THEAFRICANS
noted that a Xhosa had told the governor of the Cape Colony that "it was
impossible that a Bosjesman [Bushman: hunter-gatherer] could ever aban-
don his villainous ways, and it was necessary to destroy such vermin
wherever they were found.t'"?
At all stages, however, mixed farmers incorporated
and assimilated
numbers of hunter-gatherers into their societies. We know that the mixed
farming chiefdoms in nineteenth-century
Lesotho included people of ab-
original antecedents. Some were the children or grandchildren of hunter-
gatherers who had become clients of individual farmers and gradually
melded into the farming society, like clients whose parents were farmers.
Chiefs themselves took such women as junior wives to acquire the ability to
protect the land that was believed to be vested in the aborigines as the first
inhabirants.s"
By the time mixed farmers reached the western limit of the land where it
was possible to grow crops, if not earlier, they had encountered
pas-
toralists. The mixed farmers and the pastoralists were compatible, since
both were cattle-owners, and they tended to mingle and form composite
communities, with cultural and biological roots in both societies. Initially,
in some cases, pastoralists
incorporated
mixed farming
individual~ and