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A conference on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" was organised by the University of the Western Cape in 1997. [26] and "Khoisan activism" has been reported in the South African media beginning in 2015. [9] The South African government allowed Khoisan families (up until 1998) to pursue land claims which existed prior to 1913.
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are.
The first modern humans are believed to have inhabited South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. [1] [2] South Africa's first known inhabitants have been collectively referred to as the Khoisan, the Khoekhoe and the San.
The area of modern Zambia is known to have been inhabited by the Khoisan and Batwa peoples until around AD 300 when migrating Bantu began to settle around these areas. [3] It is believed that the Khoisan people groups originated in East Africa and spread southwards around 150,000 years ago.
Map of modern distribution of "Khoisan" languages. The territories shaded blue and green, and those to their east, are those of San peoples. The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. [2]
It entered wider usage from the 1960s, based on the proposal of a "Khoisan" language family by Joseph Greenberg. The name San in anthropological usage is a back-formation from the compound and began to replace "Bushmen" from the 1970s onward (see San people#Names).
The Khoe (/ ˈ k w eɪ / [2] KWAY) languages are the largest of the non-Bantu language families indigenous to Southern Africa. They were once considered to be a branch of a Khoisan language family, and were known as Central Khoisan in that scenario.
The accepted term for the two people being Khoisan. [2] The designation "Khoekhoe" is actually a kare or praise address, not an ethnic endonym, but it has been used in the literature as an ethnic term for Khoe-speaking peoples of Southern Africa, particularly pastoralist groups, such as the Griqua, Gona, Nama, Khoemana and Damara nations.