000 to 3 000 years about human social development in southern Africa of the relatively modern ancestors of those to whom we refer as the San, Khoe and Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga foundation peoples. The last-mentioned group, who will be discussed in more detail later, was a mix of San, early Khoe and other hunter-herder-farmers who evolved locally from slow migrational drifts identified as the West African Kalundu tradition, the Central African Nkope tradition, and the East African Kwale tradition.9

Mlambo and Parsons10 explain that there is much more complexity to the southern African hominin landscape by elaborating on a range of findings at archaeological sites. These include the Kalambo Falls on the Tanzania–Zambia border, the Matobo Hills sites in Zimbabwe, Tsodilo Hills in Botswana’s northern Kalahari, the Apollo Caves in Namibia, Howieson’s Poort, Klasies River, and Diepkloof in the Eastern Cape, the Sibudu rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, the Spoegriver site near the Kai !Gariep river, the Seacow Valley site, Rose Cottage Cave near Lesotho in the Free State, Border Cave on the border of eSwatini (Swaziland), Wilton Farm in the Eastern Cape, Elands Bay near Cape Town, the Pinnacle Point Caves at Mossel Bay, and others. Archaic humans were widely distributed across southern Africa, and indications such as those at Blombos Cave show there were other early Homo sapiens – some genetically related to the San and others not. Mlambo and Parsons show deposits at this entire array of sites linked to sites in Tanzania and sites as far north as Kenya and up to Ethiopia.

This suggests that many earlier migrations from territories north and east of present-day Zimbabwe took place some thousands of years before the events of 3 000 years ago. The earliest first peoples of southern Africa were much more complex and diverse than the picture presented by some of our contemporary discourse that is often stymied by fashionable politics. The authors also look at these movements in relation to huge and landscape-altering climatic conditions, which is a fascinating subject not dealt with in this book. It raises questions about when the populating of areas occurred, if one considers that 4 000 years ago the entire Cape Flats was under seawater, making an island of the mountains of the Cape Peninsula.

Though variations in academic opinion exist on many details, the various social sciences are at one in recognising that the oldest Neolithic societies of southern and East Africa, from Tanzania, Zambia and Angola down to the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas, were those diverse societies of ancestors of those today generally referred to as San communities. The San family of communities are the survivors of just some of those social groups going back 10 000 years ago. This makes the San communities that still survive in the 21st century the oldest peoples today. Their ancestors also exist in the bloodlines and cultures as hidden foundations for all other African groups in South Africa today, including the various branches of the Khoe peoples who are in part the closest descendent formation largely of the Tshua San and Khwe San, with some Nilotic, sub-Saharan and Cushite herder roots too.

The prehistory period: Genetic perspectives

The field of genetics today complements much of the archaeological and social history research that is at the cutting edge of informing us about the period of 1000 BCE to 1000 CE.

Geneticists conducting a genetic study led by Rebecca Cann11 in 1987 were able to trace back all of humanity living today to a female ancestor who is likely to have lived in northeast Africa about 194 000 years ago, and identified this as the mitochondrial DNA gene type L. Since then this study has become the basis of scientific human-genome tracking studies worldwide.12 The fact that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited from mothers enables researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. The L mtDNA genetic lineage to which all modern humanity (Homo sapiens sapiens) traces back was not the only Homo sapiens group to have existed over the past 300 000 years, nor the only hominin species. But the L lineage and its many offshoots are the only surviving Homo sapiens sapiens.

This early human community with the L mtDNA gene type was small, and lived alongside other Homo sapiens and archaic human species at the time of dispersal across Africa and later into Arabia, Europe, Asia and beyond. Mlambo and Parsons13 point out that the only archaeological remains of this group of modern humans known so far in East Africa is probably a Homo sapiens skull found on the Omo River in Ethiopia, dated about 168 000 years ago.

Approximately 70 000 years ago, at the time of dispersal, those L mtDNA gene type humans are likely to have been a mix of more than one stream of Homo sapiens from across Africa after over 100 000 years of circular migrations on the continent. In all of humanity today mtDNA readings can be proved to go back to this root, and this means that all modern people in their various locations are migrants. Genetics argues that there is only one human race, which evolved in different localities and progressed in different timeframes.

The L mtDNA haplogroup marker is used to track the genetic ancestry of all people today, which is identified in a vast number of descendent haplogroups that geneticists then further refine. (A ‘haplogroup’ represents a group of people who have inherited common genetic characteristics from the same most recent common ancestor going back several thousand years.) Through this process they can track DNA admixture and localities where different peoples resided. Geneticists are also able to track migratory movements as well as admixture between different groups of Homo sapiens over time. Furthermore, they can track admixture with other archaic human groups too. This work shows that there is no pure single line of descent for anyone today, and that migration within Africa resulting in one group of Homo sapiens affecting the DNA of others was a constant over time.

Theories about the geographic origin of Homo sapiens

Various theories have emerged over the past 20 years that have led to debates about where the actual origin of Homo sapiens resides. This has been driven by the questionable notion that there must be one single place to which we can emphatically assign Homo sapiens origin. Some of this thinking is rooted in a constructed racist paradigm in pursuit of a primacy race obsession. Some, erroneously I believe, contrast two single-origin claims by talking competitively of an eastern African origin versus a southern African origin of modern humans.

One version that suggests southern Africa as the place of origin is based on a Stanford University study14 where the geneticists engage in subjective speculation with strong overtones of having been influenced by non-genomic local perspectives of a contemporary quasi-political nature. One cannot be scientifically objective when this occurs. This study, which gave rise to much media speculation, nonetheless makes it very clear that they cannot draw a hard in situ conclusion about the origins of those they loosely refer to as ‘bushmen’ and ‘hunter-gatherers’.15 Another controversial study in the same vein was that of Shuster, Miller, Ratan et al.,16 which saw an angry backlash by San communities in Namibia over what they called unethical practices, stereotyping and insulting language, and constructs that also went far beyond the field of expertise of genomics. Yet another study, done by the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Australia, where researchers zoomed into the Kalahari and made some sensational claims in the journal Nature17, also came in for much criticism. The scientific journalist KN Smith18 found the approach taken and the claims made in Nature to be shockingly simplistic and deficient.

The Stanford and Australian studies also must be read with a wealth of other genomic studies showing that southern Africa has the most diverse DNA reading results in the world, which shows admixture and migration to have been a major feature of our past. These researchers should also have done more than pay broad lip service to interdisciplinary studies. In my reading of the paper, the Stanford study takes a position that many other studies have also found, and then simply moves in a direction of inverting the migratory direction from southwest to northeast without a convincing argument.

My own perspective is that multidisciplinary scientific evidence in the region suggests that the past cannot be explained as simply as one narrow place of origin, nor is there one surviving pure ethnic group of people that can represent people of ‘first’ origin in the narrow sense. Our recognition of the San is as a foundation people who have the oldest surviving direct roots to those Homo sapiens sapiens ancestors who survived natural attrition over the last few thousand years.

More importantly, besides there being distinct San communities today, all other African communities also have old San communities as part of their genetic, ancestral and cultural heritage. As such, the San represent the cement that binds us in a strong, uniting pan-African heritage that is greater than ethnic division or ‘race’ constructs. Respect for the San in our South African heritage should be at the centre of our thinking. Marginalisation of and discrimination against San communities is a grave injustice and impedes us all from truly celebrating African unity. For those who disrespect the San peoples, it translates into having no self-respect as Africans.

The other theory that speaks of Homo sapiens originating in South Africa is more noteworthy than the Stanford paper because it goes beyond genetic debates and includes the study of old human deposits of an artistic and symbolic nature. The actual theory arising from the discoveries at Blombos Cave, which is still debated, makes a different point from that which argues that South Africa is the original birthplace of the lineage of human beings today instead of East Africa. This South Africa theory is not about the origins of modern humans of today, but rather about a possible dispersal of different Homo sapiens who had reached South Africa about 100 000 years ago, from another place of origin. It links to theories that there are likely to have been multiple places of origin of different groups of early Homo sapiens, and not just a single one.

The theory arising from the Blombos Cave discoveries19 proceeds from a position which suggests that a small group of early primitive Homo sapiens originating elsewhere were living in an Ice-Age refuge on the South African coast for a period and then about 70 000 years ago migrated fairly quickly to East Africa. It is suggested that in East Africa there was a possible clash with the other Homo sapiens in the region at that time, which could have contributed to the out-of-Africa migration.

The researchers from the University of Huddersfield who, along with colleagues from other universities, developed this theory have made it very clear that there is ‘no suggestion of any direct-line linkage to people in South Africa today’, and that the genetics of today’s descendants of those called ‘Khoi-San’, namely the L-gene mtDNA markers, does not support any connection to these early possible Homo sapiens deposits at Blombos Cave.20 The theory is not in conflict with northeast Africa as the place of origin of the Homo sapiens line of ancestors of the surviving San communities, but rather embraces yet another emergent theory.

This other theory has more substance than counterposing East Africa and South Africa as places of origin, but though gaining traction it is also still far from universally accepted. This is the multiregional theory of the origins of Homo sapiens. While agreeing that Africa is the birthplace of Homo sapiens, it posits that there was a patchwork of highly structured populations of Homo sapiens evolving at different locations in Africa over time. Fossils from sites across Africa that go back 100 000 years further than the northeast African L-gene skull are argued to have remains that could be those of a species linked to Homo sapiens. Alternatively, the fossils may represent a different intermediary species altogether, or a cross-bred link between archaic humans and early Homo sapiens21 preceding the L-0 ancestor of northeast Africa.

My own position is that the northeast Africa story of the emergence of those Homo sapiens from whom the modern Homo sapiens sapiens – our surviving species – descend, is the foundation of human-genome genetic science today, and is still the most solid scientific theory to date.

But it is not exclusive from the multiregional theory, nor the theory that a proto-Homo sapiens intermediary species may have preceded the findings dating back to 194 000 years ago. Indeed, genetic science consistently shows us that the DNA of other hominin species from across Africa can be found alongside the Homo sapiens L-gene mtDNA findings.

The approach I have employed in arriving at my perspective has been to bring aspects of the East African L-gene yardstick and the multiregional theory of origins together in plotting out a much larger area of Africa as containing cradles of humankind – plural.

This is a different perspective that relies on using the available evidence rather than aligning my thoughts with competitive poles in social science thinking about East Africa vs South Africa, or with any notions of ‘firstism’ in explaining human origins. This approach also brings archaeological evidence, paleontological evidence and genetic evidence closer together. It further recognises that a range of human species lived across the region, sometimes with time overlaps, including archaic humans alongside early Homo sapiens with some interbreeding, but that this died out long before the emergence of social groups or communities that fit the full description of modern people, including San communities.

The area to which I refer is plotted from northeast Africa in a large triangle, which I call the Thõathõa Triangle, with its southernmost points in Aranos in Namibia, and Bethel in South Africa. This will be illustrated and elaborated on below. This triangle’s edges are blurred rather than hard, and Morocco in northwest Africa could be an outrider point to the northeast and Blombos an outrider in the southeast. (Some of the earliest known remains of Homo sapiens, dated about 315 000 years ago, have been found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.22) There is no certainty on these finer matters concerning the period between 194 000 years ago and 300 000 years ago, but it is safe to say that this continuing discourse does not greatly impact on the period with which this book deals. Most researchers in the fields of archaelogy, palaeontology and genetics would state today that rigidity has no place in this arena of studies. The approach to be taken requires less of the old-fashioned tree approach – with trunk, branches, roots and leaves representing a human tree – and more of one that sees the past as an interrelated network in time. Homo sapiens is more likely to have evolved within a set of interlinked groups whose interconnectivity changed through time rather than there having been a ‘primacy people’ of any sort,23 and the later migratory habits of humanity were probably occurring then as well. Brutal climatic changes are just one factor that underlines such observations.

Race theories and genetics

Race theories were born out of the social sciences later associated with genetics, namely ethnography and anthropology. These two fields have greatly influenced neocolonial political theories that are still fashionable in some quarters today. Here I would like to sound a caution about the term ‘Khoisan’ and its variants used by some geneticists who fail to observe the proper scientific protocol of using the term ‘Southern African mtDNA’. The same caution should be applied to the use of the term ‘Bantu’ with reference to people instead of to languages. The scientific genetic protocol for the people some refer to as ‘Bantu’ is ‘sub-Saharan African mtDNA’. The terms ‘Khoisan’ and ‘Bantu’ both have a sordid history.

As was mentioned earlier, the term ‘Khoisan’ was created by Leonhard Schultze in the political context of the genocide carried out by the Germans on the San, Nama and Herero in the early 20th century in what is now Namibia. In 1904 the Herero rose up in a war of rebellion againt the German colonisers, and in 1905 the Nama followed suit. The resistance was brutally suppressed by forces under General Lothar von Trotha, and survivors, including women and children, were kept in concentration camps24 where they were subjected to forced labour and a range of abuses.

As Wittenberg25 explains, Schultze had studied zoology under Ernst Haeckel, a leading German Darwinist academic, and only later turned to ethnography. Schultze was a Jekyll and Hyde character who waxed lyrical about Khoe culture and compiled a record on the Nama similar to that of Bleek and Lloyd on the !Kun and |Xam. But the same man, as Wittenberg points out, was engaged in reprehensible activities during the time of the genocide as General Von Trotha’s ‘embedded scientist’.

These same people that Schultze26 romanticised in literature was considered by him to be a threat to humanity and nearer to animal life. Dr Bofinger, the camp doctor on Shark Island, and Schultze were responsible for cutting off heads of dead prisoners and sending them back to laboratories in Berlin for further studies. It is noted by Olusoga and Erichsen27 that most of those imprisoned in the concentration camps, and particularly the ones who passed through Dr Bofinger’s field hospital, did not come out of there alive. Dr Bofinger and Schultze experimented on live ‘specimens’ and the ‘hospital’ was where bodies were broken and decapitated and skulls were split, making Dr Bofinger the most feared of the Germans by the Nama.

German race scientist Christian Fetzer,28 a contemporary of Schultze’s, regarded the Nama as being close to the Anthropoid Ape. According to Olusoga and Erichsen,29 Schultze is on record as saying with reference to the Nama that these ‘races’ were unfit for work and ‘should be allowed to disappear’, which was a euphemism for extermination. Schultze argued that, for the colonial project to succeed, ‘[t]he struggle for our own existence allows no other solution. We who build our houses on the graves of these races have a responsibility to safeguard our civilisation, sparing no means.’

Likewise, though without similar aberrations involved, the same applies to the origins of the term ‘Bantu’. It was first introduced in a hypothesis by Wilhelm Bleek30 in 1862 to controversially label as one so-called ‘race’ peoples using a vast number of languages that make up a language family of over 680 variants used by over 400 different ethnicities widely spread over the continent of Africa.

Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd carried out linguistic and anthropological studies on |Xam and !Kun prisoners from the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town, after having had the prisoners released into their custody as subjects. The ethics of this is often overlooked by those enamoured by their work. Wilhelm Bleek’s role in academia has been romanticised because of his research on the San, but he was well known as a pioneer of racist theory31 and can rightly be called the father of the system of race classification in South Africa. Moreover, Bleek’s work also stands accused of ‘civilising’ and ‘censoring’ the narratives of the |Xam and !Kun.32

These are considerations that must be kept sharply in mind when we look at the science of genetics, too, because some of the racist colonial ideas and terminology have been imported into modern genetics and skew the reports that are produced. Non-scientific language is used and subjective political views are tagged on to scientific findings. The modern-day surviving San still find themselves subjected to theories suggesting that they are not part of the mainstream human family but are instead ‘another separate branch-species’ of humanity.

Genetic mapping and the Thõathõa Triangle

We can see and track migrations and migratory drifts across the African continent and out of Africa that link back to the northeast African Homo sapiens community and original L-gene ancestor, which inform the foundation of genetic science. There is an argument that there was more than one movement out of Africa by Homo sapiens but that the main migration into Arabia, Europe, Asia and further afield occurred about 70 000 years ago.

The earlier migrations, however, have different markers from those of the African L-gene family of markers. Those with southern African mtDNA such as San, Khoe and various others link back to this common L-gene ancestor. Likewise, those who have sub-Saharan mtDNA and Nilotic-Cushitic mtDNA, who are from ethnic groups that speak Bantu languages and Nilotic-Cushitic languages, also track back to the same L-gene ancestor. The L-gene sequence demonstrates that the different African indigenous peoples are all part of one human family and are not separate ‘races’ even though they evolved in different localities.

Mlambo and Parsons33 succinctly explain the genetic mapping of all human beings today starting with the common female ancestor mentioned earlier. This oldest mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene type, labelled L-0,

… is mostly found amoung Northern San/Bushmen people living in the northern Kalahari. These people, like everyone alive, also carry traces of other mtDNA gene types as well … The second-oldest mtDNA gene type (L-1) originated around 110 kya. It is mostly found among Twa/Pygmy people in the eastern Congo Basin. The third-oldest mtDNA gene type (L-2) originated around 100 kya. It is mostly found among people speaking Niger-Congo (or Niger-Kordofanian) languages, notably the Bantu languages. The fourth mtDNA gene type (L-3) is mostly found among people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages, notably Somali, Amharic, and Semitic languages. Around 60 kya, the L-3 gave rise to new genetic types that are numbered L-3M and L-3N. All the other mtDNA types in the world today are descended from L-3M and L-3N. [The abbreviation ‘kya’ stands for ‘thousand years ago’.]

Mlambo and Parsons34 further elaborate that the ‘L-0d’ Homo sapiens genetic type had spread from northeast Africa down to Tanzania across and along the Zambezi to Angola and also down through Zimbabwe, and into Botswana and Namibia by 140 000 years ago.

Another genetic type, ‘L-0d1’, split off from the westward trajectory around the Zambezi and had drifted much more slowly southwards through Zimbabwe down to the Kai !Gariep area by 30 000 years ago and to the southwestern Cape by 22 000 years ago. Yet another genetic type, ‘L-0k’, split off in Tanzania and moved down through Mozambique into what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

These were early Homo sapiens migrants who moved out of East Africa from the area of the common ancestor whose descendants also moved across the whole of Africa. Much further down the ages, about 10 000 years ago, diverse San societies began to emerge from the L-0d, L-0k and L-0d1 ancestors.

The haplogroup L-0 locates in the region bordering Kenya and Ethiopia about 194 000 years ago.35 Across Africa, the L-1 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory of descent from East Africa moved into Central Africa; the L-2 mtDNA haplogroup into the western bulge of Africa, likewise with some of the L-3 mtDNA haplogroups. The L-4 mtDNA haplogroup trajectory reached into North Africa.

Each mtDNA haplogroup has many further subdivisions of haplogroups. In the case of eastern and southern Africa, the mtDNA of the region largely consists of subgroups of L-0.36 The oldest of these, between 160 000 years ago to 140 000 years ago, is evidenced as being present in the southwestern corner of what I call the Thõathõa Triangle area, which runs from Aranos in Namibia up to Dese in Ethiopia and down to Bethel in South Africa, and across back to Aranos. The specific subgroup at Aminuis in Namibia is notated as L-0d.

If one draws an arc to connect Aranos and Bethel and then complete the circle that includes parts of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Arica, this is the Thõathõa Circle at the bottom of the Thõathõa Triangle that reaches up to Ethiopia. The sides of this triangle are not hard borders but rather soft, blurred sides. This tool emphasises the theory that in my view best explains our distant past: the multiregional theory of sites (plural) of origin for Homo sapiens (the L-gene sequence and possible other extinct Homo sapiens groups).

Thõathõa37 means ‘beginnings’ in the Kora language, and it is used here simply for illustrative purposes in creating some geographical parameters for the historical exploration in this book. Within this triangle there have been several the most important archaeological finds that assist us to understand the southern African past, including areas that can be identified as cradles (plural) of humankind. As was noted before, there are several outrider exception sites that fall outside of this triangle, such as Blombos Cave and the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco. For me, the answer to these sites lies in the migratory spirit in Homo sapiens linked to following waterways or coastal routes.

In six southern African countries, strong showings of the L0-d, L0-d1 and L0-k mtDNA markers are among surviving San communities who trace back to the East African ancestor L-0. Evidence of the strongest, but not the only, descendants of L-0 today are the Hadza and Sandawe peoples of present-day Tanzania, and some of the following communities: Cape Khoe, Korana, Griqua, Nama and ‘Coloured’, alternatively referred to as Camissa African communities as a term of self-identification by some. The latter concept will be explained in further chapters.

All these communities also have mtDNA markers of other ‘L-1 – L-6’ sub-Saharan African mtDNA markers, as well as mtDNA markers from Asia, Eurasia and Europe. All other of the ten officially classified ‘African’ communities in South Africa also have some degree of L0-d, L0-d1 and L0-k Southern African haplogroup markers that are carried by the San and Khoe social groups mentioned. Mellet38 notes that, according to one study by Himla Soodyall, 17per cent of those self-identifying as sub-Saharan Africans had southern African mtDNA markers along with sub-Saharan Y-DNA markers (male lineage). There are no ‘pure’ lineages; over 194 000 years of the purity of any people would be impossible. Genetic studies have demolished the ‘race’ and ‘ethnographic’ constructs as a means of identifying humanity.

Variants of the same L-0 mtDNA can also be found among some white South Africans and also among diverse peoples across the globe. But having mtDNA of a particular type does not make them San people or Khoe people today, as there is a huge difference between DNA markers in humans and notions of identity.

The ancestors of one of the three main branches of San in southern Africa migrated to Namibia and surrounding Botswana around 140 000 years ago. The ancestors of the San in the northeastern parts of South Africa migrated there by 45 000 years ago, and other ancestors migrated to the southern reaches of the Cape by 30 000 years ago and 22 000 years ago.39

Again, in terms of the multiregional theory of human origins in Africa, this does not preclude the existence of other, extinct Homo sapiens in the same areas at early periods of time. What is clear, however, is that all humans in Africa today are descendants of humans who were migrants at some point in history; that all modern humans in the south and east of Africa are in ancient terms genetically related to San communities; and that all share a common root. Another way of seeing this is that, if all have an ancient ancestral connection with the ancestors of the San, and all share the fact that the San communities of at least 3 000 years ago to the present are our foundation people, then it is imperative that the San are put at the centre of our society and duly honoured. It is my perspective that the surviving San are a core connection of the African soul.

The prehistory period: Linguistic, cultural and faith perspectives

Broadly speaking, there are two overarching families of languages in Africa: Bantu languages and non-Bantu languages. Among the latter, the oldest of these are most often referenced as ‘Khoisan’ languages, but more accurately they are the Namib-Kgalagadi-Gariep (NKG) and Kwadi regional families of different languages with different roots, if we use the protocol of geo-terms rather than ethnographic labels. Looking at the linguistic arena through a non-ethnographic lens may assist us to better examine this important part of African social history and its ancient roots.

Jones40 shows us that there are four broad families of languages in Africa: 1 436 Niger-Congo (Bantu) languages; 371 Afro-Asiatic (formerly called Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic languages); 196 Nilo-Saharan languages; and 35 ‘Khoisan’ (NKG as well as Kwadi) languages. In all these languages there has been borrowing from each other, which attests to the fact that there are no absolute, solid walls that have separated peoples over vast expanses of time. Linguistics, like genetics, reveals the migratory spirit in the history of Homo sapiens and dispels the notion of the ‘natural separation’ of so-called ‘races’.

Güldemann41 has explored the inter-relationships between the three other African language families and the NKG family of languages and Kwadi, and provides argument and evidence to suggest that they are genealogically related. In his mapping of languages, he links the Khoe languages to Kwadi and the East African Sandawe language. Güldemann notes five different ‘Khoisan’ (NKG) languages that are still spoken in South Africa today, four of which have dictionaries and one (Xiri) only wordlists. He references 2 000 speakers of these languages in South Africa. In the case of Xiri, there are only three surviving people who still speak it.

The story of modern human development extends back over many thousands of years, where human proto-social groups lived and died out and left some tracer-markers that help us to understand past societies. Much, however, has not been left or has not survived dramatic natural events, or indeed is yet to be discovered. Languages, dialects or elements of these frequently change, or are adopted, kept or discarded. Language is also porous and not rigid. It defies the tendency for people today to want to box languages into conserved ‘tribal’, nationalist, ethno-nationalist or ‘race’ silos.

The same applies to religions, all of which have as many convergent beliefs as they have divergent or unique elements. Religious beliefs are a key cultural element of humanity and also hold the secrets of the migratory spirit of humans. Much of southern Africa below the equator is home to the Ngoma faith.42 This traditional faith, roughly translated as ‘the way of the drum’ (ngoma, also creolised to ‘ghoema’) is facilitated by the sangomas, who are diviners, and the faith has more than 3 000 years of history that is closely tied to the circular migratory drifts in the region. In the Cape it also influenced the faith and subculture colloquially known as ‘Doekum’ that derived from the Southeast Asian Dukun and Lewsi practices, and similar influences from Madagascar, as a result of slavery. The presence of Masbieker enslaved people taken from across southern Africa to the Cape resulted in the Ngoma faith rapidly mixing with other faith cultures in the City of Cape Town. Old tenets of San and Khoe faiths also came into the mix, as did European and other Asian faiths.

In other parts of the world along the slave routes one finds similar faith traditions in the form of Voudoun and Santeria. All these incorporate ancestral veneration, communication with the ancestral and spirit world, and physical and emotional healing. The outer form in devotions involves drumming, chanting, dancing and engagement with spirits and ancestors. Spirituality in the tradition of the indigenous African Ngoma faith is also about the union between ancestors and the land, health and good fortune. Spirituality is intricately aligned to language and thus must be considered as key to linguistic interpretation, most especially in that European scholars tend to approach language rigidly through written text. In Africa, from the art in burial places in ancient Kemet down to the southern Cape rock art, artistic expressions can be seen to be as important a part of language, and it brings faith and communication together.

Understanding the relationship of people to their belief system is vital to an understanding of social history. Coming to an understanding of African social history cannot leave out the study of belief systems and practices, nor omit the exploration of storytelling traditions. I would argue that linguistics in Africa cannot be dealt with in a silo divorced from the broader world of artistic expression and expressions of faith.

Güldemann’s43 linguistic work supports the work done by archaeologists, geneticists, rock art experts, anthropologists and other social scientists in showing that, within the Thõathõa Triangle, there are linkages between herder-hunter languages in East Africa and with peoples speaking Niger-Congo languages, Afro-Asiatic languages and Nilo-Saharan languages.44

By focusing on the !Xun and Khwedam languages, Jones45 uses the experience of speakers in contemporary times to demonstrate how languages change or become extinct. She says that ‘traditional language settings’ build and nurture language but when these become ‘vulnerable language settings’ and ‘new language settings’, language changes or it dies out, and this alters culture too. Creolisation of language creates a circular effect that results in a continuum of change in language. For small and micro vulnerable communities, it results in extinction often not only of the language but also of the cultural community of people. In southern Africa, genocide, dispossession of land and means of sustenance, de-Africanisation through assimilation into the ‘Coloured’ construct, and wars right up to the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (SADF) wars in Namibia and Angola have all contributed to language destruction and the destruction of societies.

Jones46 illustrates this reality by showing how as a result of the SADF wars, engagements with various peoples and migration to South Africa from Angola and Namibia, the !Xun and Khwe peoples, relatively small communities, were exposed to multilingualism that has impacted negatively on the !Xun and Khwedam languages.

The example of language illustrates how identities and ethnicities also change over time and how societies do not remain static for thousands of years. For a long time there has been an erroneous view, now challenged by specialists in San and Khoe languages such as Menán du Plessis,47 that the suggested widespread borrowing from ‘Khoisan’ languages into the Nguni languages is supported by strong evidence. She argues that there are indications of influence in the reverse direction, and presents evidence, particularly with regard to the clicks used in Nguni languages being different from those that had been in the San languages.48

The clicks that occur in other Bantu languages to the north also present a challenge in that the cross-influences in language may have occurred much further back in time between forebear San and Bantu speakers outside of South Africa, given that San peoples resided as far north as Kenya, Zambia and northern Angola. In line with this book’s underlying theme of the story of ‘loss’, the point of these linguistic observations is to illustrate how assimilation and dominance negatively impacted language, leading to the loss of language, and contributing to marginalisation and discrimination.

Du Plessis49 unpacks the extinction of Kora or !Ora, one of the original languages of the Western Cape Khoe and the 19th-century Korana revivalists, to show how the language became extinct over time as a result of wars, migration and generational changes, and was replaced by Afrikaans.

Once, there were more languages of the Khoe peoples, who were spread throughout Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mpumalanga, KZN, Swaziland, Mozambique as well as right down to the Cape. These languages would have died out and joined with other languages as Khoe foundation peoples assimilated into new societies along with other groups. From a practical perspective, Nama or Khoekhoegowab, which was initially the language of the upper West Coast and Namibia, offers a language for Korana, Griqua and Cape Khoe revivalists as it has official status in Namibia and thrives in institutions of learning. Khoekhoegowab clearly links in to Kora and older languages that are now extinct. It may offer a restorative path for revival of a Khoe language for some in South Africa and should be recognised as an official language.

As will be seen later on, some of the speakers of the Namib-Kgalagadi-Gariep languages are evidenced to have been part of the evolution of society that formed the multi-ethnic Mapungubwe state or kingdom as the beginning of an age of southern African kingdom formation – our southern African civilisation. We can only speculate as to which language or languages or language combinations were spoken or developed under these circumstances. There is a dialectical relationship between the formation of societies and language, but up to now this social history has largely been unknown to those looking at linguistics and genetics.

Each of the different micro-communities developing in southern Africa between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE is likely to have moved along different paths of development, with some following migratory drifts and others not, some cultivating crops and others not, some keeping sheep and others not, and others practising various combinations of all three modes of living. Some engaged in mining, metallurgy and craftsmanship as well.

There is clarity that various San peoples across southern Africa cannot be stereotyped as simply having been hunter-gatherers, living in isolation or as nomads, and then be treated as a species or ‘race’ with a completely separate lived reality from other Africans.

There is also the notion that San people wandered about naked or near naked, which is debunked by Vibeke Viestad50 in her work on ‘dress as social relations’. Despite there being over twenty surviving San peoples in six countries, there are claims that all San people look alike, have a single culture and a single language, and are short in stature, have light skin colour and specific features as per race arguments. The book Voices of the San51 provides a photographic overview of the many San communities in southern Africa, including the photographs of the 17 San authors of the book, which demolishes this myth. There is also the mid-19th-century collection of portrait photographs by Gustav Fritsch52 that shows photos of San people who defy the stereotype. Prins53 and others peel back the curtain on the ‘Secret San’ of the Drakensberg among the Zulu people, known by a range of names from AbaTwa to ||Xegwi, where this community also does not fit the stereotype.

This kind of racialising and colourising of San and Khoe social identities is deeply rooted in reaction to disparaging colonial paradigms of thinking related to ‘colourising’ identity and the rejection of a constructed ‘Coloured’ identity based on miscegenation, instead of a focus on social identity. In taking a position against ‘Coloured’ terminology, an equally colourist approach is adopted by some who created another colourist paradigm of ‘brown and black’ in response. Adhikari,54 also drawing on Zimitri Erasmus and Zoë Wicomb, points out in his paper on racial stereotyping: ‘Racial identities in South Africa became ever more reified during the latter half of the twentieth century as a result of Apartheid policies institutionalising these identities to an unprecedented degree.’

Vernon February55 further explores how the stereotyping of people classified as ‘Coloured’ is deeply rooted in the stereotyping of the San and the Khoe over the past 370 years. The negative product of this is that this ‘colourist’, ‘race-exclusivist’ culture and the primacy culture of ‘firstism’ have crept into many otherwise excellent academic papers that do not question this paradigm’s colonial and Verwoerdian apartheid roots. Voices of the San56 also strongly makes the following point:

The San and the Khoekhoen are often identified as one group, and it will therefore be pertinent to this history of the San to include a note on this common misperception … in the early years of European settlement … the newcomers had much difficulty in telling the San and the Khoekhoen apart and thus many myths may have been wrongly attributed to either of the groups, owing to the observations and writings of short-term visitors, missionaries, hunters and explorers.

Voices of the San57 raises several these points in sections entitled ‘Myths about the San’ and ‘Idealism and Romanticism’. Many of these myths have entered the academic arena without being subjected to due critique. As a result, wrong is presented as right and vice versa. As we will see in this chapter, also informed by Voices of the San and an array of archaelogists, rock art experts, linguists and geneticists, it is also clear that until at least 1200 CE those known today as Khoe did not have a presence in the southernmost reaches of South Africa, and that their society was different from San societies. In the post-650 CE period, as the Khoe and Xhosa evolved their pastoral and herding economy in the Eastern Cape and later from 1000 CE in the Western Cape, the San, except for small fishing groups, moved from the coastal areas to the hunting fields and mountains of the Central Cape.

Within the oldest languages that we have knowledge of in southern Africa we can also see the relationship between language and social consciousness regarding the value of land and the sense of belonging between Africans and their land. The existence of particular words demonstrates a conscious human relationship to environment and place of abode, and thus challenges the suggestion of ignorance about belonging and of landownership that was attached to Africans by European colonialism. Ancient African consciousness is shown by words such as !hub (land) and |amma or |ammis (water), which links to !xaib (place) that can sustain human life, and which results in !’ãs (human settlement).

The localities of settlement, and of different peoples coming together, are shown at sites that are near water. Archaeologists have found the richest deposits of markers of modern human habitat where land and fresh water come together, which makes sense because without water humans cannot survive or sustain themselves. When one looks at the Thõathõa Triangle and Thõathõa Circle, one is immediately struck by the abundance of water. It is around the waterways of southern Africa, from the Zambezi and Shashe-Limpopo basins to the Camissa in Table Bay, that diverse ethnicities came together in the peopling of southern Africa and gave birth to many new formations of peoples of the South – Mzansi.

As a concluding thought on language, it is important to address three more reasons why the persistent usage of the term ‘Khoisan’ by some linguists must be confronted. The first reason, as we have seen, relates to the roles of Schultze and Bleek in the racial framing and race classification systems in South Africa and how the term is rooted in ‘racism’.

The second issue is one that has been frequently raised by the San peoples in rejecting the term ‘Khoisan’. They argue that prefixing of San with Khoe plays into theories and practices of assimilating ‘Khoisan’ as one people, with San subjugated under Khoe. This is stated unequivocally in the only book to date written by a collective of San people, Voices of the San58. The 17 authors were supported by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa and Namibia (WIMSA), which has a governing board made up of 12 representatives of San communities from Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Angola, led by Colin Tsima (chairperson), Kagisano Molapsi (vice-chairperson) and Billies Pamo (secretary), as well as the Kuru Family of Organisations in Botswana. The book puts it as follows: ‘The term Khoesan (or Khoesaan) has not been used as the San object to being grouped together with the presently more powerful pastoralist KhoeKhoen for academic and linguistic reasons.’ The stand-alone term ‘San’, pronounced ‘Saahn’, was first adopted by San representatives in Namibia and then reiterated at successive WIMSA AGMs since 1997 as the least derogatory term in meaning and history.59

A third reason for not using the term ‘Khoisan’ and similar versions is that during the period 1716 to 1880, as covered by Adhikari,60 Penn,61 Szalay,62 Ross63 and other researchers, information presented among other notes on genocide against the San shows that collaborator Khoe who had survived conquest by the Dutch made up 60 per cent of the cavalry militia of the Dutch-led General Commando, and at other times had their own independent retaliatory commandos made up of 100 per cent Khoe militia that were effectively mobile killing squads. Some Khoe were forcibly conscripted into the commandos, but most were not. In fact, Khoe who refused to be conscripted into commandos formed well-known resister bands under the leadership of David Stuurman in the Eastern Cape or joined Orlam groups in the northwest Kai !Gariep district. Among the aberrations there were practices such as the taking of San women and girls as concubines by Khoe militia.

The Orlam Khoe groups, Korana and Griqua who formed commandos totally independent of colonial rule to attack the San also have a well-recorded history of persecution, gratuitous violence, atrocities and extermination of various San peoples.64 This is also noted by the authors of the Voices of the San.65 In coming to grips with this period, it is important to point out that, while on the one side there were the collaborator Khoe who acted with great brutality against the San (also against Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and resister Khoe), on the other side were the resister Khoe who often made common cause with the San and fiercely resisted the European onslaught against the San. Likewise, the resister Khoe made common cause with the Xhosa. Inversely, independent collaborator Khoe supported the British and Boers against the Xhosa and resister Khoe. Among the resisters there were also small bands of Khoe refugees who temporarily became part of San communities.

This division of collaborators and resisters continued well beyond 1880 right through to the apartheid era and into post-apartheid South Africa. It is important for us in purging the pain of the past, and for healing, to acknowledge the greatest imposition of colonialism on Africans – the transfer of a culture of violence and aberration of a kind previously unknown to the San and Khoe into the behaviours of significant sectors of our forebears.

I will never forget how, on a visit to one of the largest slave-trading sites in Ghana, Cape Coast Castle, the guide started the sacred tour of the dungeons by asking us to take note that their society at Cape Coast ask the enslaved ancestors and their descendants for forgiveness for the role of African forebears in collaborating in the slave trade. It was a form of institutionalised cleansing ceremony before talking about the painful slavery experience and passing through the dungeons where the spirits of the enslaved forebears are visited by descendants.

I believe that it is a fundamental part of our own healing to do the same. There is no sector of our African society in South Africa that was absolutely free of collaboration with colonialism and apartheid. Even today we can see neocolonial collaboration in oppression in many forms within our contemporary society.

An erroneous and dominant prefixing of ‘San’ with ‘Khoe’ is a painful reminder to the San of being hunted down by various Khoe formations in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also conjures up memories of Schultze and Bofinger cutting up dead bodies and experimenting on terrified Nama forebears. The San formations have often pointed out this contradiction, and it is time for the sake of our own healing that we acknowledge and cleanse ourselves of all wrongs of the past.

The well-documented assertion of Khoe conflict with the San in the above-mentioned period should not be airbrushed out of history as an inconvenient truth propagated by neocolonial revisions of history. I raise it here as being an integral part of critical examination of the use of terminology and linguistic analysis. This theme of distinguishing two different traditions among the Khoe, of collaboration on the one side and resistance on the other, will be elaborated on in the chapter on wars of resistance.

Foundation peoples

In the sections that follow we will look at what can be regarded as the three ‘foundation peoples’ in the peopling of southern Africa and what would later become South Africa. Over the period 100–1850 CE almost every new social group, community or state society that emerged with a distinct identity in South Africa would involve some ancestry of the original San people, Khoe people and Kalanga people. Whether today one sees oneself as Venda, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Griqua, ‘Coloured’, Hessequa, Tswana, Pedi, Camissa, Swati, Korana, Nama, Ndebele, Shangaan, Tsonga or any of the other modern-day social formations or ethnicities, one can be sure that one has some San, Khoe or Kalanga ancestors.

The San foundation people

In the peopling of southern Africa over the past 3 000 years we can identify three families of ‘foundation peoples’. The first were those whom we collectively call the San peoples. The second were the proto-Khoe peoples from whom emerged the Khoe south of the Kai !Gariep, among others across southern Africa. The Khoe herder-pastoralist culture was probably the most influential culture across southern Africa in the foundations of the peopling of the region. The third influence was those cultures that archaeologists such as Huffman66 and others refer to as Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga peoples.

As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the San emerged over the past 10 000 years in the region through descendency from a long line of Homo sapiens ancestors and the progression to Homo sapiens sapiens. Today there are about 20 diverse San communities that still survive in six Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. Back in time there would have been possibly a few hundred micro-groups of Homo sapiens who evolved into social formations or communities that would broadly fall under the umbrella term that ethnographers and anthropologists first labelled as San. Each of these societies had their own names, as do the surviving groups today.

According to WIMSA67 and to James Suzman68 on behalf of the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia, which was commissioned by the European Union (EU) to complete a Regional Assessment of the Status of the San in Southern Africa, the San communities across the six countries are made up of the following peoples and their subclans: !Xun; !Kung; Hai||om; Ju||hoansi; X’ao||’aesi; Naro; N|u; ǂKhomani; Khwe; ||Xegwi; !Xõó; |Gui; Khute; ǂHõã; Tsila; |Gana; Deti; Tshua; Tyua; ||Anikhwe; and Bugakhwe.

There were other historic communities who had been wiped out by genocide in South Africa, such as the |Xam, |Xun, Ga !ne and others.69 Descendants of these groups have largely been assimilated into rural Khoe communities, but among some older people in a few communities they will still proudly recall their San ancestors – the |Xam. The San in South Africa are said to number about 4 700 according to the study by Robert Hitchcock70 in 1996, and 4 350 according to the EU study coordinated by James Suzman.71 Those surviving San communities in South Africa are the !Xun, Khwe, N|u, ǂKhomani (!Kung) and ||Xegwi. Across the six countries the San number about 100 000.72 The Hitchcock73 study of 1996 puts the total regional figure at 107 071 while the EU assessment coordinated by James Suzman74 puts the figure at 88 025.

According to a study by De Jongh,75 apart from the San who are represented in WIMSA, there are also other communities that have some descendant links to the |Xam, and other San who are the people known as the Karretjie Mense (Cart People) of the Great Karoo. For the past 80 years they have chosen to refer to themselves as Karretjie Mense.

In various communities – some classified as ‘Coloured’, as well as others who are seen as Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and Pedi – there are people who are referred to as the ‘Secret San’ because these identities are deeply hidden within other communities. Prins76 notes that, among Sotho and Zulu in the Drakensberg, many communities will point out clans who have what they call AbaTwa heritage, which indicates hidden ||Xegwi. There are also other people in small groups across South Africa who celebrate linkages to both San and Khoe in revived memory, as revivalists, some of whom call themselves Khoisan in an act of self-determination.

The Twa communities in the Congo and the indigenous minority communities in Tanzania known as the Sandawe and Hadza people are distantly genetically related to San, Khoe and Kalanga descendant communities in South Africa.77

As was referred to earlier, the original widespread Cape San, known as the |Xam, were largely exterminated in brutal acts of genocide, which will be covered in more detail in Chapter 3. All this contributed to the reduction in the numbers of the |Xam from the late 19th century and their overt disappearance during the 20th century.78 In the 1904 Census of the Cape Colony, which was the last census to separately record the Cape San, there were 4 181 persons recorded. One hundred and sixteen years later the figure has remained almost exactly the same for San in the whole of South Africa, whereas every other social formation has grown exponentially.

The Tshua San and the Khwe San in the territory around the Shashe-Limpopo Basin were the first to engage with other cultures that drifted into southern Africa. Barnard79 explains that the name ‘Tshua’ means ‘person’, and that this was the large, dominant San society straddling what are now Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. They were neighboured by the equally large Khwe San people, who straddled present-day Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zambia. It was the Tshua San who first engaged with the slow migratory drift of herders from East Africa who came into the region as well as the first Kalundu, Nkope and Kwale farmer cultures from West, Central and East Africa. They were strategically situated at the Shashe-Limpopo Basin, which was one of the gateways of the earliest migratory drifts into southern Africa.

Between 300 CE and 900 CE, huge social changes occurred alongside the Tshua San that would have impacted them. They engaged with migrant herder cultures, which would have had some impact, and also with herder-farmer cultures. The Tshua San and their neighbours the Khwe San probably already had a diverse sufficiency economy by the time stronger engagement with the herder culture in southern Zimbabwe and northern Botswana grew. It is likely that they kept a few sheep and fished besides hunting, and one cannot rule out some forms of crop cultivation. From my perspective, the stereotype of perpetual ‘hunter-gatherers’ is unlikely.

Drawing on the studies of several other researchers, Adhikari80 makes several points that challenge the stereotyping of San people, and concludes that San society was not static, uniform, unable to adapt to social change, or culturally homogeneous. As he puts it:

Apart from regional variations in social customs, cosmologies, weaponry, rock art styles and material culture, they spoke a diversity of languages, many of which were mutually unintelligible and that are today classified into three distinct linguistic families. Although they shared a similar mode of subsistence, San economies differed considerably depending on the natural environment …’

Adhkari81 further points out that the San ‘had names for hunting bands and for larger cultural and linguistic groupings but not for hunter- gatherers generally, indicating that the San did not see hunter-gatherers collectively as a distinct social identity’. While the ‘concept of the San is thus very much a social construct, it is nevertheless a meaningful social and analytical category because … communities share a distinctive economy and way of life …’ With reference to other studies, Adhikari82 notes that the San interacted with Khoe herders and Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists ‘in complex ways ranging from coexistence, intermarriage and social absorption, through clientship and the provision of shamanic services such as rain-making and healing …’

It is through San engagement with the migratory drifts of other peoples and evolving communities in southern Zimbabwe that between 400 BCE and 100 CE a new people emerged as the proto-Khoe.83 From about 100 CE, new communities with new cultures and languages, and with new economic activities, slowly emerged in the territory of the Tshua San. These were the Bambata, Leopard’s Kopje and Ziwa cultures, as well as other cultures that archaeologist Tom Huffman calls West African Kalundu culture.

This evolved into an emergence of a progression of locally born cultures. These new locally born communities, labelled by archaeologists as the Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga cultures, in turn gave birth to the Kalanga84 people, who established the first southern African state of Mapungubwe and who were the root people of the Thulamela state, the state of Great Zimbabwe, the Butua state of Khami, the Mutapa state and the Rozvi empire.

These were the dominant state/empire formations in southern Africa for about three centuries after the end of the first millennium. The Mapungbwe state, which is thought to have numbered about 5 000 people, was the first in a progression of other centres of emerging states. Huffman85 in South Africa, and Chirikure, Munyaradzi and Pikirayi86 in Zimbabwe, elaborate on the archaeological evidence for this progression provided by sites on both sides of the Limpopo that indicate these as being the earlier centres for the foundation cultures and locally born peopling of southern Africa. The Tshua San and the Khwe San were an integral part of the earliest foundations of these new societies.

According to Huffman87, and Oliver, Oliver and Fagan,88 the original Kalanga people descended from the early locally developed farmer and mining communities that developed around the Leopard’s Kopje archaeological site. These included early Kalundu and Nkope cultures and notably the Bambata-Gokomere-Ziwa cultures that drifted over the Limpopo and merged with other herder-farmer cultures already in the area.

From these cultures, the early and later Zhizo cultures developed locally and gave birth to several Kalanga foundation societies in what are now Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. While distinct communities of the San, Khoe and Kalanga foundation peoples still exist today, these groups are also the foundation peoples for all African societies in modern-day South Africa.

The San, Khoe and Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga peoples collectively incorporated hunter-herder-farmer cultures as well as distinct hunter, herder and farmer groups. It is likely that all three streams had elements of all these economic modes of sustenance to a greater or lesser degree.

As time progressed, the original flat structures of governance and leadership in all these societies began to change as their numbers grew and their economy diversified. Class-structured societies and hierarchy emerged on the path toward the development of the first southern African state. While San and Khoe would have been drawn into these new formations and some of their culture would have been absorbed too, their societies became overshadowed. This heralded the beginning of their marginalisation.

The Khoe foundation people

As we have already seen, engagements and genetic mixing between San and Khoe communities and Bantu-speaking agriculturalists did not first take place in the Eastern Cape as colonial historical accounts would have us believe, but rather occurred in Zimbabwe, northern Botswana, along the Limpopo in South Africa, as well as from present-day Gauteng to Lesotho and the Kai !Gariep. Nor do we see much evidence that the relationships between these different streams were marked by any great antagonism.

The Khoe were the first of the new identities that would emerge alongside two of the oldest San communities of southern Africa, the Tshua and the Khwe. Those entering the terrain south of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers came down the western passage of Angola, with others from the central passage from the Great Lakes region and also from East Africa in slow migratory drifts between 1000 BCE and 200 CE. Migratory drifts would continue for the next 1 000 years, but the early foundations of the multi-ethnic peopling of southern Africa were laid in the period 400 BCE to 400 CE.

Huffman89 and Hall90 refer to these slow migratory drifts as the earliest West African Kalundu culture that drifted into Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa between 100 BCE and 100 CE; Nkope culture from west of the Great Lakes into Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa; and Kwale culture from East Africa that drifted down through Zimbabwe and Mozambique into South Africa. The latter two cultures are two branches of what Huffman refers to as Urewe culture. Huffman’s work is based on cultural deposits such as pottery and ceramics that identify not just distinct communities but also migratory routes and the emergent new cultures that occurred along these routes from far-off locations in different parts of Africa, right down through South Africa and neighbouring countries into the Cape. The pottery with its many distinctive designs and ceramic stories in southern Africa provides a kind of key for unlocking the complex human movements and evolution of new cultures of the south.

Hunters, herders and farmers

Preceeding the entry of Kalundu, Nkope and Kwale cultures, from about 400 BCE to 200 BCE a hunter-herder culture grew into a stronger herder culture that spread in southwestern Zimbabwe, northern Botswana and along the Limpopo. Eastwood, Blundell and Smith,91 through the study of herder art, furnish us with much evidence of the spread of Khoe herder culture all along the Limpopo from Botswana to Mpumalanga and continued on the Zimbabwe side of the river too, right through to Mozambique.

Stenning92 identifies three types of human migrations and has coined the term ‘migratory drift’ as being one of these, with transhumance or seasonal migration and ‘migration proper’ being the other. He defines the ‘migratory drift’ as gradual deviance from traditional seasonal migration patterns due to competition with other peoples. I would add that a range of other reasons could also influence migratory drift, such as climate, disaster, disease or community schism, or simply increased size of a community putting stress on resources, resulting in a multiplication of societies by division.

Herder-hunter descendants of peoples who had slowly drifted from East Africa through Zimbabwe gave birth to local hunter-herder cultures such as can be seen in the Bambata culture, which points to early Khoe among Tshua San and Khwe San in Zimbabwe around the Limpopo, Shashe and Zambezi rivers. This was a progression of new layers of early peoples from the Great Lakes and East Africa over earlier Homo sapiens that go further back by thousands of years.

The slow drifts that took place from 1000 BCE were simply a progression of what had been happening in the areas I identified earlier in this chapter as the Thõathõa Triangle and the Thõathõa Circle for thousands of years. But there was a qualitative difference from midway through the past millennium BCE in that new permanent cultures, first of herding, and then of farming, developed in Zimbabwe and to its south, as seen in the emergence of the Bamabata and Ziwa cultures.

The earliest micro-communities of herder-hunters and herder-farmers in the migratory drifts would have first mingled with San people along the Zambezi and the northwestern reaches of Zimbabwe, and then over a lengthy period of 600 years drifted from around the Zambezi southwards to the Shashe and Limpopo confluence involving what are now Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. This was a time when borders as we know them today did not exist.

Sheep and later cattle are likely to have also spread southwards to South Africa and Botswana via this route, but not necessarily at the same time as micro-groups of herders. It is suggested by archaeologists such as Sadr93 that sheep migrated more rapidly southwards than the community formations communities who were herders. Sadr puts forward an argument of hunter-gatherer people acquiring sheep before any substantial local herder group (namely the Khoe) had matured to becoming an identifiable formation with large herds. Herder movements with large herds are only likely to have developed over a few centuries.

There is no evidence that 2 000 years ago the forebears of the Khoe had rapidly evolved into distinct large herder communities who suddenly migrated with large numbers of sheep and cattle to the southwestern Cape. The Khoe, too, were part of a slow migratory drift over more than a thousand years before they reached the southwestern Cape. A genetic94 study such as that of Schlebush does, however, track the movement of domestic animals into South Africa and Botswana at this time. This can be explained by Sadr’s hypothesis that hunter groups are likely to have acquired small numbers of sheep, and that this could have happened in a micro manner without a parallel migration of herders.

Though the Limpopo-Shashe Basin emerges as a cross-over point for animal movements into what is now South Africa, Sadr argues that there may have been more than one entry point for the movement of sheep deep into South Africa, and that the theory of San ‘hunters with sheep’ needs further research. This further totally disrupts the stereotypical portrayal of the San. But this observation does not detract from the emergence of a herder-hunter people who over time focused on herding and came to be called the Khoe. The entry of sheep into the sub-region preceded the arrival of cattle.

Bousman95 shows that the epicentre of this birthing of proto-Khoe was the northern periphery of the Kalahari in Botswana and the southern areas of Zimbabwe. The San hunters-with-sheep spread out over the last centuries of the previous millennium, and this occurred more rapidly than the development of proto-Khoe herder migrants fanning out.

The evolution of the proto-Khoe ‘foundation people’ between 200 BCE and 300 CE is more likely to have been a build-up into larger communities of cattle and sheep herders alongside Bantu-speaking farmers in the Shashe-Limpopo arena. The two emerging herding and farming traditions were much more closely aligned than has been projected in colonial history. The Khoe herder groups, along with the ancestors of the Sotho, Xhosa and Tembu, slowly drifted down to the Kai !Gariep by 500 CE, pioneering new relatively settled communities left all the way along the routes. The Khoe also fanned out through Zimbabwe and through what is today Mpumalanga and into present-day KwaZulu-Natal.

The spread of milk in the diet of southern African peoples has also left DNA markers. Geneticist Schlebusch96 tracked lactase persistence alleles (a variant form of a given gene) to make further revelations about the ancestry of southern African herder-pastoralists. Smith,97 Sadr98 and many other researchers further elaborate on the emergence of the early South African herders, with a divergence of views. In question is not the emergence of the Khoe, nor that they were herders, but rather how quickly they migrated, in what kind of numbers, along which routes, and by what time large herds of livestock appeared in South Africa rather than a few sheep and cattle here and there. Sadr convincingly makes the point that there is no evidence before 1000 CE of widespread settlement south of the Kai !Gariep of large groups of Khoe, nor of large numbers of sheep and cattle.

This point gives us reason to look more closely at the history and heritage of the Khoe in northern parts of South Africa, their subsistence economy and engagement with farmer societies, and the fact that their mode of sustenance may have included hunting and farming alongside herding for some time. Sadr’s argument also means that the history and cultural-societal formations of the Khoe in the southern Cape need to be examined more closely. The 17th-century noise of the 1652 paradigm has drowned out the story of the Cape San in the region.

Certainly by the time the Cape Khoe engaged with the Europeans, they had huge herds of livestock and a strong, distinct culture and social cohesion. The story of the emergence of this success requires much more research and exposure.

While all the interconnected academic sciences tell us that too little attention has been given to studying the Tshua and Khwe San hunter-gatherers and the proto-Khoe herders along the Limpopo and across to present-day KwaZulu-Natal, there is no doubt about their domination of the region until around the period from 300 to 500 CE when Ziwa cultures came into their own. Thereafter, the early sub-Saharan Bantu-speaking farmers (Ziwa to Zhizo cultures) that grew from the initial trickle into the area from about 100 CE, possibly earlier, outpaced the dominance of San and Khoe.

There is no real dramatic time difference between the emergence of proto-Khoe herders and Bantu-speaking farmer-metallurgists in South Africa. The metallurgy technology, like the introduction of sheep, may also have spread more rapidly and independently of pastoralists. Only a few centuries separate the emergence of the different migratory drifts, which means that arguments based on which of these groups were in South Africa first are fallacious. This becomes even more the case when one considers that only by the beginning of the first millennium did the proto-Khoe evolve into the southern Khoe ancestors of the 17th-century Khoe at the Cape. The farmers speaking Bantu langages and the Khoe herders are likely to have moved into what are now the Eastern and Western Cape at about the same time, and some groups would have been a mixture of the two.

The tendency in South African history is to see the Khoe communities as being only a Western, Eastern and Northern Cape set of communities and as having originated there, whereas a broader historical lens beyond the 1652 paradigm shows us that there is a much bigger picture of the Khoe as a foundation people. The Khoe are at the root of many present-day communities in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, and our historical perspectives on the Khoe are stunted.

Colonial and neocolonial histories have crippled the history and heritage of the Khoe peoples by attaching it absolutely as an appendage to European colonial history of the 16th to 19th centuries. This type of lens on the past cannot define the bigger contribution of the Khoe to the commonwealth of southern African history and development. It plays into a neocolonial framework, a race paradigm and the de-Africanisation imposed by colonialism and apartheid. It is for this reason that one could view some of the historical narratives on the Khoe that claim to be an anti-colonial perspective as actually being a neocolonial perspective because it still clings to the 1652 paradigm. A by-product of this skewed historical approach can then result in expressions of race antagonism, as ‘race’ characteristics are assigned to a caricature of the Khoe to then distance the Khoe from their Xhosa cousins.

Khoe migrations

A range of the most prominent researchers on the Khoe over the past 60 years located the birthplace of the Khoe as having been in a circled area with the epicentre between Lake Ngami and the Makgadikgadi (formerly Makarikari) salt basin in Botswana. Richard Elphick,99 in his book Khoikhoi and the founding of White South Africa, published in 1985, used a map to illustrate the origin and expansion of the Khoe. His circle narrowly focuses on Botswana, whereas the Thõathõa Circle shows a bigger circle that includes more of Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa. Also, whereas Elphick narrows down his expansion of the Khoe’s southward migration mainly to South Africa, while giving just a hint of an expansion to northeast KwaZulu-Natal, the actual story of Khoe migratory expansion is much broader than is shown on his map.

Elphick’s approach, like that of the title of his book, is caught up in the white South African 1652 paradigm – a marginalisation of the full history and spread of the Khoe in the peopling of southern Africa. Those who narrow down Khoe history and heritage to simply a story of those classified as ‘Coloured’ follow the same approach as Elphick’s framing of Khoe history, except that they go one step further. They maintain that the Khoe did not migrate to the Cape but had been present in a place such as Cape Town for hundreds of thousands of years, not distinguishing between Stone Age hominins, early Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens. This assertion is made despite the fact that the Cape Flats were submerged under two metres of seawater 5 000 years ago, in addition to other adverse climatic conditions affecting the area, according to Mlambo and Parsons.100

My perspective on this history is that a real postcolonial shift needs to be embraced rather than putting a spin on history for political expedience and material claims. It is high time that the bigger picture of the history of the Khoe as a southern African family of peoples is explored – and there is much more exploration required than presently exists. It does a great disservice to the memory of the Khoe that their contribution is locked into a 16th-to-19th-century European lens of looking at the Africans of the South. The 1652 paradigm impedes further exploration by driving the Khoe into a ‘founding of white South Africa’ cul-de-sac.

As noted in the preceding section on the San, East African-descendant herder-hunters in Zimbabwe with Nilotic-Saharan and Cushite genetic and linguistic connections reached the area of the Shashe-Limpopo Basin 2 400 years ago in a slow migratory drift that resulted in engagements with the local San population known as the Tshua and Khwe.101 Over the next 500 years they engaged in relations with the Khwe and Tshua in Zambia, Angola, Botswana and Zimbabwe, and with other San formations in Botswana and Namibia. This dovetailed with the presence of micro-groups of people with farmer cultures from West Africa, Central Africa and East Africa between 100 BCE and 300 CE. Those earliest herders were likely to have descended from hunter-herders such as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, and Nilotic peoples before them. The proto-Khoe thus had a very rich genetic ancestral heritage and cultural heritage rooted in Tshua and Khwe San and enriched by elements from West, Central, East and North Africa going back thousands of years.

It is muted in our popular understanding of history that during the period 400 BCE to 100 CE and beyond, in the Thõathõa Circle there were also hunters, hunter-herders, hunter-herder-farmers, and farmers with metallurgy skills in the broad arena that we know as Zimbabwe today, as far down into South Africa as present-day Gauteng.102 To underline this point and introduce some perspective, this was before and during the time of Jesus Christ, and Europe as we know it did not exist. The rigidly distinct stereotypes that we assign to San, Khoe and Bantu-speaking farmers today as hunters, herders and farmers respectively were far from being the sharp divides suggested on the basis of colonial observations. Each of these groups would seem to have shared elements of one another’s modes of sustenance then, and are likely to have done so throughout the following centuries.

There were no walls between peoples practising these modes of living, nor were there mass societies at that time in the region. It would be another 800 years before as large a concentration of 5000 people would live together in a single built environment (the Mapungubwe kingdom). By the time that early Khoe herders had emerged, so too had the iron-working early farmers, and technology is likely to have been shared as well.

These two proto-micro-communities of peoples could not have been rigidly separate peoples at that time. Once beneficiation of raw materials appeared in society, the earliest forms of social classes would have emerged, as would trade have entered the arena of human relations. As soon as client-classes emerge they are employed in a manner in which technologies are shared. Where people perform different economic activities, social exchange develops social relations. There was plenty of good land for grazing and cultivation, and the area was rich in water and mineral resources. Wildlife was also in abundance, and the kind of pressures arising from scarcity of resources and dominant control over land appeared to have been absent. Conflict would have begun to develop when external trade commodified certain products that were bartered for externally produced products by about 700 CE.

When one refers to ‘engagement’, this does not mean one dramatic event at a moment in time. First as individuals, and then as relatively micro associations of people, these descendants of migrations could not have posed a threat to the San communities they encountered. This is in keeping with what is known about slow migratory drifts across the globe, where conflicts usually occured as a result of clashes of economic modes and clashes between organised societies competing for domination of territory and resources. Indications are that the San communities and cultures remained the largest groups of peoples numerically throughout much of the first 300 years of the first millennium CE, and that the modes of living of all groups were not far apart. Human deposits found by archaeologists have revealed no signs of sudden movements, dramatic wars or invasions by peoples.

Studies done on San rock art from these times do not show the kind of conflict with herders and farmer peoples evidenced later. Distinct Khoe rock art along the length of the Limpopo from west to east also provide some insight into their experiences. It is to this period that we can date the evolution into a new people with a multi-ethnic past generally referred to as the Khoe. Most scholars suggest that the period when the Khoe came into their own was about 2 000 years ago in the northern Botswana and southern Zimbabwe regions before migrating to other locations. One of the areas of migration for some Khoe by about 500 CE was the Kai !Gariep, Lesotho and Northern Cape region, and it is there where the distinct Cape Khoe identity first prospered.

‘Casual-herders’103 rather than full-blown ‘pastoralists’ may also be a more appropriate term for the mix of early San hunters with sheep and early proto-Khoe ancestors. The three proto-Khoe phases are identified by Eastwood and Smith as those Khoe who moved westward, southward and along the Limpopo. Eastwood and Smith,104 and Smith and Ouzman,105 note 953 archaeological sites along the Limpopo, at many of which there are rock paintings that can be distinguished from those made by San hunter-gatherers. These expressions are explained as having been created by Khoe herders. The authors date this spread of Limpopo Khoe herders from about 100 CE, with examples of Khoe rock art spread through to Mpumalanga and southern Mozambique.

The earliest embrace of pastoralism by hunter-gatherers is thought to have occurred in East Africa among the Hadza and Sandawe peoples as a result of migratory drifts of sheep-keeping people of Nilotic origin (from the Nile Basin) who had acquired their sheep in North Africa and the Middle East. They would have been hunters with sheep rather than simply being herders.

The soul of the Khoe as those who nurture a close relationship with domestic animals tracks back to these ancient roots that came together with the ancient roots of hunter societies as well. Through the work of Karim Sadr106 and many others we can observe that southern African hunter-gatherers may have first embraced sheep herding as far north as the Zambezi Basin. Thus sheep may have migrated at a faster rate than people, with some San peoples having some sheep before the emergence of proto-Khoe, as was noted before. Micro groups of East African herders drifted over time into southwestern Zimbabwe, northern Botswana and the confluence region of the Shashe-Limpopo Basin region in about 300 BC.

Sadr107 points out that there is an invisibility of Khoe herder migrations to the south from an archaeological perspective until the turn of the second millennium, except for an Eastern Cape site evidencing proto-Khoe and proto-Xhosa. Evidence is available that shows that at the Kei River area some Iron Age agro-pastoralists were present with Khoe herders in about 650 CE. The Khoe are only likely to have arrived as far as the Southern Cape, Eastern Cape and Western Cape sometime around 1000 CE or later. The following observations by Sadr are worth noting:108

The difficulty of detecting the archaeology of the Khoekhoe migration may have something to do with our essentialist theoretical stance as well, whereby we imagine the first pastoralists to have been like the seventeenth-century Cape Khoe. But if cultures and identities are social constructs, they can form and dissolve rapidly. From this perspective, the seventeenth-century Cape Khoekhoe culture (for example as described by Kolbe in 1719) perhaps only took on its final form in the second millennium AD and may have been restricted to the coastal areas on the western side of southern Africa. It certainly dissolved soon after contact with Europeans (Elphick 1985).

That the culture was preserved in European writing, art and cartography – caught in the ‘literary lattice,’ as Anthony Humphreys (1998) puts it – may have imparted the false impression of an identity more stable and solid than it really was, and this in turn may have diverted us into thinking that it could be traced back wholesale into the first millennium AD. Archaeology can trace the origins of some of the cultural traits that constituted the seventeenth-century Khoekhoe package: the pots, the livestock, the production strategies, and the art, if not the language. These traits originated at different times and in different places and perhaps did not coalesce into the classic Cape Khoekhoe culture until the second millennium AD.

At best, the archaeological evidence suggests that LSA (Late Stone Age) pastoralism (as opposed to casual herding) may have been a second millennium AD development in southern Africa. There is certainly no archaeological evidence to show that a coherent, mass migration abruptly brought livestock and ceramic technology to the Cape around 2000 years ago.

The proto-Khoe who were birthed through the coming together over a long period with the Tshua around the Sashe-Limpopo Basin drifted deeper into Botswana and Namibia and down to the Kai !Gariep territory. It is from the Kai !Gariep that the Cape Khoe tributaries flowed, just like the river. This was an analogy that the late Dr Neville Alexander109 was fond of using for the peopling of South Africa. Sometime between 500 CE and 650 CE some major event occurred at the Kai !Gariep, according to oral legend related by Wuras,110 which resulted in some remaining and two other groups moving off in opposite directions, westward and southeastward.

Khoe and Xhosa

The opening chapters of Peires’s111 history of the Xhosa, The House of Phalo, indicates that the early |Kosa predate later Nguni-speaking migratory drifts. It is most likely that the earliest farmers with metallurgy skills in the Eastern Cape originated from the Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga ‘foundation people’ who first emerged along the Limpopo in the evolution towards the Mapungubwe kingdom. These are the first likely foundation roots of Xhosa and Thembu peoples, and more interdisciplinary research is needed to investigate these roots and the linkages going back to the Kalanga or the Zhizo-Kalanga founders of Mapungubwe, and the Kalanga founders of Great Zimbabwe. The Thembuland Xalanga area and the association of the name with the Fish Eagle repeats a recurring theme at all sites of Kalanga settlement – the appearance of the symbolic bird that is associated with the Kalanga, the well-known Great Zimbabwe bird that now appears on Zimbabwe’s national flag.

The archaeological finds across southern Africa of micro-groups of proto-Khoe herders and Zhizo-Kalanga farmers show that these are not separated by a long period of time, and that a slow migratory drift across southern Africa preceded later migrations in the first half of the second millennium. This is key to understanding the peopling of South Africa.

Embracing the older history and heritage of the Khoe across the whole of southern Africa does not alter the fact that the Cape Khoe had habitat in the Western Cape, were the first indigenous people who had contact with the Europeans in the 15th to 17th centuries, and were the first to have resisted colonialism. As will be shown later in this book, the Khoe are the people who can be proud of having engaged in the longest resistance movement to colonialism of all groups in South Africa, facing ethnocide and de-Africanisation machinations by Europeans along the way. They were also the first to have suffered subjugation and loss of land. These are the pillars of the struggle of indigenous people against marginalisation and discrimination in the 21st century and for the right to restore their economic sustainability and rebuild social cohesion. Embracing the older history and heritage actually enhances the case for support to address restorative justice.

The Khoe mode of living was continuously evolving as it spread across different regions. It was highly influenced every step of the way by other cultures, particularly those of the farmer cultures around them. The likelihood is that the southernmost Khoe evolved to a large extent to become the southwestern Cape Khoe as they existed in the 17th century, after the move into the Eastern Cape and down the southwestern coast from the Northern Cape. From those regions, early in the beginning of the second millennium the Khoe further evolved into the formations that would be engaged by the European travellers and colonists. By the time of the European incursion the southwestern Cape Khoe culture and economy had diversified, and I would talk of a well-developed livestock ranching society following advanced farming principles of rotational grazing.

The history and evolution of the |Kosa or Xhosa show very clearly that Xhosa and Khoe were evolving culturally and structurally at the same time. There was much overlap, and if we look at the Xhosa clan system and the communities of clans, the minor principalities and the two kingdoms of Gcaleka and Rharhabe today, it is clear that those referred to as Xhosa are a confederation of peoples. In his history of the Xhosa in their days of independence, Peires challenges the notion of a homogeneous Xhosa nation and provides the evidence for a body of incorporated communities allowing for a high degree of diverse practices – a confederation. Within this confederation, as shown in the Iziduko clan name system, there are also Khoe peoples that can be identified within the Xhosa. As will be shown in more detail in Chapter 5, this complexity of the Xhosa would later be manipulated by the colonial and apartheid regimes to create a Xhosa linguistic ‘nation’.

Intergroup relations in what is now the Eastern Cape were marked at different times by co-existence, by incorporation and by pastoral encroachment, and also by displacement. Intermarriage and sexual relations occurred, along with other forms of social engagement. Groups such as the |Xam (Cape San) had already been living across the Eastern, Western and central Cape areas for centuries before the Khoe and Xhosa arrived with their pastoral and agricultural culture.

The hegemony of agro-pastoralism brought into the Eastern Cape arena by the Khoe, early Xhosa and Thembu, and the Xhosa confederacy that later evolved (which consisted of two kingdoms and incorporated other migrant groups), displaced Cape San hegemony in the region over time. This, however, did not mean that all the San left the Eastern Cape. All communities of the Eastern Cape would experience greater impacts together as a result of later migrations of northeastern cultures from what today is KwaZulu-Natal into the Eastern Cape: the Mpondo, Mpondomise, Hlubi, Bomvana and Bhaca. But by far the greatest and permanent displacement of all groups would be as a result of European invasion and the wars of forced removal and destruction of the farming communities of indigenous Africans – San, Khoe and Xhosa.

Leadership and governance traditions among the Khoe

In the over 500 years from 1000 CE, the distinct southern Khoe developed sustainable micro-communities with their own brand of social cohesion. This was rooted in a long tradition of avoidance of the state-formation (or kingdom) process. In the northern parts of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique, the Khoe largely assimilated with other communities that went on to form large states with hierarchical structures. As the Khoe moved southwards they kept the character of an alternative path, and therein lay their distinctiveness.

It is interesting to note though that all the southern African states or kingdoms that followed the Nkope-Kwale influence, including the kingdoms within the Xhosa confederation, had as their supreme leaders a figure that had ‘divinity’ or ‘priestliness’ vested in leadership – Nkosi or Moerena or Lord. In this type of leadership there are two different themes to be explored – priest as servant of the people and intercessor with the great force of nature; or a ‘divine right’ to overlordship and dictatorship. The former reveals a degree of synergy with the older Khoe and San approach to leadership.

Abrahams112 elaborates as follows on the practice of collective non-hierachical leadership among the Khoe, with reference to the book by Elphick that was mentioned earlier:

The Khoisan displayed a considerable degree of social homogeneity. They did not seem to have chiefs, or if they did they certainly did not hold them in respect … Elphick used (the) concept (of chieftainship) with many reservations. He noted that the ‘… Khoikhoi failed to develop a form of hereditary chieftainship that could hold society together even during relatively short periods of hardship, …’ He also argued that ‘… the effective power of chiefs varied as much as the trappings of their office …’ In view of these reservations it is tempting to wonder whether the Khoisan could be said to have had chiefs at all … The Europeans who came to the Cape had what may be called a cultural bias towards hierarchy … The issue of who were regarded as authority figures within Khoisan society must be separated from the fact that the Europeans preferred to deal with individuals rather than collectives and would designate a particular group after that individual: ‘Herry’s people’, ‘Gonnema’s people’ and so forth.

In my reading of Elphick he disregards his own caution to a great extent and fails to identify the mischief at work, whereas Abrahams hits the nail on the head in identifying the thought behind the European bias. I would go on to emphasise too that the Europeans’ main motivation was to find a means of transferring land and resource ownership to themselves from the commonwealth of the indigenous Africans that was convenient for their own legal systems. They needed figures with vested authority to sign treaties and to transfer power to them.

Muthien113 makes the following point with regard to colonial imposition of male domination and European imposition of social order by the sword: ‘Scholarship on, as well as practices of, the Khoesan evidence normative nonviolence, as well as gender egalitarianism. These ancient norms and practices are still evident in modern KhoeSan oral history and practice.’

The Europeans projected and imposed the concept of male-only leadership on indigenous communities to reflect their own social norms, with the result that the imposed ‘chiefs and kapteins’ paradigm of hierarchical leadership also became a male affair. Later the missionaries further overlaid their patriarchal faith on Khoe society, so that to this day male domination in the traditional leadership arena is a strong feature. But as argued by Muthien,114 women in Khoe leadership and gender egalitarianism were strong features of pre-colonial society; the colonial imposition of a male supremacy order in society has always been challenged. In the 19th-century Khoe revivalist movement (Griqua, Korana, Orlam Afrikaner, etcetera) the older indigenous tradition of strong female leadership was brought to the fore again, as is evidenced by the East Griqua women leaders Margarete Kok (died 1889) and her daughter Rachel Kok, who married Andrew Andries Stockenström le Fleur (known in popular parlance as ‘de Kneg’). A modern-day example is the election of Hendrina Martha Afrikaner (died 2011) to leadership of all the Orlam Afrikaners in 2009. Flexibility of gender roles has been much stronger among the San and Khoe than among other African peoples in South Africa, but in modern times the influences of European patriarchy and of royalism in broader African society have strongly impacted San and Khoe community life.

The southern Khoe, today referred to as the Cape Khoe, one of five formations regarded by international bodies as ‘indigenous peoples who face marginalisation and discrimination’, followed a trajectory that found a distinct social space. This space was somewhere between the large form of ‘state’ or ‘kingdom’’ with stratified subjects on the one hand, and small micro-communities or clans on the other. It took the form of council-led communities of federated micro-groups of clans. These southern Cape Khoe federal communities were resilient and organised, and had their own distinctive social cohesion by the time they engaged the Europeans.

Centuries later these forms of ‘government by the people for the people’ have found resonance in the contemporary world in the smallest and most democratic forms of government that enjoy closest proximity to people – such as People’s Councils in Cuba and Vietnam, or even the commune system of local government in Paris, France. In the late 19th century the struggle of the defeated Paris Commune became an inspiring symbol for global freedom movements that, alas, missed the point and adopted huge command-state models instead, which led to the demise of socialist systems in the 20th century. The core democratic model of Khoe societies still holds great lessons for 21st-century societies. This is a point to which I will return in the concluding chapter.

The Cape Khoe brought families of communities (clans) together into larger communities such as the Hessequa, Chainouqua, Cochoqua and so on with councils of leaders/elders (Bi’a – heads agreed by concensus) and council meetings presided over by a person recognised as a Kai Bi’a (great head). Structures were kept flat and democratic without concentration of power in leaders. The Kora terms Bi’a and Kai Bi’a were adopted for use by the present-day Gorachouqua community in preference over the trendy and unauthentic use of royal titles such as chief, paramount chief, or kaptein, which are not part of Cape Khoe heritage. I was privileged to be involved in the research and production of a guiding handbook and workshopping of this process of discovery with the Gorachouqua council, working closely with Kai Bi’a Hennie van Wyk and Bi’a Jeanette Abrahams, two of the leaders of the Gorachouqua community.

When communities grew too large and livestock too plentiful, groups split off and moved further south. Later, when they were under threat from colonialism, some communities were flexible enough to re-unite in single formations. There are no overt signs that the development of these community formations was as a result of any serious continuous antagonism or violent clashes. Friction was generally well managed. Skirmishes involving violence (and records of such do exist) were quickly subject to intervention and largely resolved through negotiation between councils of leaders of the different formations. A system of ‘paying tribute’ was used to show recognition and to make amends, and there were the innovative mock-battles and the ‘cattle-reeving system’ for dealing with infringements involving livestock losses.

Muthien115 states that ‘[m]any ancient indigenous societies, including the KhoeSan, were premised on a partnership model, characterised by horizontal linkages, egalitarianism, harmony and balance, employing constructive conflict resolution (rather than violence)’. The different formations in the southwestern Cape were also well networked as inter-reliant communities. A strong consciousness and practice of inter-reliance contributes towards non-violent resolution of conflict. Value-driven exchange was intricately bound up with values-driven interaction, and this would quickly expose the dishonesty employed by Europeans in the bartering and payment for livestock and other local products by offering tinsel and glitter rather than substantial exchange. As such, violations appeared in European–African relations before any shots were fired. The Khoe would first attempt to seek redress for the violations using their traditional methods. As will be seen in the next chapter, only when that failed after eight years had passed would they resort to the path of armed conflict as a form of resistance.

With historical hindsight, the flaw in the non-martial tradition and flat council type democratic system was that it left communities vulnerable to external threat by martial forces of warmongers with imperial-scale command-governance structures. It left the Khoe wide open to the divide-and-rule tactics of the colonialists, and the Khoe’s lack of military structures, command and development of the art of war contributed to their being overpowered. This occurred even though the Khoe fought colonialism bravely in armed resistance for longer than any other people on the continent.

The Khoe had an understanding of how to engage in and win a battle, as the viceroy of Portuguese India Francisco de Almeida found out to his detriment in 1510. On that occasion, the Khoe defeated the Portuguese in battle, killing Almeida and his entire officer corps on the beaches of Table Bay. There is a huge difference, however, between a defensive battle and a war. The Khoe had not experienced war as we know it and did not have the means to win a sustained war. In 1659 the Khoe saw the beginning of a protracted series of wars over 227 years – the longest series of colonial wars in Africa.

The Cape San and the Cape Khoe, who later organised armed resistance groups against colonisation after learning some hard lessons, adapted the leadership council system into guerrilla warfare structures in the 18th century and that served them well. In the case of the |Xam resistance in the central Cape, this adaptation saw them gain the upper hand in warfare over 30 years. They were only overcome through genocide. Khoe leaders such as David Stuurman, Hans Trompetter and Hans Branders proved similarly that, in forming alliances with the Xhosa armies in the Eastern Cape and in using guerrilla tactics organised in foci groups, they increased their effectiveness in war multifold. But in the long run, the combination of ‘divide-and-conquer’ tactics by a large imperial force, with logistical lines that stretched over long distances, overpowered the small democratic social formations of the Cape Khoe.

In her research, Abrahams116 has long emphasised the transfer of early Khoe governance to methods of dealing practically with the new threat they faced:

The conclusion that the Khoisan were not ‘acculturated’ to killing as a way of life is borne out by … Khoisan methods of struggle. They waged what we would call nowadays guerilla warfare, which proved enormously effective against the British troops. Although the Khoisan occasionally made combined attacks, normally leadership was decentralized, with groups of guerillas making decisions on their own.

If one analyses Autshumao’s tactics and strategy for dealing with Jan van Riebeeck, at heart it bears out this key observation of Abrahams. We will explore this in the chapter on the founding of the port of Cape Town and the chapter on wars of resistance.

Cape Khoe community formations in the early 17th century

Elphick117 notes signs that indicate a Khoe communication chain and trading chain that could be tracked from the southernmost communities right through to the Kai !Gariep, and beyond to the far-off north and east. In the early chapters of his work Elphick118 gives just a glimpse of the pre-colonial economy and the local trade and long-distance trade carried out by the Khoe, and in later chapters he elaborates on the rise of the European economy in their ruining of the indigenous Africans’ economy.

Figures of Khoe across the Cape at the time of the first 50 years of colonial settlement are given by Elphick as ranging between 74 000 to 100 000, and the |Xam or Cape San are said to have numbered about 30 000.119

To the south beyond the Gonaqua/Gqunukhwebe, there were nine Cape Khoe community formations right down into the Cape Peninsula that were prosperous sheep and cattle farmers: Hessequa, Attaqua, Outeniqua, Chainouqua, Gouriqua, Cochoqua, Goringhaiqua, Gorachouqua, Chariguriqua and other smaller offshoot clans of these. They were rich in cattle and sheep herds of tens of thousands of each of these livestock.120 Their pastoral economy followed sound sustainable livestock-farming methods involving rotational grazing and protection of the integrity of waterholes and rivers.

From the early 17th century there also emerged a formation of drifters from other Khoe formations that established a modern permanent trading centre next to the Camissa River in Table Bay, who called themselves Watermans or ||Ammaqua. After their expulsion from the Cape Peninsula by the colonists they integrated with the Cochoqua and Nama peoples successively.

There were also some independent Khoe farmers who had settled permanently in the Cape Peninsula, as well as yet others with just a few sheep who defected from the Peninsula Khoe groups to a San line-fishermen group called the Sonqua.

The period 1600–1652 presents a social and economic revolution or state of transformation in Table Bay and its environs. The event of the arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck and his settlement party in 1652 was simply the thick end of the wedge that had already been changing the local cultures for at least half a century. What had been happening more radically in Angola and Mozambique for over a century before the Dutch settlement had already impacted on the Cape Peninsula as a result of mass visits by ships to its shores.

The next chapter will take up this story and the real story of the foundation of the port city of Cape Town between 1600 and 1652.

Perspectives on the Kalanga foundation people

Sometime around 900 BCE, a trickle of ethnically diverse farmers drifted into the northern territory of what we today call Zimbabwe and the Zambezi Basin, into Malawi and Mozambique, and by 200 CE into the territory called South Africa today. By the time micro-groups of farmers reached northern Botswana, southern Zimbabwe and South Africa, they were descendants whose roots were from Central and East Africa rather than peoples had who directly made their way south in a long march of some sort.

Likewise, descendants of peoples from Angola also entered Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa by the first decade CE. As we have already seen in the section on the Khoe, through the construction of timelines applied to pottery and ceramic deposits archaeologists such as Huffman and others have referred to Kalundu, Nkope and Kwale cultures (from West Africa, the Great Lakes area and East Africa respectively), with the latter two being branches of Urewe culture. These slow migratory drifts laid the basis of the earliest farmer foundation people of southern Africa, who progressed through Ziwa-Zhizo-Kalanga phases into the Kalanga foundation people.

Bronwen van Doornum121 shows the intensification of hunter-gatherer occupation in the Limpopo region from about 100 CE in which locally evolved herders and farmers were beginning to take root, as evidenced by the steep increase in artefact densities at several sites.

Hall and Smith122 elaborate on the changing relations between different eras of farmers, herders and hunter-gatherers in the region. They explain how the hunter-gatherers found a means to carve out a niche for themselves, particularly among the farmer elite as that population grew and stratification increased. The form of the niche positioning by the San hunter-gatherers emerged as that of providing spiritual guidance, invoking the power of the spiritual realm and rainmaking. They were revered, and some were brought into positions of the highest status among the multi-ethnic people of the Mapungubwe kingdom that began to emerge in the 10th century. Throughout South Africa San women often became the wives of powerful leaders. This is also evidenced by relatively high mtDNA (maternal-line DNA) among Bantu-language speakers in some areas.

The earliest traces of evolving mixed San, Khoe, and Kalundu-Urewe peoples are called the Bambata culture, which emerged in what is today Zimbabwe. By 80 CE, possibly earlier, the migratory drift of micro-groups of these multi-ethnic cultures had moved across the Limpopo River into what is called South Africa today.

The further mixing of San, Khoe, Bambata, Kwale, Nkope and Kalundu in this area produced a local society that archaeologists Huffman and Pikirayi refer to as the Ziwa agro-pastoralist society. They were joined over time by further migratory drifts through Zimbabwe southwards. In the course of time segmentation and conflicts occurred and through the impact of this, as well as periods of a mini Ice Age and droughts, many other pastoralist societies emerged.

The most outstanding societies that emeged in a continuum progression were Ziwa and Zhizo social formations, and finally the Kalanga social formation. The Kalanga moved out of the area, as the Khoe had done before them, to disperse further along the Limpopo to present-day Mpumalanga and Kwazulu-Natal and to Botswana and northwards into Zimbabwe. They formed powerful super-communities or states wherever they went.

The Kalanga also moved southwards through today’s North West province and Free State, down to the Kai !Gariep river territory. The Kai !Gariep and the Vaal rivers became another of the ||amma (water) areas where the peopling of South Africa evolved. The ancestors of the Eastern Cape Khoe, Xhosa and Thembu followed the same trajectories from the northwest and northeast down in a southeasterly direction to the Eastern Cape, where again three ||amma areas – the Kei, Keiskamma and Cumissa (Fish River) – played a further role as important sites in the peopling of South Africa.

Movements in southern Africa were dynamic and not only occurred from north to south, as some academic diagrams may depict these today. Instead, migrations were in multiple directions and even circular over time, with much departures and returns too.

Hall123 argues for and emphasises this different way of viewing our past in saying that the spread of a farming lifestyle to South Africa during the Early Iron Age occurred gradually and may not necessarily be attributable to any large-scale migration of Bantu-speaking people into southern Africa. He further argues, using the term ‘migratory drifts’, that there is unlikely to have been an importation into the region of the full Iron Age culture, but rather that this developed locally over time with incremental transfers of culture and technology. The slow natural migratory drifts as argued by Martin Hall dismiss any ‘sudden arrival’ by an advanced invader people labelled ‘Bantu’.124

Giliomee and Mbenga125 also show us that the Kwale-Nkope farmer culture was settled along the eastern parts of the Limpopo by 280 CE and through to KwaZulu Natal by 400 CE. From about 550 CE the Kalundu farmer culture had settled across the western regions from the Shashe-Limpopo area downwards towards the Kai !Gariep River region. Evidence of both Kwale and Kalundu farmer cultures dated to about 650 CE have been found as far south as East London.

During the first millennium much of South Africa was well populated by societies evolved from the micro-societies that first evolved rapidly from small micro-groups in the early centuries to quite complex societies on both sides of the Limpopo by 800 CE. Giliomee and Mbenga126 also highlight the cultural symbols that were left by these proto-South African societies, such as the Lydenburg Heads dated 800 CE. These are seven terracotta heads that were discovered in association with other pottery artefacts in Lydenburg, Mpumalanga.

The Ndondondwane ceramic head found in the Tugela Valley has also been dated to about 800 CE, and the ceramic representations of young women from the Mpofuma Valley in KwaZulu-Natal are from about 700 CE. According to Giliomee and Mbenga, at the Schroda archaeological site in the Limpopo Valley thousands of fragments of these fertility dolls were found along with an array of other creations from the Zhizo period dating back to about 900 CE. Southern African fertility dolls have a wide range of meanings and uses from one society to another and are handed down over generations from mother to daughter. They are companions to children and act as a charm or talisman to ensure fertility in women.

The artefacts from this period of 700 CE to 900 CE represent just one facet of the evidence of the evolving civilisations that existed in the run-up to the formation of the advanced South African kingdom of Mapangubwe in the 11th century and its successors. The period 100 BCE through to 700 CE also has sites with equally important human cultural deposits that assist us in uncovering the early African civilisations that arose in the first millennium.

Fleminger,127 Huffman,128 Calabrese129 and others elaborate on various epochs that should be considered in a progression that starts with the first Tshua and Khwe San mixing with the herder-hunter descendants of the migrants from East Africa with Nilotic roots. The first of the archaeological sites in this progression is the Bambata Cave in the west part of the Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe. The findings at the Bambata cave indicate this as one of the earliest sites associated with the ancestors of the Khoe that go back to 100 BCE. Archaeological deposits from about 200 CE expose what is called the Gokomere culture, indicating Nkope and Kwale farmer cultures that flourished in the area of Masvingo in Zimbabwe. The area is known for its rock art dating from 300 to 650 CE. Also closely related to these is the Ziwa ruins archaeological site in the Zambezi Valley that connects San, Khoe and early East African farmers.

The progression of human cultural deposits that inform our understanding of the peopling of the region also includes the many rich archaeological deposits found at sites in the Tswapong Hills in Botswana. All these cultures mesh with three more cultures linked to archaeological sites in the Soutspanberg in Limpopo known as Happy Rest culture, Silver Leaves culture and Eiland culture, which can be traced back to 300–700 CE. Near Mapungubwe are the Bambadyanalo (K2) culture site, the Gumanye culture site and the Schroda archaeological site that reveals the advanced Zhizo/Leokwe settlement in the Limpopo Valley. All these together and more offer up rich deposits that are all part of a jigsaw puzzle informing us about the early civilisations that laid the foundations for the peopling of South Africa. The culmination of this coming together saw the emergence of another strong enduring local culture such as that of the Khoe: the Kalanga culture.

The Zhizo society at the Bambadyanalo site saw further advancement at the Schroda and Leokwe sites between 900 and 1220 CE. By this time the Mapungubwe kingdom was flourishing, which it did until 1300 when, due to climatic changes, the epicentre for further advancement shifted to Great Zimbabwe and later to Thulamela. Thulamela, which is situated in the Pafuri area of the Kruger National Park, lasted into the 18th century.

The complex path briefly outlined above led to a locally developed Kalanga society and the formation of the Mapungubwe state (900–1290 CE) of about 5 000 people that was situated close to the confluence of the Limpopo and the Shashe rivers in what is today the Limpopo Province. It became the epicentre of a civilisation covering a huge area of southern Africa. While most know of the Great Zimbabwe state that developed after Mapungubwe, there are scores more little Zimbabwe stone-walled towns. There is also evidence of advanced stone-terrace farming in Bokoniland in Mpumalanga. These mentioned sites are just a few of more than 200 stone settlements in the vast area stretching across South Africa and Zimbabwe up to western Mozambique. The name ‘Zimbabwe’ derives from the Kalanga/Karanga dialect of Shona – dzimba dza mabwe meaning ‘houses of stones’.

The full studies of these archaeologists’ works are a fascinating eye-opener that assists us to build a social development history of Africans in South Africa. Of course, within this framework there are continuous differences of opinions and robust debates. My perspectives just represent one man’s exploration of this past in broad strokes. It is my recommendation that people read the many fascinating papers on these subjects to really get to understand the process of the ‘peopling of South Africa’ and the roots of all Africans in South Africa today. The one thing we can be sure of is that what became South Africa was not a land without an African population and without a developed civilisation made up of many societies across its length and breadth when the Europeans arrived.

A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from 800 CE

These periods show not just the settlements around Mapungubwe but also the movement of people backwards and forwards between what are now Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique, with plenty of evidence of trade linkages through the Mozambique ports of Kilwa and Sofala, and with Malawi, Tanzania and the Zambezi Delta.

Already by 700 CE pre-Mapungubwe communities were linked economically via Mozambique ports to South Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, Arabia and China, but from 900 CE this trade became highly advanced. Some Arab traders were coming inland by boats on the Zambezi. There is no evidence that at this time people from the far-off global reaches had any direct contact with the region. Instead there was a chain of trading moving through to the east coast of Africa with African intermediaries.

What we also have here are clear and irrefutably African societies or civilisations, which were multi-ethnic and included hunter-gatherers, herders, crop farmers and those with mixed modes of sustenance. These societies had further become stratified and were made up of different classes. Schoeman and Pikirayi state:130

Recent research about the formation of the Mapungubwe state reveals complex interactions beyond racial and ethnic homogenous societies. During K2 period (1000 to 1220 CE), a period that preceded Mapungubwe (1220 to 1290 CE), at least three groups with different material culture identities were present in the Shashe Limpopo Confluence area. These identities are visible in Leopard’s Kopje ceramics, Zhizo-Leokwe ceramics and hunter-gatherer (ancestral San) stone tools. Clearly then the K2-Mapungubwe area was occupied by people with different modes of production as well as ethnic origins. Together these communities shaped the Mapungubwe state, and it is likely that these communities intermarried (Calabrese 2007; Schoeman 2006a, b; van Doornum 2005, 2008).

While I would not give credence to a term as such as ‘racial’, this observation of Schoeman and Pikirayi resonates with the historical complexity and layered and interconnected landscape.

The formation of states in southern Africa

It is from about 1100 CE that the age of the creation of states began across southern Africa. These include those already mentioned as well as the Butua state of the Torwa dynasty and the mighty Mutapa state (also known as Monomutapa), formed initially as an offshoot of the Butua state by 1430. The first revolt by Changa Amir (Changamire) in 1490 resulted in a progression of events that led to the foundation of the Rozvi empire of the maMbos (Mambos) by 1660. For 150 years the Rozvi empire dominated trade with the world beyond Africa through the ports along the Mozambique coast after defeating the Portuguese attempt to control the inland gold trade.

Again this is a complex and vital part of southern African history, as it is from this revolutionary time of pastoral states with multi-ethnic foundations and from the technological advances within those states that the foundations of South African states and ethnic communities emerged. It was this rather than sudden mass migrations from far-off countries across the African continent that gave birth to local societies. The key to cultural-ethnic diversity in South Africa today lies in understanding the continued migrations from the Great Lakes region and beyond, to the West and the East, as infusions with cultural influences on the Mutapa state and the Rozvi empire.

By this time, each of the San-Khoe-Kalanga societies were also being infused with further West African, Central African and East African migratory drifts. As new states spread, so too did this continued influence, as Huffman131 demonstrates with the findings of Blackburn pottery and Moor Park pottery, and defensive walling in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

We know that Arab slave raiders and their collaborators were putting communities to flight all along the Azania132 coast. The name of the African coast from Somalia to the land of Sofala (northern Mozambique) from the 7th century was Azania – ‘the place of the Zanj’.133 The term Zanj (or Zanjis, Zenjis or Azanians) was the Arab name for the people enslaved on this eastern stretch of Africa. In the main it was the people of Ethiopia and the upper Zanj coast of East Africa that were the most sought after on the slave market of Basra in Persia.

In the land of Sofala off the coast of Nacala, an Arab trader known as Musa ibn Mbiki established his base on an island that became known by his name – Mozambique Island. This name was extended in use by the Portuguese colonial power as Mozambique. Before the migratory drift from the Azanian coast, which grew as people fled the Arab slave trade, the land of Sofala was inhabited by San communities. The Arab traders moved southwards to the northern reaches of the land of Sofala over five centuries in search of gold, ivory and slaves. In 1498 the Portuguese established a relationship with Musa ibn Mbiki. Together with Musa ibn Mbiki, Mozambique Island and Delagoa Bay (Maputu) were turned into fortresses for despatching enslaved people.134 Previously the southernmost slave-trading island stronghold had been the island Zanjibar (Zanzibar).

By the 10th century the Arab slave raiders had also extended their operations to what they called the Waq Waq coast (from Sofala down to present-day South Africa). As has been noted, by 900 CE they were coming far inland along the Zambezi waterways, in search of gold, ivory and slaves. A phenomenon such as slavery and natural disasters such as floods across the Zambezi Delta were the most likely reasons for a new wave of cultures from Central Africa and East Africa to have started filtering southwards into the territory of Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and later down into the south. This ties up with new pottery styles such as Blackburn and Moor Park appearing in Eshowe dating to about 1100.

While the Mutapa state had been started by the Kalanga moving from the state of Butua, with its roots in Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe before that, it quickly absorbed other peoples and cultures. In a continuum of migratory drifts from Central Africa, East Africa and the Zambezi Delta, new cultures flowed into the Mutapa state. Here we should keep in mind that, over ten previous centuries, peoples flowing from the Kgalagadi (Botswana) in the southwest, Ndongo and Kongo (Angola) and Central and East Africa had given birth to the Kalanga at Mapungubwe and to the BaKalanga (Botswana). The circular movement of people in the past now drew in a further mix of ethnicities or communities of people, from the Bembe, Mbundu, Lala, Manyika, Kiteve, Mandanda, Lozi, Lunda and many more from the Central African territories through to the East African coast. This started a new circular migratory drift.

Micro multi-ethnic groups from the Mutapa state would slowly drift down to what is now South Africa as a result of the first unrest in that state brought on by the pressures exerted by the Portuguese. The catalyst of a new, more rapid southwards exodus was when Changamire revolted against the Mutapa state over its development of relations with the exploitative Portuguese. It was this revolt that gave birth to the Rozvi empire of the maMbos or Mambos with its expansionist history. The Rozvi, also known as Balozwi, were the most powerful regional force from 1660 through to the rise of the Zulu kingdom in the 19th century. The term ‘Rozvi’ means the ‘destroyers’, and the Rozvi would incorporate the old Butua state and extend its presence to the territory of the old Mapungubwe state right across the immediate territory on the southern side of the Limpopo as well as to most of Zimbabwe and into Mozambique.

As we can see, the establishment of South African kingdoms (and new infusions of peoples and cultures from East Africa and the Great Lakes) tracks back to Arab slave-raiding, as well as to Portuguese colonial incursion into the land of Sofala, and to the Mutapa kingdom and its dynamics and the early Rozvi empire.

This era is at the roots of several South African ethnic communities and states that arose, where one can see that the earliest leaders or dynasty progenitors are usually dated from about 1300–1400 CE. Oral histories also generally go back to this period with blurred references that indicate small snapshots of the ancient past, such as descriptions of the Zambezi Delta or the region of the Mutapa state, or shades of Rozvi culture or older Kalanga, Khoe and San cultures.

While ethnicity was porous until this era and had a strong base of San, Khoe, Kalanga, Kalundu, Nkope and Kwale foundations, from this period onwards the multi-ethnic Mutapa-Rozvi culture with strong cultural overlays from Central African communities presented a strong stamp. This was despite the fact that the core background of the Rozvi was Kalanga. An emergent Koni eastern coast culture laid the foundations of what later became labelled Nguni culture. Koni or Nguni culture was a mix of Drakensberg San; migrant Khoe from the west Limpopo; Sotho and Kalanga from the southwestern traditions; Rozvi maMbo with its mix of Kalanga and the range of Central and East African infusions; Tsonga with its mix of East African and southern infusions, and other later migratory drifts. The Nguni are a locally developed people with multiple roots rather than simply the result of a sudden migration from elsewhere, as has been propagated in popular history.

Some of the influence also spread southwards, where the older mix of San, Khoe, Kalundu and Zhizo-Kalanga progressed to establish the earliest Xhosa and Thembu root cultures before the effects of the northeastern peoples from what we today know as KwaZulu-Natal.

It is equally important to note that underpinning any successful and advanced civilisation and state is a complex and successful economy. When we look at the advanced society and state of Mapungubwe and its successors, we see that they were operating far beyond a subsistence economy. They were civilisations that were mining, controlling wildlife and putting a value on ivory and on gold. They were smelting iron ore and gold and fashioning both utilitarian and artistic objects other than rock art and engravings. They had a trade corridor with the world and were using it to trade for products they did not possess. Deposits of objects identified as having originated from Southeast Asia, China, Arabia, South Asia and North Africa have been found at key archaeological sites.

Huffman135 elaborates on the 9th-century Swahili expansion southwards to southern Tanzania from where ivory was exported to India and indirectly to China. Imported glass beads found at several Early Iron Age sites show that the trade network had extended to southern Africa by the 8th and 9th centuries. He further cites Al Masudi’s 10th-century record mentioning gold from the land of Sofala.

According to Huffman,136 coastal trading stations at this time were supplying glass beads to the interior. Southeast Asian beads were found at Mapungubwe. He also notes that gold reefs were concentrated on the Zimbabwe plateau in greenstone belts not found in central or southern Mozambique, making the point that gold from Sofala had to come from the deep interior of Africa.

A marked increase in international demand for gold, particularly from the Far East, contributed to an upsurge in gold production in the 13th and 14th centuries.137 Today we can see temples, statues and palatial homes in South Asia dating from that time that are adorned with gold. The selling of gold leaf that is pasted onto Buddhist and Hindu statues by masses of devotees to this day gives some idea of the consumer demand for gold. As a result, gold from Zimbabwe and South Africa helped to support a boom period at Sofala too.

The Chinese138 also created a great demand for ivory and for leopard skins. Among the ruling classes in the East, gold, ivory and leopard skins were associated with the trappings of power and with affluence. The demand for gold and other local products resulted in the initial expansion of the Mapungubwe state northwards to control some of the gold fields in Zimbabwe. In return, Chinese celadon green-glazed stoneware made its way to Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. African traders navigated the complex competitor network of interlocutor South Asian, Arab and Southeast Asian traders long before the arrival of the Portuguese on the scene.

It was the surplus wealth from this trade and its associated multicultural interactions that presented new opportunities and challenges to people in the Mapungubwe landscape, and the landscape of its successor kingdoms. They clearly met those challenges. Operating from East African ports were a mix of African, Arab and Indian seamen. This was at a time when Europe had flimsy boats, little maritime experience and virtually no trade with much of the world. The Europeans would later use the skills of West African, East African and Arab mariners to gain the breakthroughs they needed to reach the East.

Eastward along the Limpopo on the Mpumalanga escarpment an advanced agricultural and trading society is also evidenced to have emerged from about 1500 CE. According to Delius, Maggs and Schoeman,139 the Bokoni farmers used an innovative farming system that was unique in what is now South Africa and the largest intensive farming system of its kind in southern and eastern Africa. It was based on intensive farming techniques, including massive investment in stone terracing for crops and stone kraals for livestock that allowed for the cultivation of the rich, volcanic soils on the hillsides of the escarpment. Crop cultivation was combined with closely managed livestock production. The Bokoni were linked to trading systems in the Indian Ocean trade with North Africa, Arabia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China.140

Slavery epochs as an influence on migrations and identity formation

In looking at the role and impacts of slavery systems in our history, the tendency is to see this simply in terms of the Cape slavery system. But the effects of slavery systems on the peopling of South Africa long precedes Cape slavery. They go back to impacts of the Arab-driven slavery era before the rise of the European-driven slave trade from the 15th century as well as to the beginnings of the European-driven slavery system. It is often overlooked that Africa was subjected to two different imperialist eras involving slave trading.

Wood141 notes that Arab slave raiders operated as far south as the southern Mozambique coast and today’s KwaZulu-Natal coast early in the second millennium, if not as early as the mid-10th century. We do not know how many people may have been taken in this period, but it illustrates that as soon as trade in valuable products such as ivory and gold became a norm, conflicts and piracy arose and the capturing and enslaving of people followed.

With the beginning of the European-driven slave trade, trade engagements in the region also produced civil conflicts and the selling of Tsonga, Chopi, Wutonga, Kosse and other prisoners of war as enslaved persons. Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique had a headstart of more than a century and a half on Dutch colonialism in South Africa.

The capturing and enslaving activity in southern Africa was tapped into by Madagascar-based pirates and included the selling of war captives from among the Ronga, Mfumo, Nyaka, Tembe, and inland Pedi, Bokoni and Swati.142 The enslaved were sold through Mozambique Island, Delagoa Bay and Madagascar as slaves called ‘Mozambiques’. Over time it became very difficult to separate these enslaved people with more direct links to South Africa from the many more enslaved on Mozambique Island who came from over 15 African societies all along the Zambezi into Zambia and Congo, as well as from Tanzania and northern Mozambique, and from Zimbabwe.143 Mozambique Island and Delagoa Bay were turned into melting pots for enslaved people after the Portuguese first developed a relationship with the Arab slave trader Musa Ibn Mbiki.

Parsons144 further informs us that through this slave trade various Ronga societies, such as the Gwambe of the Wutonga and the Kosse and Manyika, became suppliers of enslaved peoples to the Madagascar-based pirates and the Portuguese. The conflict territory extended up to St Lucia. These enslaved people included Nguni speakers from what is today northern KwaZulu-Natal through to the Ronga, Tsonga and Pedi. They would lose their community and societal identities when exported to the Americas.

Many scholars on African social history make the link between land and social history experiences – with slavery being just one of these experiences. Insoll,145 quoting Bollig, and Luig and Von Oppen, says:

Land can have many meanings in Africa that intertwine and are difficult to separate. These can be economic or refer to social relationships or ritual and religious beliefs. Land and landscape can also be constructed as a ‘mnemotope’ in which memory, kinship, and legitimacy of occupation are inscribed or ascribed.

We will see in further chapters just how much the slavery experience meshes as a Pan-African experience and an African-Asian experience with the issues of land, belonging and land beneficiation.

How the culture of kingdoms entered the cultural world of South Africa

Parsons146 shows us that there is also something else that is interesting about the emergence of the Rozvi empire or confederacy out of the Mutapa kingdom in various stages over time.

As was noted earlier, the Rozvi empire was started when Chief Changamire broke away from the northeast Mutapa kingdom and first established the Changamire state, which then gave birth to the Rozvi confederacy or empire. This split occurred as a direct result of internal Mutapa conflict regarding what was considered favourable treatment of the Portuguese by the kingdom and co-operation with Portuguese enslavement of Africans.

It is in these conflicts and similar ones in Angola in the west that negative European engagement with Africans in southern Africa has its roots before the beginnings of colonisation at the Cape. Enslavement was at the core of this negative European engagement. Large cargoes of enslaved people passed through the proto-port at Table Bay for 50 years before the Dutch colony was founded. During this time the Khoe at the Cape would have become well aware of the slave trade and all that it encompassed. Besides the huge numbers passing through the Khoe-administered port, several Khoe had gone abroad with European ships and would have learnt about slavery in detail.

Migrations often occurred as people were put to flight by slave raiding in Angola and Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial period. The same had happened earlier in East Africa during the Arab slave-raiding period. It is for this reason that slavery and dispossession of land in Africa are so closely linked.

The clash with Portuguese colonial slave raiders in their contact with the Mutapa state precipitated a major revolution in southern Africa that dramatically impacted the peopling of the region. With that revolution, the culture of kingdoms entered the cultural world of what is now South Africa, first through the Rozvi empire and later through its dissolution into the Rozvi confederacy of kingdoms.

The culture of the Mutapa state with its Kalanga foundation roots changed to incorporate adherence to a belief that supreme leaders of the state were divinely appointed and were both priest and leader. Manifestations of the ‘divinity of leaders’ are a worldwide phenomenon, but in southern Africa it descends from the Lala people of Congo and from West African cultures. These divine leaders were called maMbos or Mambos. During the reign of one of the Mambos of the Mutapa, the Mambo Chikuyo (1494–1530), the disagreement mentioned earlier about the Portuguese slave raiders and gold-seekers being given too much power turned into a civil war. Changamire led a group southwards and declared independence in the south.

In about 1670 the new divine leader was a man by the name of Dombo who, by about 1680, had built a powerful army known as the Rozvi (‘the destroyers’). The Rozvi destroyed the Butua kingdom in western Zimbawe and overthrew the Torwa dynasty. The power of Dombo extended over some of the southern Pedi and Tswana groups that had migrated from south of the Limpopo to the Shashe River area of Zimbabwe.

Parsons147 mentions that the military ideas of the horning battle tactics and the short stabbing spear in close combat fighting, which are often associated with the Zulu king Shaka, had been used much earlier by the Rozvi during Dombo’s time. Refugees from Dombo’s reign are likely to have settled in what are now Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal. Shaka’s later Mfecane (‘the crushing’) involved warfare across a huge area of South Africa in which he forcibly almalgamated societies and communities by submission. The great similarity between the names Rozvi (‘the destroyers’) and Mfecane (‘the crushing’) cannot be overlooked as incidental. This challenges the uniqueness of Shaka’s rise. The Rozvi and Mfecane phenomenona are both directly related to strategies to challenge colonial incursions – of the Portuguese and the Boers respectively.

The imperial sweep subjected all the defeated to paying tribute to Shaka as the supreme leader and accepting his social and military framework. This martial and governance defence mechanism ready and able to challenge colonialism would later prove itself in the Zulu victory against a strong British force at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 in the time of King Cetshwayo.

Shaka’s ideas, methods and tactics were a repeat of a remarkably similar set of historical events of more than 150 years earlier. They can be seen as an extension of the Rozvi revolution, which was a large-scale reorganisation of societies to face modern threats. The Rozvi empire was only finally destroyed by Queen Nyamazana in 1836 during the flight of the Nongoni from the south to the north in the post-Mfecane period.

What is interesting is that several of the groups we refer to as being Nguni have an affinity for what they call an abaMbo or eMbo ancestral root – the initially small Zulu clan among them. These Mbo roots are spoken about in oral traditions ranging from the Ndwandwe, Hlubi, Ngwane, Mzantsi and Zulu,to the Mpondo, Mpondomise and Mfengu. There is also a clan called abaMbo or AbaseMbo. The Swati, too, have a lineage that goes back in time to the Rozvi MaMbos and the Mutapa kingdom. It makes more sense that this root goes back to the maMbo culture of the Rozvi confederacy rather than to the minor West African Mbo tribe, who are incorrectly believed by some to have marched on into South Africa in a mass aggressive invasion.

The Mambo or divine leader tradition had flowed from the Congo peoples down through to the Kalanga of the Mutapa kingdom to the Rozvi empire and entered the South African arena into Swaziland, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal between 1100 and 1450 CE. It is the root of the Nkosi, Morena (Lord) or royal tradition in South Africa. The European word and concept of hereditary ‘kings’ was overlaid on this tradition.

Parsons148 also tells us that during the 17th and 18th centuries the Langeni of the Pongola marshlands were part of the Tembe kingdom of the Ronga and may also earlier have been part of the Nyaka kingdom. These are all peoples with a mixed heritage going back to the southwestern San-Khoe-Kalanga societies of the first millennium as well as to the Urewe roots of northeast Africa and the Great Lakes. The Langeni split up into new clan formations that moved southwards to join up in the societies that were emerging in present-day KwaZulu-Natal and came to be called Nguni. These clans included the Ngwaneni, Dlamini, Ndwandwe and Langa. Other formations with this root are the Hlubi, Ngwane and Swati. The Hlubi could be the oldest of the peoples in the region, with roots that can be tracked back to the Rozvi Mambo state and the Mutapa state with their old southern African ancestral Kalanga pastoral heritage, as well as to the East African ancestral Shubi heritage.

According to Parsons,149 there was much movement to and fro over the Limpopo in the east, and to and fro between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In this arena there were many trade routes to the coast and much opportunistic trading activity in gold, ivory and slaves. Tsonga from the south and the north were involved, as were Tswana, Sotho and Chopi-Tonga. Chopi and Tonga (who were related to the Tswana/Sotho) were originally part of the Rozvi confederacy. The southern Tsonga who did not move northwards formed three Ronga states: the Nyaka, Tembe and Maputo. These ended up in conflict with one another as well as with the societies to the south referred to as Bokoni/Nguni in KwaZulu-Natal, Swaziland and Mpumalanga.

It is this conflict arena that saw European pirates based in Madagascar become involved to exploit the tensions. Prisoners of war in southern Mozambique and today’s Mpumalanga and northern KwaZulu-Natal were then traded to the pirates as slaves. All this occurred long before the age of Shaka, during which, and after which, there is no evidence of prisoners of war being sold as slaves, according to Eldredge and Morton.150 Shaka ruled from 1816 to 1828.

With the decline of Ronga power in today’s northern KwaZulu-Natal, the Ndwandwe chieftaincy arose, consolidated its power over the region and incorporated many of its former enemies. The other powerful chieftaincy that arose in about 1600 was that of Nyambose with his Mthethwa, who also trace back to the Tsonga. These were the two most powerful regional formations up until the late 18th century. These Nguni societies traded extensively across the Drakensberg with Tswana-Sotho. There was much migration back and forth across the mountains and much adoption of each other’s cultures.

At the same time as the emergence of the Ndwandwe and Mthethwa, there were the Zantsi clans spread along the coastal area of central KwaZulu-Natal from Babanango mountain west of Ulundi. One of these clans split into the Qwabe clan and the Zulu clan, and the latter settled on the Mhlatuze River.151

The groups referred to as southern Nguni mainly emerged from the Zwedi clan north of the Mzimkhulu River and the Hlubi.152 These societies were the Mpondo, Bhaca, Hlubi, Xesibe, Zizi, Bhele, Tolo, Cele, Ntlangwini and Mpondomise. The Bomvana later migrated to the Mpondo to seek refuge during conflict in the north.

The Xhosa took in peoples from the north who sought refuge. The confederacy of Khoe and Xhosa (|Kosa) was only welded into a kingdom at the time of Tshawe with the help of his allies among the Mpondomise. It is from this and the earlier mentioned migrations that the modern Xhosa confederation of peoples were born, with a strong hegemony in their society of those to their immediate north but nonetheless also with a very strong Khoe backbone as well as an older San legacy. The history of the Thembu, like that of the Xhosa, involves earlier migrations from the west at the time of the early Khoe and Xhosa, as well as migrations from the northeast.

The rise of new states in the western regions of South Africa

There were more than 30 large organised formations elsewhere across South Africa besides the great Rozvi empire.153 From early micro-societies that consolidated over time with the development of trade and stratification, there were processes of what Giliomee and Mbenga154 call segmentation and differentiation, resulting in new kingdoms. They cite 35 ethnic groups.

Examples of these are the early Pedi state, the Bokoni phenomenon, the Hurutshe state, the Rolong state, the Tlhaping state, the Tebele state, and the Nwaketsi state. There was the emergence of the social formations of the Fokeng, Tlokoa, Koena, Kubung, Taung and Zizi along the road to the Sotho state, which also involved incorporation of San, Khoe and Zizho-Kalanga foundation people.

Segmentation can be explained as the separation or breaking away by groups from existing societies related by descent from a common ancestor or origin to create new social groups. Differentiation refers to the exertion of political, social and economic control over others that leads to stratification and a hierarchy of a common class and a client class.

After the decline of the Mapangubwe state in 1290 CE, the first emergence of ‘differentiation’ was the Kalanga (Karanga) or ‘The Houses of Stone’ people, who branched off northwards from the Shashe-Limpopo Basin to establish Great Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe can be translated as ‘Houses of Stone’. The Kalanga had also moved westwards to Botswana, where they called themselves the Bakalanga, before the Zimbabwe move.

In the western arena of South Africa, we again turn to archaeology to inform us about some of the first new events in the second millennium. Mlambo and Parsons155 explain how pottery and ceramics found at various sites show us how social history unfolds and can be tracked. A site just beyond Phalaborwa that has been identified as Icon culture dates back to 1250 CE. Three new Moloko pottery cultures followed Icon from 1500 CE: the Letsibogo culture of the North-Sotho peoples; the Olifantspoort culture of the early Rolong Tswana led by Morolong and South Sotho people in Gauteng and the southern North West Province; and the Madikwe culture of the southern Tswana people in the North West Province. Further to the west, the Eiland culture of the Kgalagari people unfolded from 1300 CE in the eastern Kalahari. With the Rolong, Phofu, Kwena, Kgatla and other clans, a useful tool in tracking their social history would be by taking oral tradition and totem cultures on board in one’s explorations.

Mlambo and Parsons156 note that ‘Tswana’ was a self-identification term used by these clans in recognising each other to be related and explains that Tswana chiefs and headmen married their first cousins as ‘great wives’, thereby keeping big cattle herds in the family. They also married non-Tswana women as junior wives, producing daughters whose marriages sealed alliances with subject headmen who paid cattle as bride-wealth. The cattle were ‘loaned’ back to the subject headmen as long as they were loyal. Tswana rulers brought non-Tswana subjects together as multi-cultural subordinate ‘wards’ within villages.

The Ntsoanatsatsi culture (meaning rising sun/origins/ancestral font) emerged from 1450 CE, giving birth to the Fokeng people.157 This was a mix of Kalanga/Mambo/Rozvi-influenced Nguni speakers from across the Drakensberg who came together with Khoe, San and South Sotho people with Kalanga origins. The hybrid building styles of these people influenced many different social groups in South Africa, and this symbolic built environment offers clues to the micro social history of these peoples. Tlokwa clans among the Tswana and South Sotho can be traced to the intermarriage of the Fokeng with Kgatla Tswana.

Further westwards, crossing over the Drakensberg from the east, long before the Mfecane there were the people of Musi and of Langa who laid the foundations of the early Ndebele. In the course of time and a complex history, the Ndebele would split into three different societies: two in South Africa and one in Zimbabwe that was founded by Mzilakazi, rebel leader of the Khumalos. One Ndebele state in South Africa remained close to the Zulu and the other was closer to the Sotho-Tswana peoples.

The Soutpansberg territory was occupied by a mixture of people associated with the Icon pottery culture and the Ngona Shona-speaking people who settled among them. The Tavashena pottery culture in the Soutpansberg from 1450 CE can be attributed to the infusions of other Shona migrants fleeing conflict in the Rozvi-dominated Zimbabwe arena. In time the Singo people in this region established the Venda kingdom after 1690.

There were several other cultures such as the Malapati Gumanye, Klingbeil, Maguga, Eiland, Diamant, Baratani, Kgalagari and Toutswe cultures, all of which denote pottery, ceramics, building and language cultures. They also have roots in San, Khoe and Kalanga, as well as the old Urewe – Nkope and Kwale – cultures and the Kalundu culture.

These few broad strokes of history highlighting the cultures and peoples of the western regions of South Africa only present the tip of an iceberg of complex history and heritage. Further scholarly work will show just how much these cultures cross-fertilised all other cultures in South Africa. My intention here has simply been to introduce this multifaceted past. Circular migratory drifts over long periods of time interconnected all southern African societies, leaving nobody untouched.

As the Khoe pastoralists and other agro-pastoralists moved into territories already occupied for thousands of years by different San peoples, rock paintings of the San are one of the means for gauging what occurred in those times. The interpretations indicate that at times there was peaceful coexistence and at other times there were troubles. The San were sometimes incorporated into the new formations and at other times found themselves on the margins, always having to give way to the more powerful. At the Kai !Gariep (or Orange River) territory, the Sotho ancestors, the Xhosa ancestors, the Khoe and the River San such as the different Gai, !Eis and Koa communities coexisted in different locations along the river in early times (500-800 CE). This was not to last.158 Some communities drifted apart and moved further into the Cape. They took a range of cultural influences with them and then crafted their own unique identities and cultures too.

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The following chapters will look at some of the most pertinent struggles involving the Cape indigenous African communities – the |Xam (Cape San), the various Khoe communities, and Xhosa communities. The Cape Khoe were those who first clashed with interlopers in defence of their land and livelihood rights, initially with early European travellers who infringed on their rights and then with the Dutch colonial settlement. The |Xam put the highest premium on their culture of ‘total freedom’ and made the ultimate stand of ‘freedom or death’ in their defence against the genocide committed against them. These are among the most important points to be exposed in the approach of this narrative challenging the lie of 1652. All of what will be explored is part of the legacy of trauma that descendants wrestle with today.

Yvette Abrahams159 puts it clearly and succinctly when describing generationally transmitted trauma in our society today as having three causes:

… the original violence of the dysjuncture [sic]; the memory-triggered trauma of that violence; without healing tools, we develop dysfunctional responses to dysjunctures. Although they add to our problems, dysfunctional responses work. We did, we do, survive. It is not enough for a revolution. Colonialism happened. Dysjunctures remain … There are times when survival itself becomes resistance. In the face of loss so complete, and so total, life itself becomes an act of resistance.

This chapter has not attempted to present a definitive history of 1000 BCE to 1652 but rather draws on my reading of many different social science contributions, with many competing views, to present perspectives on a range of themes. All these themes together frame a different approach to the colonial and apartheid version of the peopling of southern Africa.

The intention of these discussions and perspectives is not to present a new ‘authentic’ version of history, but rather to disrupt the dominant colonial paradigm of thinking about southern Africa and to promote exploration of the past that can build consciousness leading to reclaiming a trajectory of rising above adversity through acts of resistance. There are so many fascinating, well-researched new publications and literally thousands of unpublished works that are now easily available to the public through the internet. The bottom line is that the overwhelming evidence shows that South Africa was not an uninhabited land, was not a region of the world without civilisations, and was not subject to a mass invasion of an alien race that can be equated with the European invasion of 1652 and its colonisation of the region as is presented by ‘firstism’ claims.