THEAFRICANS
finally by Normans. They portrayed the "Bushmen" as aboriginal hunters
and gatherers who had been subjected to two great waves of migration
from central Africa: first "Hottentot"
pastoralists and then "Kaffir" mixed
farmers. 19
We now know that the migration model does not provide a sufficient
explanation
for the early history of Southern Africa. People did enter the
region from the north, but the historical process was much more complex.
There was continuity
as well as change. Populations were not closed re-
producing entities, equipped with unique unchanging cultures. People in-
teracted, cooperating and copulating as well as competing and combatting,
exchanging ideas and practices as well as rejecting them.
There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the processes that brought
pastoralism and arable farming to Southern Africa. One problem concerns
the origins of pastoralism.
By the late fifteenth century, when the first
Portuguese expedition rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India,
pastoralists lived in much of the western part of Southern Africa, wherever
there was enough rainfall for them to pasture their sheep and cattle, es-
pecially in the coastal lowlands from the Buffels River southward and the