SAN

• San rock art dates back as far as 27 000 years ago. Both painting and engravings are found in South Africa, the former mainly in the more mountainous areas, engravings mostly on the central plateau.
  • The engravings depict mainly animals and geometric figures.
  • The paintings depict humans involved in various activities. They were all executed by shamans and reflected their memories of the trances and hallucinations they underwent in order to connect their communities with the natural and supernatural universe. Maybe they had a more complicated vision of universe than people at such an early stages of human kind 's intellectual and spiritual development. These paintings presented many events of the San history: the San, living in small groups which came together in time of need, were hunter-gatherers. They did not have chiefs: the shamans were the main authority in San society but without political power. Because of  climate conditions rainmaking cerimonies were the subject of many paintings, associated with the most common motif of the hunting of animal, particularly eland.
  • San art  may have been symbolic but it was also realistic. For istance the scenes of war showed the dreadfull fact of the San's inability to stem the tide of the advancing Bantu. Many paintings depicted the San defeated from bigger and darker attackers armed with spears and shields, the San themselves having only bows and arrows.

• Some time after 500 BCE (before common era) the practice of sheep herding emerged in southern Africa. This new economy, based on breeding sheep and later cattle, is associated with the spread of Khoi languages.

• In the eastern part of the country the San were later absorbed by Bantu speakers. Coexsistence with the Bantu resulted in the prominence of the click sounds characteristic of Khoisan languages in the major contemporary South African Bantu languages, Xhosa and Zulu. Similarly, many of these languages use the Khoi vocabulary for all cattle-based pursuits.

Oggi i San, ritiratisi progressivamente nelle steppe del Kalahari, conducono un' esistenza stentata. 2000 anni fa erano forse un milione oggi sono circa 50 000.