The precolonial inhabitants of Southern Africa, however, were not literate, and there are peculiar difficulties in reconstructing the history of preliterate societies. Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists provide us with information. So do social anthropologists who study the societies in their present condition and authors who record the traditions that have been handed down within those societies. But even when we have a rich collection of such sources, our knowledge of the history of societies in the period when they were neither literate nor in contact with literate people is patchy. The archaeological record includes only a fraction of human remains and human products. We are on shaky ground when, as we must do, we draw historical inferences from comparative linguistics and from social anthropology. We know, moreover, that people manipulate and modify traditions to suit their interests.
In unraveling the prehistory of Southern Africa, the best we can do on many crucial topics is to express approximations, probabilities, and informed conjectures derived from the available evidence. The situation improves when we reach the time when literate eyewitnesses began to produce written descriptions; but not until the nineteenth century do we have the first substantial descriptions of societies in the interior of South Africa. Those accounts, moreover, have their limitations. Alien observers are imperfect recorders and interpreters, and we cannot be sure how ancient or how recent were the things that they described. Finally, it was not until the twentieth century that many Africans themselves began to write about their past. The reader should bear these problems in mind throughout this chapter.
The Southern African Environment
Although Southern Africa is at the southern end of the Eurasian-African landmass, it Was an isolated region before humanity’s technological advances of the past few centuries (map 1). Ocean currents impeded regular access by sea. In the South Atlantic, the Benguela current sets in a northerly direction and retards the approach. In the southern Indian Ocean, the Mozambique current sets strongly in a southerly direction, making it difficult for sailing craft to leave the region, so that the ancient Indian Ocean trade system did not penetrate Africa south of Sofala (modern Beira).
The Southern African coastline, moreover, is punctured by few natural harbors. The best are those in the Cape peninsula and Durban. But in the Cape peninsula, Table Bay is exposed to winter gales from the northwest and False Bay to summer gales from the southeast; and a shallow bar impeded the entrance to Durban harbor until it was dredged using modern equipment. Before the sixteenth century A.D. Southern Africa was a region where human activity was an indigenous process, except as the arrival of people by land from further north modified it.
1. Southern Africa in the sixteenth century
“Pula!” (May it rain!) is a popular greeting in Lesotho, and it is the name of the currency in Botswana. Rainfall has had a profound influence on the history of the region. In the west, the average annual rainfall is fewer than five inches, resulting in desert conditions along the coastline of Namibia and the northern Cape Province. In the east, the average rainfall reaches forty inches a year, producing subtropical vegetation along the Transkei and Natal coastlines. In between, a transitional zone receives about twenty inches of rain a year. To the east of that zone, the rainfall is sufficient for arable agriculture; to the west, it is not. One exception to this division is the Cape peninsula and its vicinity, where heavy winter rains are sufficient for intensive agriculture.
These rainfall figures are annual averages. In fact, rain varies greatly from season to season. Throughout most of the region, droughts are frequent. They vary in range and intensity. A drought might affect a very small area or last no more than a single year; but sometimes—perhaps at least once in a human generation—devastating droughts hit entire subregions and persist for as long as a decade. The climate may have been somewhat moister throughout the region during the six thousand years before about 4,000 B.C., but since then there do not seem to have been any distinctive climatic changes.
Most of the region is a plateau, ringed by an escarpment that runs parallel to the coast about a hundred miles inland and reaches its greatest height, more than ten thousand feet above sea level, in the Drakensberg range between Natal and Lesotho. No navigable waterways flow through the region, but the river valleys attracted early human occupation and provided early trade routes.
Except in the sheer desert in the far west, the region could support small, dispersed populations of hunter-gatherers with a variety of edible plants and animals. The region teemed with game—elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, buffalo, lions, leopards, giraffes, zebras, quaggas, and numerous species of antelopes—until hunters with firearms had cleared many areas and exterminated several species, including the quaggas, by the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the region could also support domesticated animals, but tsetse flies and other bearers of diseases of cattle, sheep, and goats have made pastoralism extremely hazardous in the tropical lands of the northeast. East and north of the twenty-inch rainfall zone, arable agriculture is possible. Throughout Southern Africa, however, agriculture is constrained not only by the irregular rainfall but also by the quality of the soils, which, as in tropical Africa, are generally “poor both in mineral and organic nutrients and in structure.”1 Yet human diseases were less widespread in temperate Southern Africa than in the tropics further north.
Southern Africa possesses great mineral resources. Iron-bearing rocks were spread throughout much of the region, and rocks containing gold and copper broke surface at various points in the Limpopo river valley and the northwestern part of the Cape Province, as well as further north in Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. Preindustrial farming people mined these deposits in open stopes to a depth of several feet and extracted the minerals from the deposits; but modern industrial technology was a prerequisite for the fuller exploitation of the region’s vast quantities of gold, copper, diamonds, platinum, chrome, and uranium. Gold-mining operations now penetrate two miles below the surface. It was also left to modern technology to remedy the lack of navigable waterways by constructing railroads, roads for automobiles, and, eventually, air transportation services, to enrich the soils with modern fertilizers, and to mitigate the effects of the inadequate and intermittent rainfall by building dams, reservoirs, and canals.
In the Beginning
In one respect, archaeologists have not served historians of Southern Africa well. The historians’ tendency to ignore all but the most recent history has been compounded by the archaeologists’ use of arcane terminology. Some of their terms are positively misleading. In particular, following precedents created in European archaeology, archaeologists of Southern Africa have used as their basic categories the terms Stone Age (which they divide into Early SA, Middle SA, and Late SA) and Iron Age.2 Those terms are illogical, ahistorical, and inaccurate: illogical because they confuse chronological phenomena with cultural phenomena, ahistorical because their ages do not correspond with the historian’s chronology, and inaccurate because they imply that, for example, every member of an Iron Age community used iron tools and weapons. They have been discarded by European and other archaeologists in favor of stages in the evolution of cultural diversity, but they linger in much work on Southern Africa.
On the evidence available at present—and there has been an escalation of sophisticated work on early humans in Southern Africa by archaeologists and physical anthropologists in recent years—it is probable that the hominid predecessors of modern humans originated in various parts of East and Southern Africa. That includes the Transvaal, where, among other discoveries, archaeologists have found fossils that they have identified as being in the human continuum and have dated three million or more years ago. The earliest fossils that have been discovered anywhere in the world that some physical anthropologists attribute to modern Homo sapiens come from Klasies River mouth in the eastern Cape Province and Border Cave on the Natal-Swaziland border, which they have tentatively dated at more than fifty thousand years
ago.3
Scholars now recognize that in Southern Africa as elsewhere the changes they have identified in the shape and size of the stone tools of the hunter-gatherers represent the development of increasingly specialized methods of exploiting the resources of the different environments in the region. Each group adapted its hunting methods to the climate, topography, and animal species of its territory. The outcome of this territorial specialization was diversity. From area to area, groups became increasingly different from one another.
By the beginning of the Christian era, human communities had lived in Southern Africa by hunting, fishing, and collecting edible plants for many thousands of years. They were the ancestors of the Khoisan peoples of modern times—the peoples white settlers called Bushmen and Hottentots. They contributed a high proportion of the genes of the “Coloured” people, who constitute 9 percent of the population of the modern Republic of South Africa. What is less well known is that they also provided a smaller, but still considerable, proportion of the genes of the Bantu-speaking Africans, who form 75 percent of the population of the republic, and that they have provided genes to the people whom governments officially classified as white and who amount to 13 percent of the modern population.4
The hunter-gatherers were small people with light brown or olive skins. In 1811, English traveler William J. Burchell described the members of a band who lived in isolation in the arid interior of South Africa:
They were small in stature, all below five feet; and the women still shorter; their skin was of a sallow brown colour . . . Though small, and delicately made, they [the men] appeared firm and hardy; and my attention was forcibly struck by the proportional smallness, and neatness of their hands and feet . . . The women were young; their countenances had a cast of prettiness, and, I fancied, too, of innocence; their manners were modest, though unreserved . . . One of them wore a high cap of leather, the edge of which protected her eyes from the sun: at her back, and entirely hid excepting the head, she carried her infant, whose exceedingly small features presented to me an amusing novelty.5
The ways of life of these early Southern Africans varied greatly in the different environments of the region-—the coastline and its immediate hinterland; the highlands rising to the escarpment; the grasslands of the eastern plateau; the area of good winter rainfall in the southwest; and the vast arid lands of the Karoo and the Kalahari and Namib deserts. Linguists demonstrate that in each area the people spoke a distinctive language but that all the languages were distantly related; all, for example, included strong click sounds that are difficult to render in the modern Western alphabet.6 Ray Inskeep, an archaeologist, concludes that one should visualize “stable populations living in well-defined territories over long periods of time.”7
The basic social unit was the nuclear family, but several families usually formed bands numbering between twenty and eighty people. These bands were not closed, reproducing entities. People identified with members of other bands who spoke the same language and lived in neighboring territories in the same general environment. They occupied caves or camps constructed of portable materials and moved from one watering, foraging, and hunting area to another as the seasons dictated. As in other preindustrial societies, there was a division of labor between women, who stayed close to the campsite and were responsible for childcare and most of the work of collecting edible plants, and men, who were the hunters. They were skillful in fashioning tools from wood and stone, clothing from animal hides, musical instruments from wood, catgut, and ostrich quills, and bows and arrows with tips smeared with poisons extracted from snakes or insects or plants. Their artists have left an impressive record in the rock paintings and engravings that have survived in protected places.8
The population probably increased slowly over the centuries but remained sparse by modern standards. Health and life expectancy varied with the environment. The principal factors were the regularity and nutritional value of the food supply and the exposure to disease. The major scourges of tropical Africa, such as malaria and yellow fever, may have affected some of the people who lived below the mountain escarpment in the eastern Transvaal and Natal. They would have been absent from the rest of Southern Africa, but in arid areas debility and undernutrition would have followed several winter seasons and periods of drought.
Harvard University expeditions have made a thorough study of a contemporary people whose name is written as !Kung and who live today near the border between northeastern Namibia and Botswana. They found that the modern IKung live in groups that fluctuate between twenty-three and forty members during the year. The nutritious perennial mongongo nut is their staple food, providing one-third of their food supply, while other plants provide another one-third and the rest comes from hunting. They spend most of the year in poolside camps near the source of the nuts, but for a couple of months during the dry season they move to permanent water holes further from the nut trees, when some of them hike sixteen miles to collect nuts, carrying their water supply with them.9
Another study deals with the modern G/wi people, who live in the Kalahari Desert, where food is scarcer. The G/wi bands tend to be larger, with forty to sixty members, and they use a much larger territory than the IKung, but they often split up into smaller family units. Plants form three-fifths of their diet, but in the early summer, the period of greatest shortage of plants and large antelopes, the men give up bow-and-arrow hunting and catch smaller game with traplines, making time to help the women with their gathering. The G/wi also eat such foods as rodents, birds, tortoises, snakes, ants, and termites, which the IKung ignore.10
These studies of modern communities who still practice a hunting-gathering way of life are illustrative to a degree; but they certainly do not represent the ways of life of the many early South Africans who lived in areas with greater natural resources—the areas that have been transformed, first by the development of African farming cultures, then by the intrusion of white farmers, and eventually by the application of modern agricultural and industrial technology.11
The more we learn about these hunting and gathering peoples, the more we respect the skills they applied to the available resources. Inskeep sums this up well:
The combination of food remains, environment and artifacts reveals . . . the confidence and success with which the . . . hunter and his womenfolk provided for the group. Plant fibres were spun into fine cordage which could be used as needed for traplines and bindings, or worked into fine, strong nets for catching and carrying. Wood was used with simple skill for pegs to keep things off the ground in cave or rockshelter, for arrowheads and bows, for digging sticks and tool handles. Reeds were cut for arrow-shafts or woven into mats. Time, skill and taste were brought to the fashioning of beads and pendants and objects of bone, shell, and ivory at whose use we can only guess. In all this we see evidence of masterly adaptation to the environment.12
Most modern people assume that hunter-gatherers were so incompetent and undernourished that they had to work continuously to survive. Scholars have demonstrated that that assumption is false. Describing the modern IKung, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins says, “They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons and implements, fibers for cordage, grass for shelters), or to materials which were at least sufficient for the needs of the population.”13 Other studies of the IKung, as well as similar studies of modern Australian hunter-gatherers, demonstrate that their way of life involves much less work per capita than our modern “civilized” existence. In their present habitat, the IKung spend about fifteen hours a week in hunting and gathering, and their daily per capita subsistence yield is about 2,140 calories, well above the daily requirement.14 Hunter-gatherers had time and energy for subtle and complex aesthetic expression in rock art and in music.
Sahlins also contends that typical hunter-gatherers lived in “pristine affluence.”15 H
e argues that inherent in their way of life is a philosophy. Their mobility—arising from their need to leave a campsite when they had depleted the plants and game in its area—made them adopt a philosophy of limited wants. They desired no more possessions than they could carry. But lack of property had its compensations. They had a sense of living abundant lives, for the resources available to them exceeded their wants. “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything: perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. . . . Theworld’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”16 There was, however, a dark side of the hunter-gatherers’ way of life, and it, too, was a consequence of their mobility. People were left to die when they were too old to walk, and twins and other children were killed when they were too numerous to carry.
Inskeep provides a judicious summation of the hunter-gathering culture as it had matured in Southern Africa by the beginning of the Christian era: “We find evidence of sophisticated and successful populations employing with confidence a wide range of skills to support themselves in their chosen, or inherited territories. For some there may have been hard times when food was short, but rarely would it fail completely. For others life must have come close to ideal in terms of security. With a million and a half years of experience behind him man had reached the highest points of success in the evolution of the hunting-gathering way of life in Southern Africa.”17
A History of South Africa Page 3
