The First Farmers
In the sixteenth century A.D., some people in the most arid and most mountainous parts of Southern Africa were still living as their ancestors had done, by hunting game and gathering edible plants. Elsewhere to the west of the twenty-inch rainfall zone, wherever pastures were adequate, especially in the reliable winter-rainfall area in and near the Cape peninsula, people were herding sheep and cattle. These pastoralists were genetically similar to the hunter-gatherers, and their appearance was similar, except that they were somewhat taller.
East of the twenty-inch rainfall zone lived mixed farmers—people who not only owned cattle and sheep but also grew cereal crops and used spears and digging tools with iron tips. Culturally and physically they resembled the people living as far north as the equator. Unlike both the hunter-gatherers and the pastoralists, they occupied semipermanent villages throughout the year and their political organizations were stronger and more complex. They spoke Bantu languages and had dark brown skins and robust physiques. These Bantu-speaking mixed farmers were the ancestors of the majority of the inhabitants of present-day Southern Africa.
In the course of time, Europeans called the hunter-gatherers Bushmen, the pastoralists Hottentots, and the mixed farmers Kaffirs. They used those words in a derogatory sense. When we use ethnic terms, we now refer to the hunter-gatherers as San, the pastoralists as Khoikhoi, and the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers as Africans.18
White scholars have not found it easy to account for the differences among these peoples. Until recently, white South Africans in particular assumed that “Bushmen,” “Hottentots,” and “Kaffirs” were pure racial types and that the basic process that lay behind the outcome was migration. In so doing, they were applying a model drawn from European history, with its early folk wanderings and, in the case of Britain, successive invasions by Romans, by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, by Scandinavians, and finally by Normans. They portrayed the “Bushmen” as aboriginal hunters and gatherers who had been subjected to two great waves of migration from central Africa: first “Hottentot” pastoralists and then “Kaffir” mixed farmers.19
We now know that the migration model does not provide a sufficient explanation for the early history of Southern Africa. People did enter the region from the north, but the historical process was much more complex. There was continuity as well as change. Populations were not closed reproducing entities, equipped with unique unchanging cultures. People interacted, cooperating and copulating as well as competing and combatting, exchanging ideas and practices as well as rejecting them.
There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the processes that brought pastoralism and arable farming to Southern Africa. One problem concerns the origins of pastoralism. By the late fifteenth century, when the first Portuguese expedition rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, pastoralists lived in much of the western part of Southern Africa, wherever there was enough rainfall for them to pasture their sheep and cattle, especially in the coastal lowlands from the Buffels River southward and the Fish River westward to the well-watered Cape peninsula. How and when did pastoralism reach that area?
In a book published in 1977, historian Richard Elphick weighed the evidence then available. He agreed with those who had surmised that pastoralism probably started in Southern Africa when some hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now northern Botswana acquired first sheep and later cattle from pastoral people further north. That would have sparked off a process that transformed the way of life of more and more of the aboriginal hunting and gathering peoples of the western part of Southern Africa. Social groups would have become larger than the hunting-gathering bands and also more complex, as some individuals acquired more livestock and power than others.20
Scholars have subsequently criticized and elaborated Elphick’s informed conjectures. Linguists demonstrate that the language spoken by the pastoralists had close affinities with a language spoken by hunter-gatherers in northern Botswana, Elphick’s nuclear area. Archaeologists have discovered that pastoralism began in Southern Africa several centuries before the Christian era. Several aspects of this process are still controversial, but it seems likely that, after people in tropical East Africa had begun to incorporate sheep and cattle into their economies several millennia ago, pastoralism, as an extension of the hunting-gathering way of life, was transmitted southward through the hunting-gathering communities. It may have reached South Africa as early as 2,500 years ago.21
Our second historical problem concerns the origins of mixed farming—arable agriculture as well as pastoralism—in the eastern part of Southern Africa south of the Limpopo River. The earliest evidence we have of this transformation shows that people were cultivating crops and using iron implements at several places in river valleys below the mountain escarpment in the eastern Transvaal and Natal in the third century A.D. The farming population gradually expanded across the escarpment and increased in numbers. By A.D. 1,000, farmers were present in much of Natal, the Cape Province east of the Kei River, the Transvaal, Swaziland, eastern Botswana, and the northeastern Orange Free State. They were living in villages where they produced pottery and metallic implements, and in most areas they integrated crop cultivation and pastoralism. After that, the mixed farming population increased rapidly and expanded into the higher areas that their predecessors had neglected. By the sixteenth century, mixed farmers occupied nearly all of the land east of the twenty-inch rainfall line in Southern Africa, except for mountainous terrain, and all were pastoralists as well as crop producers.
This transformation was part of a process of cultural transmission and gradual territorial expansion that derived ultimately from West Africa and secondarily from the area around Lake Victoria, where people began to adopt the iron-working, mixed farming way of life a few centuries before the Christian era. It accounts for the wide spread of Bantu languages and for much cultural similarity throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including, for example, a strong sense of social hierarchy.22
British archaeologist David Phillipson summarizes the process as revealed in the archaeological record in Southern Africa: “The archaeological sites and artifacts ... make a marked contrast with those that had gone before, and contain the first evidence in these southerly latitudes for food-production, for settled village life, for metallurgy and ... for the manufacture of pottery.”23 He adds: “The fact that so many important aspects of culture were introduced together over such a wide area and so rapidly makes it highly probable that the beginnings of iron-using in sub-equatorial Africa [were] brought about as a result of the physical movement of substantial numbers of people . . . . [I]t is likely that these people were speakers of Bantu languages.”24
Their arrival was nonetheless almost certainly not a simple process of mass migration from the north and exclusion of the previous inhabitants. There are no traditions of massive waves of migration into Southern Africa, and it seems probable that the first mixed farmers filtered into the region in small groups. Their movements are best described as a migratory drift, or a gradual territorial expansion. Throughout southeastern Africa, with its poor soils and intermittent droughts, it became customary for families, headed, for example, by energetic younger sons, to break from established village settlements and found new ones further south, or for chiefs to extend their power by placing relatives with their followers in new localities to extend their power.25 Such events were still occurring in Lesotho and to the west of the Kei River in the early nineteenth century.26
Many aspects of the origins and spread of mixed farming in southeastern Africa are still unresolved. Most archaeologists emphasize the changes that took place in the farming culture toward the end of the first millennium: expansion into higher ground, greater use of pastoralism in addition to crop agriculture, and changes in pottery styles. They attribute those changes to a shift in the source of immigration from an easterly to a westerly stream.27 Others emphasize internal dynamics, as farming communities became increasingly specialized in their various
micro-environments.28 American James Denbow, for example, has shown how herding as distinct from agriculture predominated in Botswana, on the verges of the Kalahari Desert, where the rainfall was barely sufficient for agriculture.29
Another unresolved question is whether the first mixed farmers to infiltrate into Southern Africa used iron or whether iron-working reached Africa south of the Limpopo later by diffusion from the north. In central Africa, agriculture and pastoralism seem to have preceded metallurgy. It seems likely, however, that by the time farmers began to infiltrate south of the Limpopo they knew how to produce iron tools and weapons.30
Relations between Hunters and Herders
The incorporation of domestic livestock into the economies of the aboriginal hunting and gathering people in the western part of Southern Africa profoundly affected their way of life.31 Private property, previously associated with such small, portable possessions as clothing (made from skins) and weapons (bows and arrows), now included sheep and cattle. Gaps developed between rich and poor as some people acquired large numbers of livestock while others owned none at all. Moreover, whereas the hunter bands had been small, herders formed larger communities. Their primary social and political groups were clans, composed of people who claimed descent from a common ancestor, but several clans were often joined in loosely associated chiefdoms that Europeans have called tribes. Hereditary chiefs in consultation with their clan heads were responsible for organizing the transhumant movements of their chiefdoms and their defense against human and animal predators.
The adoption of pastoralism involved a fundamental shift in philosophy.32 Whereas hunter-gatherers, with their mobile way of life, had no desire to accumulate property and were often affluent within their philosophy of limited needs, when they became herders they began to treat material possessions—sheep and cattle—as a form of wealth; and since the number of livestock a person might accumulate was limitless, they experienced a feeling of scarcity—a desire for more. In that sense they, unlike hunter-gatherers, were imbued with an acquisitive spirit.
The herding way of life, moreover, required more work than hunting and gathering, so that pastoralists had less time and energy to devote to aesthetic pursuits. When Europeans arrived in Southern Africa, they found that the pastoralists were not as adept in music and rock painting and engraving as the hunter-gatherers.
According to Elphick’s reconstruction, the herding way of life spread by migratory drift and cultural transmission from the nuclear area in northern Botswana, where the first Southern African aborigines probably obtained livestock from herders further north. The initial direction of the expansive process would have been southward to the middle reaches of the Orange River. One segment would then have moved westward to split near the mouth of the Orange, whence some chiefdoms would have moved southward and others northward along the Atlantic coastline. The other segment may have moved southward to reach the Indian Ocean in the vicinity of the Fish River and thence westward to the Cape peninsula.
As some such process occurred, complex interactions would have taken place. In some cases, aboriginal hunters may have accommodated to the intrusion of the first herders into their territories; but, as we know from reports by literate Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the herders and their livestock seemed to threaten their control of the land and its resources, the aborigines resisted. Treating sheep and cattle as fair game, they shot them with their poisoned arrows. Symbiotic relations often developed, however. Herders provided hunters with milk in exchange for game, and this sometimes led to structured relations. Hunter clients served their herder patrons, not only providing them with meat but also defending them against human and animal aggressors and even looking after their sheep and cattle. Eventually, aboriginal individuals, and sometimes entire bands, were assimilated into the herding way of life and incorporated into the herders’ clans. When Europeans began to settle in the southwestern part of the region in the seventeenth century, they found that the herding culture was dominant wherever the pastures were suitable for stock farming. The herding population was most numerous where the environment was most favorable—namely, in the lower Orange River valley and, especially, the Cape peninsula and its vicinity.
Herding had distinct advantages over hunting and gathering. The food supply was more reliable; milk was a most nutritious component of the herders’ diet. That would have made them taller and stronger than their aboriginal ancestors and contemporaries. The herders, however, did not eliminate the hunting and gathering economy in their vicinity. There were always people who owned no livestock living among or near them. As a nineteenth-century observer put it:
Nearly every tribe is found to consist of three distinct classes of persons. First, the wealthy class. Second, a portion of the poorer class disposed to reside with and serve the former, and third, the remainder of the latter class who either from disinclination to servitude or an inability to obtain it, trust for support to other means, and in pursuit of them remove from the haunts of their more settled countrymen and establish themselves in positions best adapted for the objects they have in view. It is this class which forms ... the detached pauper population of a tribe.33
Following droughts, military defeats, or epidemics affecting the people or their livestock, entire communities were sometimes obliged to revert to the hunting-gathering way of life. Pastoralism, moreover, was not possible in the Kalahari Desert and the mountain escarpment. There, communities continued to practice their traditional hunting and gathering mode of life throughout the colonial period—even, in such cases as the IKung and the G/wi, down to the present day.
Archaeologists have found no evidence that the herding way of life spread east of the twenty-inch rainfall zone. We may assume that herders would have tried to expand in that direction where, with better rainfall, the environment was more propitious. Perhaps they did so, but the evidence has not been discovered. Alternatively, by the time their eastward expansion began in earnest, it was checked by the presence of the more powerful iron-working mixed farmers.
The Mixed Farming Economy
Between the fourth century A.D. and the late eighteenth century, Bantu-speaking mixed farmers, the ancestors of most inhabitants of modern Southern Africa, were consolidating their position in the better-watered eastern part of the region. Their numbers were growing. Along the twenty-inch rainfall zone they were creating an increasingly stable frontier with pastoralists, and east of that zone they were occupying more and more of the country suitable for agriculture and were incorporating, killing, or expelling more and more of the indigenous hunter-gatherers.
This section and the next describe the way of life of the farming societies at a time when they were still autonomous. We can draw on substantial documentary evidence from the seventeenth century onward, written by survivors of shipwrecks, explorers, traders, missionaries, and pioneer settlers who spent time in southeastern Africa before it was transformed by the rise of the Zulu kingdom and by white conquest—processes that are the subjects of later chapters.
All the mixed farming people in Southern Africa had much the same basic economy: swidden agriculture, pastoralism, and metallurgy. They also had similar cultures, including closely related Bantu languages. The farmers in the lands below the escarpment, who are known as Nguni, spoke dialects of the same language, of which the modern survivors are Xhosa in the south and Zulu in the north. Most of those on the plateau above the escarpment spoke dialects of another language, of which the modern survivors are Sotho in the south, Pedi in the east, and Tswana in the west. The two languages had a similar syntax and much common vocabulary. Farmers could and did move easily from community to community throughout southeastern Africa, and those who migrated to a new area rapidly assimilated the local culture. There were, of course, considerable differences within the region, as farmers adapted to distinctive micro-environments. Conditions in the better-watered subtropical lands below the mountain escarpment in what are now KwaZulu, the eastern T
ransvaal, and southern Mozambique were very different from those in the frontier zone in Botswana, where crop agriculture was rarely possible.
The mixed farming economy was more productive than the economies of both the herders and the hunter-gatherers. Besides possessing sheep and cattle, hunting the abundant game population, and gathering indigenous plants, the farmers cultivated sorghum and made, used, and traded iron tools and weapons and copper ornaments. They thus had a richer and more reliable diet and possessed stronger physiques than the hunters and herders, and they achieved denser levels of population. Moreover, whereas the hunters and herders were mobile and slept in natural or portable shelters, the farmers built stone or wattle-and-daub huts and established semi-permanent hamlets or villages; and whereas the herders’ political organizations were fragile associations of semiautonomous clans, the farmers created centralized chiefdoms.
Surface deposits of high-grade iron ores, such as magnetite, were available in several parts of Southern Africa. People dug the material from the surface or mined it in open stopes. The smelting process involved high skills, because the ore had to be heated to a temperature of at least one thousand degrees centigrade. That was done by forcing air from hand-operated bellows through narrow slits in low shaft furnaces built of clay. The usable metal was then separated from the slag and brought to its desired shape by reheating and hammering.34
Blacksmiths were the most specialized artisans in society and were accorded high status. Eugene Casalis, a perceptive French missionary who worked in unconquered Lesotho from 1833 to 1855, reported that a blacksmith was “the principal workman, the only one whose labours amount to anything like art ... . [A] 11 acknowledge the blacksmith to be an exceptional character. He is more than a workman, he is the ngaka ea tsepe, the doctor of iron.”35 Casalis described and illustrated the Sotho blacksmith’s techniques and his products: spears, hatchets, two-edged knives, hoes, awls, and spatulas.36
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