THEAFRICANS
Southern Africa, were consolidating their position in the better-watered
eastern part of the region. Their numbers were growing. Along the twenty-
inch rainfall zone they were creating an increasingly stable frontier with
pastoralists, and east of that zone they were occupying more and more of
the country suitable for agriculture and were incorporating,
killing, or
expelling more and more of the indigenous hunter-gatherers.
This section and the next describe the way of lifeof the farming societies
at a time when they were still autonomous. We can draw on substantial
documentary evidence from the seventeenth century onward, written by
survivors of shipwrecks, explorers, traders, missionaries, and pioneer set-
tlers who spent time in southeastern Africa before it was transformed by
the rise of the Zulu kingdom and by white.conquest-e-processes that are the
subjects of later chapters.
All the mixed farming people in Southern Africa had much the same
basic economy: swidden agriculture, pastoralism, and metallurgy. They
also had similar cultures, including closely related Bantu languages. The
farmers in the lands below the escarpment, who are known as Nguni,
spoke dialects of the same language, of which the modern survivors are