The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region. Some interpretations of the genetic analysis suggest divergence from other humans as early as 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Their recent ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa.
The San speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu, and Kxʼa language families, and can be defined as a people only in contrast to neighboring pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans, and South Asians.
In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San, making it the country with the highest proportion of San people at 2.8%. 71,201 San people were enumerated in Namibia in 2023, making it the country with the second highest proportion of San people at 2.4%. San is a pejorative Khoekhoe term that was adopted by Western anthropologists; the representatives of San peoples stated their preference in 2003 to be referred to as their respective nations.
Definition The San or Bushmen are the peoples of southern Africa who traditionally lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and spoke non-Bantu languages with click consonants (thus excluding the Twa, Kwisi and Cimba, but also the Kwadi and Damara). These include speakers of three distinct language families living between the Okavango River in Botswana and Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, extending up into southern Angola; central peoples of most of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the southern people in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo River, who together with the Khoekhoe are the last remnants of the previously extensive indigenous peoples of southern Africa.
Names The designations "Bushmen" and "San" are both exonyms. The San have no collective word for themselves in their own languages. "San" comes from a derogatory Khoekhoe word used to refer to foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiǁom dialect."The old Dutch also did not know that their so-called Hottentots formed only one branch of a wide-spread race, of which the other branch divided into ever so many tribes, differing from each other totally in language [...] While the so-called Hottentots called themselves Khoikhoi (men of men, i.e. men par excellence), they called those other tribes Sā, the Sonqua of the Cape Records [...] We should apply the term Hottentot to the whole race, and call the two families, each by the native name, that is the one, the Khoikhoi, the so-called Hottentot proper; the other the San (Sā) or Bushmen." – Theophilus Hahn, Tsuni-ǁGoam: The Supreme Being to the Khoi-Khoi (1881), p. 3.
"Bushmen" is the older cover term, but "San" was widely adopted in the West by the late 1990s. The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch , is still used by others and to self-identify, but is now considered pejorative or derogatory by many South Africans. In 2008, the use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burger newspaper was brought before the Equality Court. The San Council testified that it had no objection to its use in a positive context, and the court ruled that the use of the term was not derogatory. "Objectively speaking and taking into account the context in which (Die Burger) published the word 'boesman' and the evidence of the San Council witness, I find that the usage of the word did not cause harm, hostility or hatred. Instead, the San Council's representative was adamant that no hurt or harm was caused to them or the San community with the manner in which (Die Burger) published the word 'boesman'."
The San refer to themselves as their individual nations, such as ǃkung (also spelled ǃxuun, including the Juǀʼhoansi), ǀxam, Nǁnǂe (part of the ǂKhomani), Kxoe (Khwe and ǁAni), Haiǁom, Ncoakhoe, Tshuwau, Gǁana and Gǀui (ǀGwi), etc.Lee, Richard B. and Daly, Richard Heywood (1999) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of -Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge University Press, Representatives of San peoples in 2003 stated their preference for the use of such individual group names, where possible, over the use of the collective term San.Statement by delegates of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and the South African San Institute attending the 2003 Africa Human Genome Initiative conference held in Stellenbosch.
Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors later switched back to using the name Bushmen."The fashion of renaming the Bushmen of Southwestern Africa as the 'San' exemplifies many of the problems with the name game. University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has lived with the famous tongue-clicking hunter-gatherers said, 'In the 1970s the name "San" spread in Europe and America because it seemed to be politically correct, while 'Bushmen' sounded derogatory and sexist.' Unfortunately, the hunter-gatherers never actually had a collective name for themselves in any of their own languages. 'San' was actually the insulting word that the herding Khoi people called the Bushmen. [...] Harpending noted, 'The problem was that in the Kalahari, "San" has all the baggage that the "N-word" has in America. Bushmen kids are graduating from school, reading the academic literature, and are outraged that we call them "San." [...] one did not call someone a San to his face. I continued to use Bushman, and I was publicly corrected several times by the righteous. It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say "San" and I say "San," then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics.'" The compound Khoisan is used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi and the foraging San collectively. It was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularized by Isaac Schapera in 1930. Anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan,"Schapera is the author of the convenient term Khoisan, compounded of the Hottentot's name for themselves (Khoi) and their name for the Bushmen (San)." Joseph Greenberg, The Languages of Africa (1963), p. 66. as it has been reported that the exonym San is perceived as a pejorative in parts of the central Kalahari. By the late 1990s, the term San was used generally by the people themselves. The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term. These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organized by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993, the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia, and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organized by the University of the Western Cape. The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001.
The term Basarwa (singular Mosarwa) (sometimes shortened to Sarwa) is used for the San collectively in Botswana. The mo-/ba- noun class prefixes are used for people; the older variant Masarwa, with the le-/ma- prefixes used for disreputable people and animals, is offensive and was changed at independence.
In Angola, they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas, or bosquímanos (a Portuguese adaptation of the Dutch term for "Bushmen"). The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe. The San are also referred to as Batwa by Xhosa people and as Baroa by Sotho people. The Bantu term Batwa refers to any foraging tribesmen and as such overlaps with the terminology used for the "Pygmoid" Southern Twa of South-Central Africa.
History
Origins Although there is some debate among social scientists, there is a general consensus on the claim that the modern communities described as San descend from the oldest Neolithic societies of southern and east Africa. Some 10,000 years ago, these social groups were spread from Tanzania, Zambia and Angola down to Cape Agulhas. As such, the San can be regarded as among the oldest cultures on Earth. Peoples related to or similar to the San occupied the southern shores throughout the eastern shrubland and may have formed a Sangoan continuum from the Red Sea to the Cape of Good Hope.
In the first millennium BCE, Mellet mentions two dominant groups in Southern Africa. The first one was the Tshua San, who were spread across what are now Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, and strategically occupied the Shashe-Limpopo basin. The second group, further West, was the Khwe San, whose territory included present-day Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zambia. The historical presence of the San in Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. The two groups engaged with other communities who occupied this area on their migratory drifts southwards, including some migrant herder groups, who later evolved into the Khoekhoe, as well as herder-farmers during the Bantu expansion (2000 BCE–1000 CE). In this process, San were partly driven off their ancestral lands or incorporated by Bantu speaking groups.
The San were believed to have closer connections to the old spirits of the land, and were often turned to by other societies for rainmaking, as was the case at Mapungubwe. San shamans would enter a trance and go into the spirit world themselves to capture the animals associated with rain. Thus, Mellet claims that the San would have been involved in the early foundations of the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and subsequent birthing of the states of Thulamela, Great Zimbabwe, Mutapa Empire and others.
Pre-colonial times
Due to their mode of sustenance based primarily on hunting and foraging, San were able to migrate and spread more rapidly than herder or farmer cultures, and are believed to have spread to present-day South Africa, including the South coast, before the Khoe and Bantu peoples. It is possible that they occasionally herded small numbers of sheep. After 650 CE, as the Khoe and Xhosa migrated into present-day Eastern Cape and after 1000 CE, into the Western Cape, the majority of the San moved from the coastal areas into the interior, with only small fishing communities remaining near the coast.
They were traditionally semi-nomadic, moving seasonally within certain defined areas based on the availability of resources such as water, game animals, and edible plants. The San organised themselves into hunting parties, and did not have clans nor chiefs, with decisions taken by elders. Early San societies left a rich legacy of cave paintings across Southern Africa, which depict hunting, battles, domestic life, and mythological events.
Displacement, marginalisation and genocide during European colonisation