The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
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,