Ethnic Identity, Demographic Crises and Xhosa-Khoikhoi Interaction

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Tribes no longer exist, at least in the writings of Africanists, but they tend to be replaced by very similar looking entities, going under a variety of aliases. Perhaps purely as a result of laziness of thought, there remains a tendency of write of the Zulu, the Tswana, or the whomever, and not to probe the assumption that these units have some actual existence. Nevertheless, like all working assumptions, this has to be continually re-examined. In this paper, therefore, I return to one of the classic problems in southern African history (in the broadest sense), namely that of the relationship between the Khoisan and the Bantu-speaking Africans. It has of course been widely studied, especially by linguists and physical anthropologists, and, to a lesser extent by archeologists. These disciplines show complementary results. Linguistics shows that many loan-words crossed from Khoisan to the Bantu languages - though not, apparently, in the reverse direction - and that this occurred to its greatest extent in the various Nguni languages of the south-east coastal belt. Physical anthropology has shown that the proportion of Khoisan genes in the Bantu speaking population increases from north to south. The archeological evidence is less clear. For eastern Zambia, Phillipson has argued that “the Early Iron Age folk and their late stone age neighbours… can be shown to have existed in several regions” and that “throughout the first millenium the two populations clearly to a large extent maintained their own separate identities”. This situation seems to have lasted until “four or five centuries ago.”