Khoisan ( ) or () is an umbrella term for the various non-Bantu indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples. Khoisan populations traditionally speak click languages. They are considered to be the historical communities throughout Southern Africa, remaining predominant until Bantu expansion and European colonisation. The Khoisan have lived in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu (sorghum-based) agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, where populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups. Considerable mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click phonemes in many Southern African Bantu languages, including Xhosa.
Many Khoesan peoples are the descendants of an early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago. (However, see below for recent work supporting a multi-regional hypothesis that suggests the Khoisan may be a source population for anatomically modern humans.) Their languages show a limited typological similarity, largely confined to the prevalence of click consonants. They are not verifiably derived from a single common proto-language, but are split among at least three separate and unrelated language families (Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kxʼa). It has been suggested that the Khoekhoe may represent Late Stone Age arrivals to Southern Africa, possibly displaced by Bantu expansion reaching the area roughly between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.
Sān are popularly thought of as foragers in the Kalahari Desert and regions of Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. The word sān is from the Khoekhoe language and refers to foragers ("those who pick things up from the ground") who do not own livestock. As such, it was used in reference to all hunter-gatherer populations who came in contact with Khoekhoe-speaking communities, and largely referred to their lifestyle. It made distinction from pastoralist or agriculturalist communities, and had no ties to any particular ethnicity. While there are attendant cosmologies and languages associated with this way of life, the term is an economic designator rather than a cultural or ethnic one.
Name The compound term Khoisan / Khoesān is a modern anthropological convention in use since the early-to-mid 20th century. Khoisan is a coinage by Leonhard Schultze-Jena in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera. It entered wider usage during the 1960s, based on the proposal of a Khoisan language family by Joseph Greenberg.
During the Colonial/Apartheid era, Afrikaans-speaking persons with partial Khoesān ancestry were historically also grouped as Cape Blacks () or Western Cape Blacks (). This was done to distinguish them from the Bantu-speaking peoples, the other African population of South Africa who also had significant Khoe-San ancestry.
The term Khoisan (also spelled KhoiSan, Khoi-San, Khoe-SanThe hyphenated spelling Khoe-San or Khoi-San is recent (post-1990). Note that this usage is distinct from the occasional usage of Khoi-San for the Khoe-speaking subset of the San, e.g. "the Ai-San, the Kun-San, the Au-ai-san, the An-San, the Matsana-Khoi-San, and the Bushmen of Otave" in John Noble, Illustrated Official Handbook of the Cape and South Africa (1893), p. 395. Spellings Khoi-San and Khoe-San in Mohamed Adhikar, Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (2009), p. 148.) was also introduced in South African usage as a self-designation after the end of apartheid in the late 1990s. Since the 2010s, there has been a Khoisan activist movement, demanding recognition and land rights from the government and the white minority which owns large parts of the country's private land.
However, the term is also seen as problematic by many, for several reasons. Mellet argues that Leonhard Schultze-Jena, who first coined the term, was driven by a racist framing which needs to be confronted. Secondly, San people tend to reject this appellation, as expressed by a collective of San authors supported by WIMSA, who explain that: "The San object to being grouped together with the presently more powerful pastoralist KhoeKhoen for academic and linguistic reasons". A third reason is that the relationship between Khoekhoe and San people in history has been complex with evidence that commandos with Khoekhoe participation or even Khoekhoe leadership played an important role in the genocide against the Cape San people in the 18th and 19th centuries.
History Origins
It is suggested that the ancestors of the modern Khoisan expanded to southern Africa (from East or Central Africa) before 150,000 years ago and possibly as early as before 260,000 years ago.Estimated split times given in the source cited (in kya) (kya meaning kilo years ago, or a millenia): Human-Neanderthal: 530-690, Deep Human [H. sapiens]: 250-360, NKSP-SKSP: 150-190, Out of Africa (OOA): 70–120. By the beginning of the MIS 5 "megadrought" 130,000 years ago, there were two ancestral population clusters in Africa; bearers of mt-DNA haplogroup L0 in southern Africa, ancestral to the Khoi-San, and bearers of haplogroup L1-6 in central/eastern Africa, ancestral to everyone else. This group gave rise to the San population of hunter gatherers. A much later wave of migration, around or before the beginning of the Common Era, gave rise to the Khoe people, who were pastoralists.
Due to their early expansion and separation, the populations ancestral to the Khoisan have been estimated as having represented the "largest human population" during the majority of the anatomically modern human timeline, from their early separation before 150 kya until the recent peopling of Eurasia some 70 kya.. Science, December 4, 2014 They were much more widespread than today, their modern distribution being due to their decimation in the course of the Bantu expansion. They were dispersed throughout much of southern and southeastern Africa. There was also a significant back-migration of bearers of L0 towards eastern Africa between 120 and 75 kya. Rito et al. (2013) speculate that pressure from such back-migration may even have contributed to the dispersal of East African populations out of Africa at about 70 kya.
Recent work has suggested that the multi-regional hypothesis may be supported by current human population genetic data. A 2023 study published in the journal Nature suggests that current genetic data may be best understood as reflecting internal admixtures of multiple population sources across Africa, including ancestral populations of the Khoisan.
Late Stone Age
The San populations ancestral to the Khoisan were spread throughout much of southern and eastern Africa throughout the Late Stone Age after about 75 ka. A further expansion dated to about 20 ka has been proposed based on the distribution of the L0d haplogroup. Rosti et al. suggest a connection of this recent expansion with the spread of click consonants to eastern African languages (Hadza language).
The Late Stone Age Sangoan industry occupied southern Africa in areas where annual rainfall is less than a metre (1000 mm; 39.4 in).Lee, Richard B. (1976), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the ǃKung San and Their Neighbors, Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press The contemporary San and Khoi peoples resemble those represented by the ancient Sangoan skeletal remains.
Against the traditional interpretation that find a common origin for the Khoi and San, other evidence has suggested that the ancestors of the Khoi peoples are relatively recent pre-Bantu agricultural immigrants to southern Africa who abandoned agriculture as the climate dried and either joined the San as hunter-gatherers or retained pastoralism.
With the hypothesised arrival of pastoralists and Bantoid agro-pastoralists in southern Africa around 2,300 years ago, linguistic developments later became evident in the adoption of click consonants and loanwords from ancient Khoe-San languages. These influenced the evolution of blended agro-pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities, which would eventually give rise to the modern, amalgamated native linguistic communities found today in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia (e.g., in South African Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Zulu people).
Today these groups represent the quantitative majority of extant admixed ancient Khoe-San descendants by the millions.
Historical period
The Khoikhoi entered the historical record with their first contact with Portuguese explorers, about 1,000 years after their displacement by the Bantu. Local population dropped after the Khoi were exposed to smallpox from Europeans. The Khoi waged more frequent attacks against Europeans when the Dutch East India Company enclosed traditional grazing land for farms. Khoikhoi social organisation were profoundly damaged and, in the end, destroyed by colonial expansion and land seizure from the late 17th century onwards. As social structures broke down, some Khoikhoi people settled on farms and became bondsmen (bondservants) or farm workers; many were incorporated into existing Khoi clan and family groups of the Xhosa people. Georg Schmidt, a Moravian Brother from Herrnhut, Saxony, now Germany, founded Genadendal in 1738, which was the first mission station in southern Africa,The Pear Tree Blossoms, Bernhard Krueger, Hamburg, Germany among the Khoi people in Baviaanskloof in the Riviersonderend Mountains. Early European settlers sometimes intermarried with Khoikhoi women, resulting in a sizeable mixed-race population now known as the Griqua. The Griqua people would migrate to what was at that time the frontierlands of the Xhosa native reserves and establish Griqualand East, which contained a mostly Xhosa population.
Andries Stockenström facilitated the creation of the "Kat River" Khoi settlement near the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. The settlements thrived and expanded, and Kat River quickly became a large and successful region of the Cape that subsisted more or less autonomously. The people were predominantly Afrikaans-speaking Gonaqua Khoi, but the settlement also began to attract other Khoi, Xhosa and mixed-race groups of the Cape.
The so-called "Bushman Wars" (1673–1677) were largely a response by San communities to their dispossession and colonial expansion by Dutch settlers.
At the start of the 18th century, the Khoikhoi in the Western Cape lived in a state dominated by the Dutch. By the end of the century the majority of the Khoisan operated as 'wage labourers', not that dissimilar to slaves. Geographically, the further away the labourer was from Cape Town, the more difficult it became to transport agricultural produce to the markets. The issuing of grazing licences north of the Berg River in what was then the Tulbagh Basin propelled colonial expansion in the area. This system of land relocation led to the Khoijhou losing their land and livestock as well as dramatic change in the social, economic and political development.
After the defeat of the Xhosa rebellion in 1853, the new Cape Government endeavoured to grant the Khoi political rights to avert future racial discontent. The government enacted the Cape franchise in 1853, which decreed that all male citizens meeting a low property test, regardless of colour, had the right to vote and to seek election in Parliament. The property test was an indirect way by the British Cape Government (who took over from the Dutch in 1812) to retain a racist based system of governance because on average only white people owned property adequate to meet the test.