The History of the Bantu People of South Africa

There were African people in South Africa centuries prior to the arrival of the Europeans. These people were however, nomadic which may have led the Europeans to think that portions of South Africa were uninhabited. Leo Marquard stated,

"It is frequently though erroneously stated that there were white men in South Africa before the Africans arrived. But although the men from Europe who began to settle in what is what is now the Western Province of the cape in 1652 found only Hottentots and Bushmen, there is clear evidence from the accounts of early Portuguese travellers and from modern archaeological and anthropological investigations, that Africans were living in various parts of what is now the Republic of South Africa from at least 1500. By 1700, then Europeans, Africans, and Coloureds (people of mixed African-European blood) already made up the three main elements of South Africa's population."1

There were two major African groups in South Africa prior to the coming of the European. They were referred to by the Dutch and Portuguese as "Bushmen" and "Hottentots" or lumped together into a category called the Bantu.The Bushmen were a nomadic people who lived off the land, similar in their social structure and way of life to the indigenous population of North America. Leo Marquard describes the Bushmen and their social setting as follows:

"During the course of their trekking, the cattle farmers (the Dutch settlers of South Africa) came upon the Bushmen. Small of stature, living on wild herbs and game that they killed with poisoned arrows, having only a rudimentary social structure, the Bushmen were unable to adapt themselves, as the Hottentots had done, to the ways of the white man. They were accustomed to hunt where they pleased, and the idea of private ownership of land was utterly foreign to them. "2