One of Earth's oldest cultures has no shared word for itself
The San of southern Africa may have diverged from other humans 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, by some readings of genetic data. Yet neither San nor Bushmen is their own term. San began as a Khoekhoe insult for foragers who owned no cattle, and in 2003 San representatives asked to be called by their individual nations.
The San are the region's hunter-gatherer peoples, speaking or descended from speakers of click-consonant languages in the Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa families. Their recent homelands spread across Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. Botswana counted roughly 63,500 San in 2017, 2.8 per cent of its population, the highest share anywhere, and Namibia recorded 71,201 in 2023. The Khoekhoe root of San appears to mean picking things up off the ground. Bushmen comes from the 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans; in 2008 a South African equality court heard a case over the Afrikaans form and ruled it was not derogatory in the context used.
Communities called San are widely thought to descend from the oldest societies of southern and eastern Africa. Around 10,000 years ago such groups ranged from Tanzania down to Cape Agulhas, and because foragers moved faster than herders or farmers, they probably reached South Africa's southern coast before Khoe and Bantu speakers. As those groups spread during the Bantu expansion, many San were pushed off ancestral land or absorbed. The Tsodilo Hills of northern Botswana preserve strong evidence of their long presence.
Neighbouring societies believed the San stood closer to the old spirits of the land and sought them out for rainmaking, as at Mapungubwe. Their shamans entered trance to journey into the spirit world and catch the animals tied to rain. Traditionally semi-nomadic, bands followed water, game and plants within familiar ranges, with elders rather than chiefs making decisions. Rock paintings across southern Africa show hunts, domestic scenes and myths.
European settlement brought catastrophe. When the Dutch arrived at the Cape in 1652, the Cape San numbered an estimated 30,000 to 50,000. From about 1714, a loan-farm system pushed stock farmers called Trekboers onto San land, where they took waterholes and hunted the game San relied on. Conflict escalated through the 18th century, and in 1777 the Dutch East India Company officially endorsed a policy of eradicating the San.
Source: San peoples
