THEAFRICANS
averaged about twenty inches a year, communities of mixed biological and
cultural inheritance occupied a frontier zone. There, the mixed farming
culture
and
chiefdoms were becoming increasingly dominant:
the
Gqunukwebe chiefdom in the south and the Tswana chiefdoms in the
north.
Over the years, the mixed farmers had acquired considerable cultural
and genetic influences from hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. Their Bantu
languages incorporated numerous loan words from the hunters' and her-
ders' vocabularies-notably,
words with click sounds that were originally
exclusive to the hunters. As one would ~xpect, the greatest proportion of
click words and hunters' and herders' genes are to be found among the
mixed farming peoples nearest to the frontier zone-the
Xhosa and the
Tswana. Linguists estimate that one-sixth of all Xhosa words contain
clicks.83 The early history of the region has also left its mark in numerous
non-Bantu names of rivers and mountains in the eastern as well as the
western part of Southern Africa.
The mixed farming communities were far from static. They had many of
the characteristics of a frontier society. During the first millennium A.D. a
"tidal frontier" of mixed farmers had founded a series of settlements south