The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
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