communities, with cultural and biological roots in both societies. Initially,
in some cases, pastoralists
incorporated
mixed farming
individual~ and
families into their polities, but sooner or later farming chiefdoms acquired
control.s ' South African historian Jeffrey Peires has described the final
phase of that process among the southern Nguni. During several genera-
tions starting in the late seventeenth century, the Xhosa expanded to the
southwest as sons of the reigning chiefs of the Tshawe royal family split off
to found new chiefdoms. Some pastoral groups joined the Xhosa volun-
tarily; others were incorporated
through conquest. The pastoralists who
were incorporated
"were not expelled from their ancient homes, or rele-
gated to a condition of hereditary servitude on the basis of their skin colour.
They became Xhosa with the full rights of any other Xhosa. The limits of
Xhosadom were not ethnic or geographic, but political: all,persons or
groups who accepted the rule of the Tshawe thereby became Xhosa."82
In the middle of the seventeenth century, when white people began to
settle in the Cape peninsula, hunter-gatherers and pastoralists were still in
sole occupation of the western part of Southern Africa. In the eastern part,