Ethnography and Condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505

Front matter

Portrait of a bushman playing on the gorah. (From a Portrait by William J. Burchell, Esqre.)

before A.D. 1505

Being a description of the inhabitants of the country south of the Zambesi and Kunene rivers in A.D. 1505 together with all that can be learned from ancient books and modern research of the condition of South Africa from the earliest time until its discovery by Europeans

Chapter I

Ethnography of South Africa

Chapter I.

Early Inhabitants of South Africa, termed by Europeans Bushmen, by Hottentots Sana, by Bantu of the eastern coast Abatwa, of the western coast Ovatwa, of the interior Baroa.

Since the commencement of the twentieth century a great advance in our knowledge concerning the early savage inhabitants of South Africa as well as of Europe has been made through discoveries of their implements and other handiwork, coupled with remains of their skeletons found where they were buried. In Europe the successive advances and retreats of the great sheet of ice that once covered the whole of the northern and central parts of that continent, as Greenland is covered to-day, afford means for classifying in order of time the various races that once lived there, and the implements they used furnish proofs of the different stages of knowledge they had reached. South Africa, owing to its geographical position, has not been covered with ice since man first made his appearance here, or in other words since the pliocene or termination of the tertiary period as termed by geologists. There must have been great variations of climate, but these were insufficient to compel man to remove altogether from any locality to another far distant. We have here therefore a more unbroken chain of race, not as in Europe one race disappearing and another quite different taking its place, or possibly two very dissimilar races existing near each other at the same time.

It is not possible to state in years, or in centuries, or even in millenniums, the length of time that man has existed in South Africa, nor is it possible to determine with any degree of accuracy whether he has lived in this part of the world as long as in Europe, though the most primitive of stone implements, the one which Professor Sollas has named the boucher, is found in abundance here, and indeed all over Africa, as well as there. By the word man is meant a being capable of communicating his thoughts by speech, understanding the use of fire, and able to make implements, however crude, of wood or stone. That such a being roamed over South Africa from an exceedingly remote period is absolutely certain from the situations in which many of his implements are found, and the crust termed the patina which has formed upon them.

The ancient mounds of shells along the seacoast are usually regarded as furnishing one proof of this fact. The first of these that was examined carefully was a heap formerly to be seen in a cave at Mossel Bay, which was for some years regarded as a curiosity more than as a record of the existence there of man at some distant period. It was even held by some amateur investigators that the shells had been brought there by seabirds. More recently many other mounds have been discovered, among them one on the left bank of a tributary of the Buffalo river at East London. Its discovery was due to the opening of a way to a quarry, for it had the semblance of a natural hill, being covered with a deep layer of vegetable soil, in which trees and shrubs were growing; and this appearance it had presented as far back as could be traced. Upon examination—which was very thorough, as over thirty-two thousand cubic metres of it were removed to fill a lagoon—it was found to consist of a mass 45.72 metres or one hundred and fifty English feet long and 12.19 metres or forty feet deep, composed of oyster, mussel, cockle, periwinkle, and other shells, mixed with bones of animals of various kinds, ashes, and pieces of coarse pottery. A very few stone implements were found in it, but stones showing the action of fire were common.

This mass of shells must have been collected by a small community, for a large number of people could not have existed at the same time upon the food obtainable within walking distance. It must have been abandoned several hundred years at the lowest estimate, to allow time for dust and sand to be blown over it, and plants to grow and decay, until at length vegetable mould half a metre in depth was formed, sufficient to support large shrubs and trees. Some pestilence may have destroyed the whole of the people who obtained subsistence there, or they may have been attacked and killed by men of their own race who lived by hunting wild animals, or they may have existed until the arrival of Hottentot immigrants some time about the year 1400 of our era, when they would certainly have been exterminated. The cause of the abandonment of the mound is thus conjectural, and all that can be asserted concerning it is that it cannot have been more recently than a.d. 1400, and may have been many centuries earlier. Of the length of time required for the collection of such a vast mass of shells no estimate whatever can be made.

The other mounds composed of shells and refuse that have been discovered along the South African coast are exactly similar to the one at East London in character, though not usually so large. It is only by accident that they are found, for on the surface of the undulating soil there is no indication of their existence. They are turned to account by farmers at the present day, who use their contents as fertilisers for cultivated ground. In Europe, notably along the coast of Denmark, similar mounds have been exposed, and are there termed kitchen middens, a name that might also be used here. It would be convenient if the people who lived so largely upon shellfish had a distinctive name given to them, for the word strandloopers (beach-rangers), applied to them by some recent writers, causes much confusion. That word was used in the middle of the seventeenth century by the first Dutch settlers in South Africa to denote a very different class of people, an impoverished people of mixed Hottentot and Bushman blood, speaking the Hottentot language and whenever possible following Hottentot customs, who from dire necessity were reduced at times to eke out a miserable existence in the same manner as the far more ancient men of the shell mounds, and it has since been commonly used in history to signify them alone. The others—those alluded to in this paragraph—were beachrangers, it is true, but that was their normal mode of existence, and to distinguish them from the very different beachrangers of recent times I propose to term them the Ancient Shellmound Men.

The mounds referred to, however, may have had their origin at a time not exceedingly remote, for those who have examined them carefully have found no apparent change in the physical features of the country since the earliest deposit was made. The shore was then where it is to-day, though the rocks along it may have undergone some slight alteration of form from the action of winds and waves. Much older are various stone implements shaped by human hands, which have been found in situations where they must have lain undisturbed for an incalculable length of time. For instance, they have been picked up in gravel washed by a stream into a recess when its bed was more than twelve metres higher than it is at present; in localities where considerable changes in the contour of the surface must have taken place since they were deposited; and at great depths in aeolian rock, where bones of animals and shells are also found.

How long the boucher continued to be used cannot be ascertained, but at length better implements were formed. Possibly the first inhabitants had evolved by themselves something superior, or another section of people, having made an advance in knowledge somewhere else, migrated slowly to South Africa, and established new industries here. From this time forward the implements were formed, not of oval water-worn stones, but of pieces broken off a rock and then chipped into the required shapes. It might be a spearhead that was needed, or a scraper, or a chopper, or something to serve as a knife, all these could now be made. The arrowhead can hardly date back as far, for it implies a knowledge of the bow, an implement which must have been the product of much thought. But if the advance is due to immigration, not to native growth of knowledge, the bow may have been brought here by the newcomers, and the stone arrowheads found in great abundance be as ancient in South Africa as the knife or the unhafted axe.

None of them were ground or polished, as chipping comprised all the labour that was bestowed upon them. They were the products of the skill of man still in a very low stage of his existence. Workshops where they were manufactured have been discovered in various places, and to some of these the raw material, or unchipped stone, must have been brought from a considerable distance. The artisans may have lived there permanently, or, what is more probable, some superstition may have been connected with the localities. At these factories a quantity of stone from which flakes have been struck, some raw material, a very few finished articles, and a great many broken ones usually lie wholly or partially hidden by drift sand or mould, and it is generally by accident that they are discovered. They prove that already man had learned the lesson of the value of a division of labour, for it can be taken for certain that every one was not his own manufacturer, but that only the most skilful were employed in making the best-formed tools.

The implements used at this stage of man's residence in South Africa were almost as well fashioned as those of the people termed by us Bushmen were found to be when Europeans first visited the country, so that it is reasonable to assume that the race was continuous, especially as no indications can be found of any subsequent intrusions until the arrival of the Hottentots and Bantu only a few centuries ago. Several improvements, though with one exception trifling, are observable, but no race, however backward, can continue to exist for an enormously long period of time without making some progress in knowledge and in manufactures. The stone implements therefore became gradually more varied and a few of them were more nicely finished, bone came into use for some purposes, and the spherical perforated stone, which shows the greatest advance of all, and which is not found with any of the early tools, was invented. Thus there was progress, though exceedingly slow, during the countless centuries that passed away.

In the earliest stages of man's development three principal causes must have operated in forcing him to think: hunger, disease, and war. These were the elementary factors of civilisation. In favourable localities in other parts of the world commerce, as a powerful factor, came at a later period, but in South Africa that stage was not easily arrived at.

This is apparent if the physical condition of the country be considered. The land rises from the ocean level in terraces or steps, until a vast interior plain is reached. Deep gorges have been worn by the action of water, in some places internal forces have caused elevations, in other places depressions, and everywhere along the margins of the terraces distortions may be seen. There are no navigable rivers, and the coast is bold and unbroken. The steep fronts of the terraces, which from the lower side appear to be mountain ranges, and the absence of running water in dry seasons over large surfaces, tended likewise to prevent intercourse between the different parts of the country. The rude people of each section were left to themselves, without that stimulus to improvement which contact with strangers gives. There was very little necessity to exert the mind to provide clothing or habitations, for since the close of the ice period in Europe and the corresponding fluctuations of temperature in the southern hemisphere the climate has been uniformly mild, and even on the elevated interior plain snow never lies long on the ground. Like the wild animals, man on occasions of severe weather could find some temporary shelter. In this respect a savage is far more callous than a civilised man.

Hunger must have forced him to think, to plan the destruction of game, to search for edible plants, and to reject those that were noxious; but after becoming acquainted with the flora in his locality and with the use of poison in the chase, that factor would lose much of its potency. The cultivation of the ground or the domestication of animals could no more enter the mind of a savage in the palæolithic stage than into that of a child learning to walk. Disease would compel him to think, but only in an exceedingly slight degree when compared with a modern European, for his ailments were few and were in general attributed to witchcraft. War, whether against his fellows or the powerful carnivora, would be a more important factor in obliging him to exercise his mind, and to it was probably due the gradual though tardy improvement in his weapons by the selection of harder stone and by fashioning them more carefully. But slow indeed was the progress in cultivation from the hunter who used the stone weapons of early times to the Bushman who shot his bone-tipped arrow at an antelope at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Where the race of savages who occupied this country so long, the race now termed the Bushmen, had its origin can only be conjectured, and the highest authorities are not agreed as to the locality. That it once spread over the whole of Africa, a portion at least of Southern Europe, and South-Eastern Asia appears to be absolutely certain, but where did it have its birth and its early childhood? That is the doubtful question.

Dr. Peringuey believes in Africa, and he gives reasons for his conclusion that members of it migrated to Europe at a time so remote that there was a passage by dry land over the centre of what is now the Mediterranean sea. He does not allude to the section of the race in South-Eastern Asia, but confines himself to Europe and Africa.

Professor Sollas, on the contrary, holds that the migration was from Europe to Africa, and assigns it to the same remote period as Dr. Peringuey. He gives a graphic description of the Bushmen in Southern Europe, who lived there in what is termed the Aurignacian period, nearly in the middle of the palæolithic or rough stone age. They were negroids of small size, with short twisted hair. Their faces were almost vertical down to the bottom of the nose, and they had prognathous or projecting jaws and retreating chins, exactly similar to the Bushmen of South Africa. This is ascertained from two of their skeletons found in the Grimaldi caves at Mentone.

Their weapons and tools were the same in form and size, so much so that if a handful of Bushman arrowheads and scrapers were thrown into a heap of similar implements say in the museum at Brussels, they could not be separated again except by some one with a thorough knowledge of the composition of the rocks from which they were taken.

Engravings on pieces of ivory of the mammoth, now long extinct, made by these people, similar in character to Bushman engravings on stone, are familiar to students in the great museums of Europe. Many paintings on the walls and roofs of caverns, their work also, have been found during recent years in France and Spain. They are of exactly the same style as those of the Bushmen of South Africa, but of course represent different animals.

The best of these paintings yet discovered in Europe is a herd of bisons on the roof of the cavern of Altamira in Spain, in which various colours were used. Equal as a work of art, if not superior to it, is a hunting scene from a cavern in the mountains bordering Griqualand East in South Africa. Two stone slabs became detached from the roof of this cavern, and fell upon a heap of dust and debris, which preserved the painting perfectly until the slabs were discovered and removed to the South African museum in Capetown, where they can now be seen. When pieced together, the painting is 2.39 metres in length by 92 centimetres in width, and represents seventeen elands, the largest thirty-two centimetres in length, beautifully drawn and shaded in colour, with grotesque figures of hunters using their weapons. Some of the elands are foaming at the mouth from exhaustion, and from the nostrils of one, which is in the attitude of falling, blood is actually dropping. One hunter is hamstringing an eland with a battle-axe, which together with iron-headed arrows, shows that the picture cannot be very old, as it must have been painted after the intrusion of the Bantu into that part of the country, not three centuries ago. An opinion held by most investigators that the older pictures are better as works of art than the more recent ones is thus proved to be incorrect. At all times there must have been a few individuals who excelled as painters and sculptors, while there were many who could only produce daubs.

No figures of human beings have yet been discovered among the paintings of the Europeans, but statuettes made by them have been found at Mentone and other places, which represent the Bushman type of body, with its steatopogy or very protuberant buttocks of adipose matter. There can hardly be a question therefore of the identity of race, the only difference—though a very important one if the measurements can be relied on—observable between them being that the skulls of the European branch were a little longer in proportion to their breadth (horizontal cephalic index 68 or 69), and the cranial capacity or size of the brain was much greater.

What became of the negroid inhabitants of Southern Europe no one can say. They were there before the close of the great ice age, and then they disappeared as other races had done before them. This was in Professor Sollas's mind when he conjectured that they migrated into Africa; but they might have been exterminated entirely, or partly absorbed and partly exterminated by an invasion of a stronger race. This has ever been the law: progress in knowledge and skill and become invincible, or perish. And they were the least progressive of all mankind. Ages later this was the fate of their kinsmen in South Africa, who continued to exist so long solely because of their perfect seclusion.

In South-Eastern Asia there are people living to-day, such as some of the inhabitants of the Philippine islands, the Andamanese, and the Semang in the Malay peninsula, who are so like the Bushmen that it is almost certain they are of the same stock. The type must have been fixed in their common primeval home in some far remote time, and the changes in each that have since taken place have been so small that the close relationship may still be seen. Mentally especially this is the case. Their power of thought on subjects of any nature outside of their ordinary occupations is not greater than that of a European child six or seven years of age, and they have all the credulity of such a child. There are no means of ascertaining whether this was the case with the section of the race in Europe, but the probability is very strong that it was.

The points of resemblance between the Bushmen and the Semang are so numerous that they cannot be accidental. The average height of Semang men is 1491 millimetres, of Bushmen of South Africa 1444 millimetres, and of pygmies of Central Africa 1400 to 1450 millimetres. The average horizontal cephalic index of the Semang is 78.9 (of their women 81.1), but this index is variable. This hardly differs from that of Bushmen. The cranial capacity of the Semang is 1348 cubic centimetres, which is greater than that of Bushmen, but still very low. The noses of the Semang are remarkably broad and flat, and the root is depressed; the chin is feebly developed. The cheek bones are broad, the ears are small, and very few of the men have any beard. The hair is spirally curled, the mouth is large, and the jaws are prognathous. They do not practise circumcision, nor do they tattoo their bodies.

They are nomads, use rock shelters or screens of leaves for habitations, coil themselves up to sleep on a heap of leaves without a pillow, make baskets and mats, eat anything and everything edible, sometimes consume raw flesh, produce fire by the friction of two pieces of wood, and cook their food in the most primitive manner. Their implements of stone are not ground or polished. They do not make canoes or rafts, but harpoon fish, and use baskets as nets.

Their marriage rites are of the slightest kind, they bury their dead entire, there is no trace of an actual cult among them, they make traps, pitfalls, and snares to catch game, their only domestic animal is the dog, they have no words for any numeral higher than three or four, and yet they are decorative artists. On ornaments for the heads of their women and on their quivers they trace geometrical patterns, outlines of animals, and figures believed to be charms.

Every assertion in these paragraphs applies to the Bushmen, and though there are some characteristics mentioned in addition to these, which are not applicable to those people, they are such as might have easily arisen from their different environments. These are that the Semang have round bright eyes, straight and far apart; their foreheads are low and rounded, and their cheeks are full; their heads are covered with frizzled hair more closely than those of Bushmen. They do not use skins or feathers for clothing, but make bark cloth, and wear girdles of fungus peel; their women wear magic combs, with patterns engraved on them. They do not make pottery; their musical instruments are all formed of bamboo; they use bedsteads made by lashing half a dozen thick bamboo poles together, and raising this platform on supports. They have no great fear of ghosts; and they have a dim belief in mythological personages, of whom Kari is their highest god, and is obeyed by Tuhan and Pie.

The chief difference is that the skin of the Semang is of a dark copper colour, or chocolate brown to shiny black. The skin of the Bushmen is yellowish brown, darker or lighter according to the locality frequented by them. In every case the shade of the skin seems to denote that it was acquired for a purpose of the greatest utility.

The Semang, living in forest gloom, required a very dark skin in order to conceal themselves. Their remote ancestors may have been of quite a different tint. The Bushmen on the arid plains and bare mountain sides of South Africa were of the colour that was most advantageous to them, for they were almost invisible at a short distance, so closely did the tint of their skin resemble that of the dried-up soil. Even their scantily covered scalps were of advantage to them in this respect. After rains when high grass sprang up, through which they could creep covered with a few tufts, or in a bushy country where they could adopt disguises, their colour would be a matter of little importance, but on the plains of South Africa it meant much, for it enabled them, by keeping to leeward and making use of anthills or boulders or shrubs, to stalk their prey until within reach of their arrows.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that the same guiding mind which coloured so many of the lower animals in accordance with their environment should have exerted its beneficent power in aid of savage man in the same way? In the far distant time when the ancestors of the Bushmen made their first appearance in South Africa, they may not have been of the same colour as they were when Europeans first saw them. In the early years of the nineteenth century the traveller Burchell observed that the Bushmen north of the Orange were differently coloured from those south of that river, though each section had the tint best suited to its surroundings. Many others have noticed this peculiarity since Burchell wrote, though no such accurate records were made as could be desired. This cannot be accidental. Of course when clothing came to be worn by primitive man such changes were useless, and consequently ceased to take place.

It is certain that the whole of the continent of Africa at a remote period was occupied solely by people of the Bushman race. In the gloomy forest west of the Albert Nyanza they are found by European travellers of the present day, and the descriptions of them given by Schweinfurth, Junker, Stanley, Casati, Von Wissmann, and many others could be applied with perfect accuracy to the Bushmen of the southern extremity of the continent. They could not have migrated to that locality through a country inhabited by stalwart negroes, by whom they were always regarded as noxious animals, and as such destroyed, nor could the section of their race south of the Zambesi have moved down through Bantu tribes. They must have occupied the country alone for countless generations, before invaders of greater strength destroyed or absorbed all of their kindred except the puny remnant that was forced into the depths of the forest where they could not be pursued. Just so, at a later date, they were exterminated or absorbed all the way down to the Zambesi, except possibly a very few who made their escape across that river.

Of their existence far north in the continent there is ample proof, but only after other races had settled along the Mediterranean shore and peopled the valley of the Nile as far up as Abyssinia. As they could not have migrated there after the arrival of those races, they must have preceded them as inhabitants. There are references to them in the earliest histories that were written, though the dates were modern compared with the memorials of their existence that their stone implements supply in the southern part of the continent. The first of these in order of time shows us a long-established kingdom of Egypt, with a people far advanced in civilisation, and a form of hieroglyphic writing in extensive use. Nubia too had then a settled population. Many inscriptions in hieroglyphic characters have been translated into English, and among them is more than one record of expeditions being sent southward to obtain Bushmen or pygmies to amuse the king by dancing before him.

Thus one official in the time of the fifth dynasty has placed his services on record. He states among other notable occurrences that he was sent to the land of ghosts, that is to the unknown country beyond the farthest part explored, to bring back a pygmy for the purpose indicated, and that he went by the way of Nubia to Punt, where he managed to secure one. How realistic this appears to South Africans who can remember the habits of the people living on the inland plateau in the middle of the nineteenth century. One of the commonest ways of many a farmer there to amuse his guests and himself was to get one of his Bushman herdsmen to dance or caper before them, with a promise of a big glass of brandy or a long piece of roll tobacco, of both of which every individual of his race was immoderately fond, if he did it well. On being told to dance springbok, he would bound into the air again and again with as much ease apparently as one of those animals, without quivering his body or seemingly bending his limbs. Then he would be told to dance baboon, when at once every joint of his body was in motion. The agility of the little imp, the elasticity of his limbs, the wonderful contortions that he was capable of displaying, gave as much delight to the South African farmer as a similar performance by another individual of the same race gave to Pharaoh, lord of Egypt, so many thousand years ago.

Statuettes of Bushmen, with the steatopygous protuberances well marked, have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, a conclusive proof that individuals of that race were known to the artists.

The historian Herodotus, writing about 440 before Christ, mentions the pygmies, but they were then, no longer to be found in the valley of the Nile below Senaar, nor had they been seen there probably for a very long time. Evidently more stalwart people had occupied the valley, and the little hunters had either been exterminated or compelled to retire from the field. They were reported to be south of the desert, and though Herodotus never saw one, he obtained information that enabled him to give a most graphic description of them. He described them as dwellers in caves or caverns, as eating serpents, lizards, and other reptiles, as being the fleetest of foot of any people he had ever heard of, and whose language was like the squeaking of bats. It would be hardly possible to express in fewer words a description of the Bushman race.