The History of the Bantu People of South Africa
“It is frequently though erroneously stated that there were white men in South Africa before the Africans arrived. But although the men from Europe who began to settle in what is what is now the Western Province of the cape in 1652 found only Hottentots and Bushmen, there is clear evidence from the accounts of early Portuguese travellers and from modern archaeological and anthropological investigations, that Africans were living in various parts of what is now the Republic of South Africa from at least 1500. By 1700, then Europeans, Africans, and Coloureds (people of mixed African-European blood) already made up the three main elements of South Africa’s population.”1
There were two major African groups in South Africa prior to the coming of the European. They were referred to by the Dutch and Portuguese as “Bushmen” and “Hottentots” or lumped together into a category called the Bantu.The Bushmen were a nomadic people who lived off the land, similar in their social structure and way of life to the indigenous population of North America. Leo Marquard describes the Bushmen and their social setting as follows:
“During the course of their trekking, the cattle farmers (the Dutch settlers of South Africa) came upon the Bushmen. Small of stature, living on wild herbs and game that they killed with poisoned arrows, having only a rudimentary social structure, the Bushmen were unable to adapt themselves, as the Hottentots had done, to the ways of the white man. They were accustomed to hunt where they pleased, and the idea of private ownership of land was utterly foreign to them. “2
The Hottentots were another group of African people that the Europeans encountered during their exploration of South Africa. The Hottentots were a sturdy people who were named erroneously by the Portuguese and the Dutch. The Portuguese thought these were Bushmen, and the local natives, taking their terminology from long-gone Dutch ships, referred to all strangers from the south as “Hollontontes.”3 And the native Hottentots – so-called from the Dutch words, ‘hotteren’ and ‘tateren’, which described their clicking, or stuttering, speech. . .4 The Hottentots, as they were called, were a branch of the Bantu speaking people within South Africa. The Hottentots were primarily cattle herders, which made them important to the Dutch, who in 1652, established a ‘victual station’ to supply ships travelling from Europe to India around the Cape of Good Hope.5 Jan Van Riebeck had been sent to the Cape in 1652 by the Dutch East Indies Company to establish a trading post from which the Dutch could trade items to the indigenous population for foodstuffs, such as fruit, vegetables and meat to replenish the supplies of the Dutch ships that rounded the Cape. At first the Dutch East Indies company had no intentions of colonizing South Africa and her people.6 Leo Marquard stated, “Jan Van Riebeck found loosely organized nomadic Hottentot tribes, and for a time the Dutch bought cattle from them for copper wire and beads, the traditional currency between Europe and ‘primitive’ peoples; but soon the questions of grazing rights and of land obtruded themselves. The Hottentots resented the occupation of their pasture lands near Table Mountain and constantly stole from and attacked the Dutch. This provoked reprisals, and two short wars compelled the Hottentots to recognize Dutch occupation.”7
Both the Bushmen and the Hottentot were a branch of the nomadic or migratory Bantu people. The Bantu are believed to have migrated to Southern Africa from East and Central Africa as a result of wars, famine and overpopulation. The Bantu, prior to the arrival of the Europeans, spoke a closely related language, and estimates of their population, during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, reached 50,000,000 people.8 The term Bantu is a philological word coined during the nineteenth century by the European. It comes from aba ntu meaning “people,” and is the plural of the word “man”-umu ntu. The language and customs of the Bantu speaking people varied only slightly causing them to form close bonds through kinsmanship and lineage ties. 9 Donald Morris describes the Bantu people as follows:
“The Bantu are magnificent physical specimens. Their natural diet embraces meat and dairy products, fruits, cereals, and vegetables. They live in the open and are a cleanly people, although not all of their ideas of sanitation would meet with favor in a Western civilization. Warfare has played a sufficient part in their heritage for a process of natural selection to weed out the physically unfit, and blood admixtures here and there have varied the blue-black basic stock to a bewildering array of shades and features. By the fourteenth century they were south of the Zambesi in numbers, and somewhere in the Rhodesias they seemed to have paused long enough to experiment with political structures.”10
Within this unofficial nation of Bantu people was the Nguni family, which was made up of several hundred small clans, all speaking a common language.11 The clans were divided into several major clans, such as the Xhosa, Mtetwa, Lala, Defe, and the Tonga.12
It was from one such subdivision that the Zulu people emerged. The Zulu’s were an offshoot of one of the major clans in the Nguni family, who had defected under a leader named Mandalela.13 Zulu tradition purports that Mandalela led a small group of Nguni people away from the larger clan to form their own tribe in the seventeenth century. As the tribe grew, and upon Mandalela’s death, he was replaced by his son, Zulu. Little is know of Zulu but at the time of his death his people had grown into a sizeable clan. When Zulu died, the clan adopted this name. It meant “the Heavens,” and the clan was proud of its title of ama Zulu – “people of the Heavens.”14 Zulu was followed by his son Dunga, who was followed by his son Jama, who was followed by his son Senzangakona, who was the father of Shaka. Under the rule of the descendants of Zulu, the Zulu’s were not to attain any degree of power or prominence in Africa until Shaka came to the throne and led the Zulu’s into the annuals of world history. The Zulu’s are to this day probably one of the more respected and feared ethnic groups within Azania (South Africa). This respect and fear is due entirely to the Zulu’s legacy of pride and bravery which was exemplified during the reigns of four great Zulu kings: Shaka, Dingaan, Mpande, and Cetewayo.15
ENDNOTES
1
Leo Marquard The Peoples and Politics of South Africa, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 1.
2
Ibid., p.5.
3
Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 72
4
Anthony Nutting, Scramble for Africa: The Great Trek to the Boer War, (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1971), p. 33.
5
Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 19.
6
Robert Lacour-Gayet, A History of South Africa, (London: Cassell and Company Limited, 1970), p. 14.
7
Marquard, p. 3.
9
Morris, p. 24.
9
Ibid., p. 24.
10
Ibid., pp. 24-5.
11
Ibid., p. 26.
12
Brain Roberts, The Zulu Kings, (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1974), pp. 38-9
13
Ibid., p. 43.
14
Ibid., p. 43.
15
Thomas Lucas, The Zulus and the British Frontiers, (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), p. 29.
