text: # Hottentots  
  A possibly earlier, in any case a more consequential Hamitic migration must have been that of the Hottentots who, at the time of the European occupation of the southern Cape, inhabited large areas of what became later the Cape Colony and South West Africa. In connecting the Hottentots with the Hamites of North Africa one moves on rather hypothetical grounds, in spite of the fact that some physical and linguistic evidence lends support to such an assumption. It is, however, not too unreasonable to regard the rather light-skinned Hottentots as an early wave of Hamites who gradually, perhaps in the course of millennia, made their way from the north to the very south of the continent, where they lived in close proximity with the Bushmen and were subjected to many Bushman influences.