Who Were The First People In South Africa
The Khoisan were the first inhabitants of southern Africa and one of the earliest distinct groups of people, enduring centuries of gradual dispossession at the hands of every new wave of settlers, including the Bantu, whose descendants make up most of South Africa’s black population today. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has embarked on a mission to redistribute land. But this process has largely excluded the Khoisan, because South Africa does not acknowledge them as the country’s first peoples, and their land was mostly taken long before the apartheid era. Now, a growing movement of indigenous activists believes the time has come to take back what’s theirs.
One of the Khoisan’s biggest challenges is race. Land restitution was conceived to benefit black South Africans, but the Khoisan are not generally considered black; they are designated as “coloured.” The term, originally coined by the British, was used during apartheid to label citizens who did not fit the binary race model—including most Afrikaans-speaking nonwhites and mixed-race children. This amorphous categorization condemned much of the Khoisan’s history to oblivion and facilitated the theft of their land.
Even the word Khoisan is a foreign term, coined in the 1920s by a German anthropologist trying to describe multiple tribes—including the Khoikoi and San—as a single ethno-linguistic group. Recent DNA research shows that, for tens of thousands of years, the so-called Khoisan were the largest human population on the planet. These days, those who identify as Khoisan are an ostracized minority, not just inside their country but also within the coloured community.
The Nothern Bantu Tribe Migration
In the third to sixth centuries, northern Bantu groups migrated into southern Africa from central Africa, establishing agricultural settlements and displacing many of the traditionally hunter-gatherer Khoisan. When the Europeans arrived—1,000 years later—the Khoisan were the first to fight against them, leading to a series of of 17th century wars between the Khoikoi and Dutch settlers. Their native resistance culminated in the 18th century in battles that came to be known as the Bushman Wars. Eventually, smallpox decimated the majority of the Khoisan population, making it easier for settlers to take their land and then force the natives to work on it.
Nobody knows how many Khoisans currently live in South Africa, and the government does not collect such data. According to 2017 estimates, 8.8 percent of the country’s population—or about 5 million people—is coloured, but the number of coloured people who have indigenous ancestry and currently identify as Khoisan is likely just a small fraction of that number.
What Does The Khoisan Have In Common With The Māori
The Khoisan have much in common with Canada’s First Nations or New Zealand’s indigenous Maori. Yet unlike other native groups, they are not recognized as their country’s first inhabitants, and their identity is largely invisible, forgotten even by most current descendants. Traditional customs, such as plant-based medicine and hunting, are dismissed as primitive, while the term “bushman” is often used as a slur. One of their languages features on South Africa’s coat of arms, but none of them is recognized among the country’s 11 official languages. This coat of arms—which also includes two human figures based on Khoisan rock art—is stamped on the 5 rand coin, but much of the ancient Khoisan rock art still lies unmarked on private land, where it is desecrated with graffiti and often stolen by thieves and sold to archeology collectors.
South Africa’s First People, Today
What remains of South Africa’s first people live predominantly in the Northern Cape:
- most of the San groups live in the Kalahari
- the Khwe and !Xun live around Platfontein in Kimberley
- the Khoekhoe, including the Nama people, live in the Northern Cape
- the Korana live mainly in Kimberley and the Free State
- the Griqua are more widely spread – there are groups in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Free State and KwaZulu-Natal
‘Hidden San’ communities are believed to live in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga.
