THEAFRICANS
transmitted
southward through the hunting-gathering communities. It
may have reached South Africa as early as 2,5 0 0 years ago.2 1
Our second historical problem concerns the origins of mixed farming-
arable agriculture as well as pastoralism-in
the eastern part of Southern
Africa south of the Limpopo River. The earliest evidence we have of this
transformation shows that people were cultivating crops and using iron
implements at several places in river valleys below the mountain escarp-
ment in the eastern Transvaal and Natal in the third century A.D. The
farming population gradually expanded across the escarpment and in-
creased in numbers. By A.D.
1,000,
farmers were present in much of Natal,
the Cape Province east of the Kei River, the Transvaal, Swaziland, eastern
Botswana, and the northeastern Orange Free State. They were living in
villages where theyproduced pottery and metallic implements, and in most
areas they integrated crop cultivation and pastoralism. After that, the
mixed farming population increased rapidly and expanded into the higher
areas that their predecessors had neglected'.Bythe sixteenth century, mixed
farmers occupied nearly all of the land east of the twenty-inch rainfall line