Khoisan

Khoisan is not the name of a single nation but a modern umbrella term for two groups of southern African peoples: the Khoekhoe, who were herders, and the San, who were hunter-gatherers. What links them is that they lived in the region before the arrival of Bantu-speaking farmers and Europeans, and that their languages use click consonants. The term is widely used, but it is also contested.

The word was coined in the 1920s by the scholar Leonhard Schultze-Jena, joining khoe, "person", with San, and was popularised by the anthropologist Isaac Schapera. It spread in the 1960s with Joseph Greenberg's proposal of a single Khoisan language family. Linguists now treat "Khoisan languages" only as a convenient label: the languages fall into three families, Khoe, Tuu and Kxʼa, which share clicks but have not been shown to be related. Some writers object to the term because of the racial thinking of its coiner, and many San reject being grouped with the historically more powerful Khoekhoe. Since the late 1990s, however, many South Africans of Khoekhoe descent have adopted Khoisan as a self-name.

Genetic studies place the ancestors of the San among the earliest-diverging human populations; some interpretations date their separation from other humans to 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Their ancestors once ranged much more widely across southern and eastern Africa. Remains about 10,000 years old from Oakhurst rock shelter in South Africa show strong continuity with living San and Khoe. Herding peoples are thought to have arrived some 2,000 to 2,300 years ago, and Bantu-speaking farmers spread south during the first millennium CE, mixing with earlier peoples; click sounds borrowed into Xhosa and Zulu are one trace of that encounter. In 2019 researchers reported engravings about 8,000 years old, showing animals such as a hippopotamus and an antelope, at the Vredefort impact structure.

San is a Khoekhoe word for foragers without livestock, and in 2003 San representatives said they preferred to be called by the names of their own nations. Traditionally the San lived in small, egalitarian bands that made decisions by consensus and shared through gift-giving. Their healers entered trance to reach the spirit world, and neighbouring farming societies sometimes turned to them as rainmakers. About 63,500 San lived in Botswana in 2017 and 71,201 were counted in Namibia in 2023.

The Khoekhoe, once known by the now offensive name Hottentots, were pastoralists who kept large herds of cattle in the Cape in the seventeenth century. Today's Khoekhoe groups include the Nama of Namibia and South Africa, the Damara and the Griqua. The Khoekhoe language is closely related to some San languages of the Kalahari.

After the Dutch East India Company settled at the Cape in 1652, smallpox and the loss of grazing land broke Khoekhoe society apart, and many became farm workers or were absorbed into Xhosa communities. San resisted the advance of colonial stock farmers, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Cape San communities were destroyed in what many historians describe as genocide. In German South West Africa about 10,000 Nama were killed between 1904 and 1908 in the Herero and Nama genocide. In Botswana, San residents were moved out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve; in 2006 the High Court ruled the removals unconstitutional.

Since 2015 Khoisan activists in South Africa have campaigned for recognition as a First Nation and for the right to claim land lost before 1913, which current law does not allow. In 2020 the University of Cape Town opened a Khoi and San Centre. Millions of southern Africans carry some Khoe or San ancestry.

Our maps use a single "Khoisan" label from -3000 to 1500. It is a rough linguistic and cultural zone, not a state: in -3000 and -2000 it covers the southern third of the continent, from -1500 to 700 it stretches over much of eastern and southern Africa, and from 800 it shrinks to the south and west as Bantu-speaking farmers, Great Zimbabwe and later the Mutapa Empire appear beside it. See also South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.