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The compound term Khoisan / Khoesān is a modern anthropological convention in use since the early-to-mid 20th century. Khoisan is a coinage by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera. [6] It entered wider usage from the 1960s based on the proposal of a "Khoisan" language family by Joseph Greenberg.
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]
[1] [2] South Africa's first known inhabitants have been collectively referred to as the Khoisan, the Khoekhoe and the San. Starting in about 400 AD, these groups were then joined by the Bantu ethnic groups who migrated from Western and Central Africa during what is known as the Bantu expansion .
Over time, the Khoisan, their European overseers, and the imported slaves mixed, with the offspring of these unions forming the basis for today's Coloured population. The best-known Khoikhoi groups included the Griqua , who had originally lived on the western coast between St Helena Bay and the Cederberg Range .
Rock paintings from the Western Cape. The Middle Stone Age covers the period from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherers of Southern Africa, named San by their pastoral neighbours, the Khoikhoi, and Bushmen by Europeans, are in all likelihood direct descendants of the first anatomically modern humans to migrate to Southern Africa more than 130,000 years ago.
At the tip of the continent, the British found an established colony with 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves. Power resided solely with a white élite in Cape Town, and differentiation on the basis of race was deeply entrenched. Outside Cape Town and the immediate hinterland, isolated black and ...
The hypothesized Bantu expansion pushed out or assimilated the hunter-forager proto-Khoisan, who had formerly inhabited Southern Africa. In Eastern and Southern Africa, Bantu speakers may have adopted livestock husbandry from other unrelated Cushitic-and Nilotic-speaking peoples they encountered. Herding practices reached the far south several ...
For thousands of years, the Khoisan peoples of South Africa and southern Namibia maintained a nomadic life, the Khoikhoi as pastoralists and the San people as hunter-gatherers. The Nama are a Khoikhoi group. The Nama originally lived around the Orange River in southern Namibia and northern South Africa.