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Southern African Humanities
Vol. 20
Pages 1–6
Pietermaritzburg
December, 2008
Trends and traps in the reconstruction of early
herding societies in southern Africa
1
François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar and 2Karim Sadr
1
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 22 avenue Victor Hugo, 91440
Bures-sur-Yvette, France; [email protected]
2
School of Geography, Archaeology & Environmental Science, University of the
Witwatersrand, P. Bag 3, PO Wits, 2050 South Africa;
By the mid 1980s, the question of the origins of herding in southern Africa appeared to
have been settled. Linguists, historians and archaeologists seemed to agree that the
earliest domestic livestock had been brought some 2000 years ago from the middle
Zambezi basin to the southern tip of Africa by immigrant small-scale pastoralists who
later became known as the Khoekhoe. The (proto-)Khoekhoe had, it was thought,
obtained their livestock from Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists who were themselves
immigrants, en route from East Africa southwards.1 All this was presented in Richard
Elphick’s book on the Khoekhoe published in 1985, which differed from the 1977 first
edition only in the date of the Khoekhoe’s arrival at the Cape. Similar ideas were repeated
in a small book on the Cape Herders by Boonzaier et al. (1996). Other major publications
which have dealt wholly or partly with this issue include Ehret (1982, 1998), Barnard
(1992), Smith (1992, 2005), Sealy and Yates (1994), Mitchell (2002) and Phillipson
(2005).
Since the 1990s, the archaeological part of Elphick’s scenario has begun to unravel.
Much new evidence fails to support it. Radiocarbon dates, for example, now indicate
that the earliest sheep were already at the Cape coast one or two centuries before Bantu
speakers began to emigrate from East Africa (Sealy & Yates 1994; Henshilwood 1996;
Robbins et al. 2005). Far from finding 2000-year-old archaeological sites of immigrant
herders, the earliest sheep bones repeatedly turn up in archaeological sites of local
hunter-gatherers. Furthermore, few cattle bones are found in the earliest herders’ sites
and the earliest ceramics show little similarity between northern Botswana and the
Cape coast. Instead, pottery similarities that could link north and south in a migration
model date only to the second millennium AD.
Beyond the archaeology, much new linguistic research—notably Vossen’s (1997)
work on the Khoe languages—has appeared since Elphick published his seminal work.
Vossen’s work, along with the ethnographic findings of Barnard (2007), suggests a
sharp cultural and linguistic divide between Khoe-speaking herders and non-Khoe
hunter-gatherers. Other disciplines, such as genetics and physical anthropology, indicate
a less clear separation between the hunters and the herders, the Khoe and the non-Khoe.
In the face of such contradictory evidence, can Elphick’s classic Khoekhoe migration
scenario be maintained? What can be salvaged?
There is disagreement about which part of the conventional view needs changing.
Some may consider the problem simply to be the date of the migration, while others
1
But see Christopher Ehret (1967) who pointed out that some of the Bantu words for livestock were in fact
of Khoe origin.
http://www.sahumanities.org.za
1
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SOUTHERN AFRICAN HUMANITIES, VOL. 20, 2008
tend to think that the archaeological identity of the migrants needs clarification. Others
still might suggest that instead of insisting on migration, it might be better to reconsider
the whole process of how livestock reached southernmost Africa. Some have questioned
the relevance of the economic dichotomy between, on the one hand, hunter-gatherers
who were slightly acquainted with sheep-herding and ceramic technology, and smallscale herders on the other. For long, some have questioned the fundamental ethnic
dichotomy between Bushmen and Khoekhoe (Elphick 1985; Marks 1972; Schrire &
Deacon 1989), suggesting that the latter were the product of local ethnogenesis. These
counter-proposals contributed to bring the debate on to the terrain of ideology, ethos,
status and identities of the hunter-gatherers and herders. Strong arguments were put
forward to get rid of migration and to promote the diffusion of sheep and ceramic
technology, and the subsequent local development of a herder identity. Other strong
(and equally convincing) arguments have been put forward to defend the qualitative
difference between hunters and herders that only a migratory episode could explain.
Neither camp has convinced the other. The anti-migrationists minimize the reality of
cultural difference (most notably linguistic) between the hunters and herders of southern
Africa; and the pro-migrationists cannot point to solid archaeological evidence for the
migration.
Most recently, while the archaeological trace of pastoralists has become less invisible
(Fauvelle-Aymar et al. 2006), the idea of a migratory process involving cattle herders
with a pastoralists ideology has been revitalized by researchers working on (relatively)
new evidence, such as those provided by rock art (Eastwood & Smith 2005; Smith &
Ouzman 2004) or husbandry practices (Fauvelle-Aymar 2006). But at the same time, it
was shown that there was enough room for two different processes to occur: one of a
Neolithic-like cultural diffusion of sheep herding and ceramic technology some 2000
years ago, and a possibly later demic diffusion involving the Khoekhoe (Sadr 1998,
2003). With new and important research currently underway, especially in the domain
of linguistics and archaeology, where are now the frontlines in this fascinating and
multi-facetted debate?
In order to clarify the current state of research into the (proto-)Khoekhoe migration
or ethnogenesis, as well as the origin and history of livestock and livestock-herding in
southern Africa, in November 2006 a dozen experts from various disciplines participated
in a four-day colloquium in Paarl at our invitation and with the support of the Institut
Français d’Afrique du Sud (IFAS) and the National Centre for Scientific Research
(CNRS, France). As one can easily imagine, a multi-disciplinary consensus did not
emerge, but this was not the aim of the exercise. The aim was to define and present the
state-of-the-art in multi-disciplinary southern African pastoralist studies and the debates
that now are developing. In this we succeeded. The next step comes with the current
publication, which includes revised versions of nearly all the original presentations in
Paarl, as well as two additional papers by experts who could not attend the colloquium.
Support for the publication has been generously provided by the Palaeontological
Scientific Trust (PAST), the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, France)
and the Kent Bequest of the South African Archaeological Society. It is envisaged that
the publication will provide the new linguistic, anthropological and archaeological
baseline for research on the Khoekhoe migration and the earliest food producers in
southernmost Africa.
FAUVELLE-AYMAR & SADR: INTRODUCTION
3
The original order of presentations in Paarl has not been preserved in this volume.
Instead, we have grouped the articles in three sections to follow a tenuous path of
chronologically changing ideas. Leading the volume is the paper by Christopher Ehret
which provides a comprehensive and updated overview of the linguistic history of the
Khoe (the sub-group of the Southern African Khoisan language family of which all
non-Bantu Southern African livestock-raisers are members). Relying on the reconstructed
stammbaum illustrating the language filiations within this group, he suggests a
stratigraphy (borrowing a term from the geological and archaeological vocabulary) of
linguistic splits, which provide a relative chronology of Khoe-speakers’ history, notably
on aspects of culture related to domestic animals, agriculture and pottery-making. An
important conclusion is his suggested sequence of livestock introduction (sheep, cattle
later, and goat still later) that can be hypothesized from the linguistic relationships
between linguistic cognates of these languages: a sequence that, if agreed upon,
invalidates the very concept of a pastoralist ‘package’ inherited at the beginning of the
story. But the most far-reaching conclusion of this paper (and one that was not fully
developed in previous publications by the same author) is the evidence for the Limpopo
Khoekhoe who allegedly inhabited parts of the eastern Highveld of South Africa before
the Bantu migration and during the first millennium AD. The epistemological importance
of this is to erase the old mental frontier that still separates the western (pastoralist/
Later Stone Age/ Khoekhoe-speaking) South Africa from the eastern (agriculturalist/
Iron Age/ Bantu-speaking) parts.
The contributions in this volume reconstruct the past, but by debating a wide and
sometimes contradictory range of evidence. This is in particular what Himla Soodyall
and her colleagues are doing with the genetic prehistory of the Khoisan peoples. Using
mitochondrial DNA they face the same issues as, say, linguists: namely the unknown
time-depth of the processes involved, the places of origin, and the difficult question of
the correlation between objectively-describable group markers and the societies’ selfdefined criteria of belonging, which have more to do with subjective feelings and
negotiable ways of defining ancestry.
In exactly the same way that Soodyall et al. consider the southern African data within
the larger African context, Andrew B. Smith develops here a similar approach with the
archaeology of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa: a story that starts with the drying up
of the Sahara during the fifth millennium before present and goes on with the subsequent
archaeologically-documented slow drift of livestock (and its keepers?) south through
East Africa during the fourth and third millennia before present. How exactly did the
domestic animals (and the apparently chronologically-related ceramic traditions) get
across the Zambezi River and reach the Cape coast at such speed that, in radiocarbon
terms, the earliest livestock in the Zambezi basin and at the southern tip of southern
Africa are coeval? Smith’s debate, relying on a summary of pottery types and decorations
in southern Africa and on his recently-published monograph on Kasteelberg (Smith
2006), engages with Sadr (2003) in discussing the respective likeliness and bias of the
various scenarios to explain the abrupt appearance of sheep and pottery in southernmost
Africa.
Reconstruction (a term frequently used by linguists, but here applied to anthropological
aspects of pastoral populations) is also the purpose of the two next contributions in this
volume. Alan Barnard, the author of a comparative ethnography of the Khoisan peoples
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SOUTHERN AFRICAN HUMANITIES, VOL. 20, 2008
(1992), examines the kinship terminologies and systems of Khoisan speakers and finds
that all the Khoe-speakers (irrespective of their being in modern times hunter-gatherers
or herders) share the same pattern, that of distinctively herding societies. To what extent
this finding can be used to support the concept of a migration is, however, more complex,
since the appearance of proto-Khoe-speaking pastoralists at some time in the past could
well be better seen as the result of an ideological transition occurring in situ rather than
through a migratory process. On the other hand, François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar,
departing from what he calls the ‘Khoisan paradigm’, envisions the husbandry practices
of the historical Khoekhoe within the larger African context and finds that the South
African and Namibian Khoekhoe had highly-specialized pastoralist techniques. These
techniques, unlikely to be of local origin, can only be compared with those of East
African full-time pastoralists. This in turn revives the hypothesis of an East African
origin for southern African pastoralism, maybe not under the classical form of a
migration, but under that of a ‘percolation’ of ideologically fully-equipped cattle-raisers
in a substratum of southern African Khoisan hunters-gatherers, leading to the almost
complete absorption of the former.
Then come the languages. Also speaking of a population of pastoralist colonizers
‘blending’ into a substrate of Khoisan-speaking hunter-gatherers, Tom Güldemann
provides here a model parallel to that of percolation. Basing his argument on grammatical
features (such as the pronoun systems) as well as lexical data of the non-Bantu languages
of southern Africa, Güldemann is able to reconstruct an inverted sequence of linguistic
changes going back from Khoekhoe to a proto-Khoe-Kwadi lineage who could well be
held responsible for the introduction of food-production in the sub-continent. That this
early population, who evidently raised sheep and possibly also practiced agriculture on
at least a small scale, may have had some linguistic affinities with the Sandawe and
other (extinct) languages of East Africa is a tantalizing suggestion that provides solid
arguments for the introduction of food-production a few centuries ahead of, and
independently from, the Iron Age Bantu migrations.2
The conducting of a dialectal survey among Khoekhoegowab (the language previously
labelled Nama/Damara) speakers in Namibia and other Khoe-speakers in Botswana,
given that these two areas were in the path of the first food producers, may be the best
way to refine or counterbalance the historical scenarios involved. The result of such a
survey of lexical variation is presented here by Wilfrid H.G. Haacke. The discussion on
the status of Kwadi and Damara leads him to oppose Christopher Ehret’s (1982)
hypothesis of a Central Sudanic origin of some Khoekhoe words.
Drawing less on lexical variation found among Khoekhoe dialects than on the
comparisons of melodies found among the tonal systems of these dialects as well as on
the naming and kinship systems of two Khoekhoe-speaking hunting-gathering groups,
Christian J. Rapold and Thomas Widlok are able to put forward tentative scenarios for
the directions followed by sociological and linguistic innovations. Although admittedly
not conclusive, these at least provide fresh comparative evidence, thus contributing to
normalizing the study of such groups as the Hai||om (Black Khoekhoe-speaking
‘Bushmen’ of Namibia) who are still perceived as typological anomalies.
2
In his appendix, Güldemann has rendered valuable service by presenting concise explanations of the
sometimes bewildering variety of terms used by the specialists in this field.
FAUVELLE-AYMAR & SADR: INTRODUCTION
5
If, at this point, the reader has managed to get a clear picture of the origins and
history of stock-raising and food production in southern Africa, then the last contributions
to this volume would probably embark her/him onto a complete revision of previous
certitudes. Following ideas previously published (Sadr 1998, 2003), but here reelaborated on a thorough examination of osteological, lithic and ceramic evidence,
Karim Sadr proposes that there exists no archaeological testimony for an ancient (2000
year-old or so) migration of pastoralists (as opposed to small-scale herders). Particularly
relevant here is the discussion on the typology of ceramics in southern Africa, which
(contrary to what should be expected if such a rapid migration was involved) shows no
stylistic chains between the northern margins and the southern tip of southern Africa.
Even the striking similarities between the early first millennium AD Bambata ceramics
of eastern Botswana/western Zimbabwe with the late first millennium AD ceramics of
the south coast are amply counterbalanced by the differences between these two ‘families’
of pot styles, and thus cannot support the idea of a southward migration. In Sadr’s view,
the most that can be said, taking the evidence at face value, is that a wave of diffusion
of small stock and pottery manufacture occurred very rapidly among local Late Stone
Age hunter-gatherers, and that these innovations were adopted, according to a variety
of regional patterns, by groups who thus became ‘hunters-with-livestock’ but certainly
not pastoralists in the full sense of that word. Sadr goes a step further by suggesting that
the archaeological difficulty of finding an ancient pastoralist ‘package’ in southernmost
Africa may be the result of seeing the historically recorded Khoekhoe as an essential
analogy for prehistoric herders.
Charles Arthur presents here a closely related paper on the importance of focusing on
very low-density archaeological scatters of artefacts—practically invisible sites, set in
very specific geographical locales—if we are to ever find the archaeological Khoekhoe.
As in many parts of the world until a few decades ago, southern African specialists of
the Stone Age have focussed their attention on caves and rock shelters with long, wellpreserved sequences of occupation. Alas, these are precisely the locales where pastoralist
Khoekhoe camps are least likely to be found. But how to discover camps occupied only
for a few days several centuries ago? The problem is not trivial, but neither is it
insurmountable. Arthur argues for the importance of off-site or site-less surveys, where
the object is to record individual occurrences of artefacts and other cultural features in
a landscape, rather than focussing on clusters of such artefacts and features as
determinants of ‘sites’.
Alan Morris, in the field of physical anthropology, follows an approach with equally
far-reaching epistemological consequences. Considering that the ‘types’ physical
anthropologists were looking for in the bones and blood until the age of modern genetics
were not natural objects but rather creation of the typologists, he is questioning whether
any kind of biological scenario that was then produced was not the consequence of the
adhesion to categories that had more to do with the political context of the time. The
resultant static biological entities that artificially coincide with ethnic tags get in the
way of letting the sample generate the hypotheses. Finally, Bernd Heine and Christa
König follow a similar de(con)structive way in the field of linguistics. Challenging the
well-rooted idea that the initial location of the proto-Khoekhoe was in the middleZambezi basin—this was actually one of the apparent points of consensus among the
scholars—they are also wondering whether it is not a bit premature to draw historical
6
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scenarios given the lack of evidence in many domains and the caveats induced by
alternative hypotheses never taken into consideration.
These fascinating discussions on a centrally important cultural development in the
history of southern Africa, the introduction of a herding way of life, could not have
been presented here without the help of numerous specialists who gave freely of their
time and advice in their role as referees for the papers. To all, we express our deepest
gratitude and great pleasure in having had such exemplary co-operation.
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