who
not only owned cattle and sheep but also grew cereal crops and used spears
and digging tools with iron tips. Culturally and physically they resembled
the people living as far north as the equator. Unlike both the hunter-
gatherers and the pastoralists,
they occupied semipermanent
villages
throughout the year and their political organizations were stronger and
more complex. They spoke Bantu languages and had dark brown skins and
robust physiques. These Bantu-speaking mixed farmers were the ancestors
of the majority of the inhabitants of present-day Southern Africa.
In the course of time, Europeans called the hunter-gatherers Bushmen,
the pastoralists Hottentots, and the mixed farmers Kaffirs.They used those
words in a derogatory sense. When we use ethnic terms, we now refer to the
hunter-gatherers as San, the pastoralists as Khoikhoi, and the Bantu-speak-
ing mixed farmers as Africans. 18
White scholars have not found it easy to account for the differences
among these peoples. Until recently, white South Africans in particular
assumed that "Bushmen," "Hottentots,"
and "Kaffirs" were pure racial
types and that the basic process that lay behind the outcome was migration.
In so doing, they were applying a model drawn from European history,