Tens of thousands of years ago to the 18th century

The San and Khoikhoi: South Africa's first peoples

Hunter-gatherer San and herding Khoikhoi peoples, heirs to one of humanity's oldest continuous cultures, fill southern Africa with rock art, and are later dispossessed and almost erased.

An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa — Christopher S. Henshilwood et al., Nature (2018)
The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)

Well established indigenousidentitylandculture

Southern Africa is one of the places where modern humans grew up. At Blombos Cave on the southern Cape coast, archaeologists found engraved ochre and a cross-hatched drawing on stone about 73,000 years old, the oldest known drawing by human hands.

An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa — Christopher S. Henshilwood et al., Nature (2018)

The ancestors of the San, hunter-gatherers who speak languages famous for their click sounds, lived here for many thousands of years. Their rock paintings, of eland, rain animals and trance dances, cover shelters from the Drakensberg to the Cederberg, and geneticists find among them some of the deepest-rooted lineages of humankind.

A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)

About two thousand years ago some people in the region began herding sheep and later cattle. These herders, the Khoikhoi (“people of people”), lived in the western and southern Cape when Europeans arrived. Over the next two centuries they lost their grazing lands and cattle to Dutch settlers, were struck by smallpox epidemics such as that of 1713, and were drawn into the colony as servants and farmworkers; the San were hunted as “vermin” on the colonial frontier.

The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 — Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), Wesleyan University Press (1989)
A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)

One woman’s story has come to stand for this history. Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman, was taken to Europe in 1810 and exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus”. After her death in Paris, her remains were displayed in a museum until the 1970s. At Nelson Mandela’s request France returned them, and she was buried in the Eastern Cape in 2002.

A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)

Why it matters today

South Africa

The San and Khoikhoi (together often called Khoe-San) are honoured on the national coat of arms, and many Coloured South Africans trace ancestry to them. Yet their languages are endangered or lost, and Khoe-San activists campaign for recognition as South Africa's First Nations and for land. The return of Sarah Baartman's remains from France in 2002 became a symbol of restored dignity.