BANTU

• The advent of a settled agriculture in South Africa is associated with the spread of Bantu speakers.
  • Originally Bantu speakers spread from today's Cameroon around 1500 BCE, perhaps as a result of advancing desertification on the edge of the Sahara.
  • They spread in two different streams, one south down the Atlantic coast, the other right across the continent to East Africa, reaching the Great Lakes region about 1000 BCE. It was this eastern branch that finally reached South Africa while the western one arrived only as far as Namibia.
  • The picture becomes more complicated with the migration of the eastern Bantu to the South. Bantu moved from present-day Tanzania in three streams: to today's Zambia; to present day Zimbawe; and to what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
  • This migrations have been remarkably rapid.

• Bantu were agriculturalists and so they settled in the South Africa's fertile eastern seaboard because they needed good soil and rainfall. Agriculture requires a settled way of  life and can sustain bigger communities than herding.

• They mined iron and produced iron tools and a distincitve type of pottery.

• These new Bantu iron-using settlements were technologically superior to the Khoisan population and that makes their relationship problematic; we know from San paintings that there were fights, which the Bantu tended to win.

• The Bantu however needed the Khoi because they were richer in cattle just as they needed the San because of their rainmaking skills. Perhaps most important, the Bantu needed the Khoisan in order to legitimise their occupation of the land, for the Khoisan were the original owners.

• Many Khoisan  were gradually absorbed into these Bantu Iron Age communities as clients and partners. This process consisted of  polygamous Bantu men choosing Khoisan wives, a process which would see Khoisan mothers teaching their children their own language, that's why Bantu languages came to incorporate Khoisan click sounds and various khoisan words.

• This coexistence did not last. The Bantu began to accumulate cattle too. The rise of  Bantu pastoralism increased competition for cattle pastures and hunting grounds between Bantu and Khoisan groups not yet assimilated.

• Apartheid ideologues took comfort in the notion of black vs black conflict which tended to make the later conflicts between white farmers, Bantu and Khoisan part of a more natural larger picture: "we may have subjugated the bantu but that's nothing compared with the way they exterminated the Bushmen"