being settled quite thinly by pioneer farrners.??
In some cases friendly symbiosis on a basis of complementarity eventu-
ally gave way to structured, differential incorporation of the hunters into
plural societies under the control of the farmers. This was the nearest
approach to slavery in precolonial Southern Africa. In Botswana, down to
the present day, farmers control the lives of hunting aborigines."?
In most areas, however, as farming people built up their numbers and
gained control of the land, with its springs and streams, the unincorporated
hunting bands, struggling for survival, attacked the livestock of the farm-
ers, as they were wont to attack wild game, and as hunting bands in the
western part of Southern Africa had been wont to attack the sheep and
cattle of the pastoralists. This interaction often degenerated into endemic
warfare. White people described such a state of affairs in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Alberti reported that the Xhosa lived "in constant
feud" with their hunting and gathering neighbors, who persisted in rob-
bing them of their livestock. A Xhosa, he wrote, "regards and treats these
robbers as beasts of prey, follows their spoor after they have perpetrated