Southern Africa
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Southern Africa, southernmost region of the African continent, comprising the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The island nation of Madagascar is excluded because of its distinct language and cultural heritage.
The interior of Southern Africa consists of a series of undulating plateaus that cover most of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana and extend into central Angola. Contiguous with this are uplands in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Coastal mountains and escarpments, flanking the high ground, are found in northern Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Coastal plains abut the Indian Ocean in Mozambique and the Atlantic in Angola and Namibia.
The Kalahari desert forms the central depression of the Southern African plateau. Its elevation rises to the Great Escarpment, which flanks the plateau in an almost unbroken line from the Zambezi River to Angola. Southern Zimbabwe and much of South Africa are within a region of scrublands and grasslands known as the veld. To the southeast of the veld is the Drakensberg range, which includes the region’s highest peak—Lesotho’s Mount Ntlenyana, at 11,424 feet (3,482 metres). In Namibia the coastal margin includes the extremely dry Namib desert, which, in the south, merges eastward into the great sandy expanse of the Kalahari.
The region is generally drained eastward toward the Indian Ocean, a pattern exemplified by the largest rivers, the Zambezi and Limpopo. The Zambezi is the longest river in the region, and its catchment includes much of Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The only major river flowing into the Atlantic Ocean is the Orange, which drains parts of South Africa, Lesotho, and Namibia.
Southern African climates are seasonal, ranging from arid to semiarid and from temperate to tropical. The seasonality is an important control on plant growth and a regulator of river flows. Droughts are common in much of the region. Four main types of vegetation are found: savanna woodlands (known as miombo forest) in the north, a series of dry woodlands to the south of these, arid and semiarid grassland, scrubland, and bushland in the Namib and Kalahari deserts and their environs, and Mediterranean vegetation along the southern coast.
The semiarid plains and plateaus that cover much of the region contain animals commonly associated with the East African plains—e.g., antelopes, gazelles, zebras, elephants, and the big cats. However, different animals are found in the coastal woodlands of South Africa and in the desert regions to the north and northwest. Many habitats have been extensively modified by agriculture, thus restricting the ranges of certain species that were formerly more widespread. There are some two dozen large national parks and game reserves in the area as well as many smaller ones, most located in the open or partially wooded plains. At the beginning of the 21st century, several transfrontier parks were opening, including Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the first transnational park, and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, among the largest parks in the world.
The Black peoples of Southern Africa—the overwhelming majority of the region’s population—can be divided into speakers of two language families, Khoisan and Bantu. Khoisan speakers, who have inhabited the region for millennia, have now been displaced in many areas by Bantu speakers. People of European ancestry began migrating to the region in the mid-17th century; they now constitute a sizable minority in South Africa and a much smaller population in Zimbabwe.
The history of Southern Africa cannot be written as a single narrative. Shifting geographic and political boundaries and changing historiographical perspectives render this impossible. Research into local history in the late 20th and early 21st century has presented fragmented historical knowledge, and older generalizations have given way to a complex polyphony of voices as new subfields of history—gender and sexuality, health, and the environment, to name but a few—have developed. Archaeological and historical inquiry has been extremely uneven in the countries of the Southern African subcontinent, with Namibia the least and South Africa the most intensely studied. Divided societies produce divided histories, and there is hardly an episode in the region’s history that is not now open to debate. This is as true of prehistory as of the more recent past.
The uncertainties of evidence for the long preliterate past—where a bone or potsherd can undermine previous interpretations and where recent research has subverted even terminology—are matched by conflicting representations of the colonial and postcolonial periods. In Southern Africa, history is not a set of neutrally observed and agreed-upon facts: present concerns colour interpretations of even the remote past. For all the contestants in contemporary Southern Africa there has been a conscious struggle to control the past in order to legitimate the present and lay claim to the future. Who is telling what history for which Africa is a question that needs constantly to be addressed.
This article covers the history of the region from the prehistoric period to the end of the colonial period in the 20th century. Coverage of the region’s physical and human geography can be found in the article Africa. For discussion of the physical and human geography of individual countries in the region and of their postcolonial history, see Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Area 2,314,764 square miles (5,995,215 square km). Pop. (2005 est.) 121,111,000.
Southern Africa before the 15th century
Early humans and Stone Age society
The controversies in Southern African history begin with the discovery of a fossilized hominin skull in a limestone cave at Taung near the Harts River north of Kimberley in 1924, followed in 1936 by discoveries in similar caves in the Transvaal (now Limpopo and Gauteng provinces) and Northern Cape province, in South Africa. Other significant hominin finds were made in the Sterkfontein Valley (in Gauteng province) beginning in the 1940s. For some time the significance of these finds and their relationship to the evolution of early humans were unappreciated, perhaps because the finds could not be dated, and stone tools—long regarded as the defining characteristic of early humans—had not been found with them. Since that time, similar but datable discoveries in eastern Africa as well as discoveries in the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa have made it possible to place the South African remains in sequence and identify them as australopithecines, upright-walking creatures who are the earliest human ancestors. The australopithecines who roamed the highland savanna plains of Southern Africa date from about three million to one million years ago. There can be little doubt that for hundreds of thousands of years Southern Africa, like eastern Africa, was in the forefront of human development and technological innovation.
Controversies remain, however. The connections between australopithecines and earlier potentially hominin forms remain unclear, while a number of species of australopithecines have been identified. Their evolution into the species Homo habilis and then into the species Homo erectus—which displayed the larger brain, upright posture, teeth, and hands resembling those of modern humans and from whom Homo sapiens almost certainly evolved—is still fiercely debated. Homo erectus appears to have roamed the open savanna lands of eastern and Southern Africa, collecting fruits and berries—and perhaps roots—and either scavenging or hunting. Acheulean industry appeared during the Early Stone Age (c. 2,500,000 to 150,000 years ago) and was characterized by the use of simple stone hand axes, choppers, and cleavers. First evident about 1,500,000 years ago, it seems to have spread from eastern Africa throughout the continent and also to Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch, reaching Southern Africa about 1,000,000 years ago; Acheulean industry remained dominant for more than 1,000,000 years.
During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive, and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens. Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens, dated from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave in Eastern Cape, while at Border Cave on the South Africa–Swaziland border a date of about 90,000 years ago has been claimed for similar Middle Stone Age (150,000 to 30,000 years ago) skeletal remains.
With the emergence of Homo sapiens, experimentation and regional diversification displaced the undifferentiated Acheulean tool kit, and a far more efficient small blade (also called microlithic) technology evolved. Through the controlled use of fire, denser, more mobile populations could move for the first time into heavily wooded areas and caves. Wood, bark, and leather were used for tools and clothing, while vegetable foods were also probably more important than their archaeological survival suggests.
Some scholars believe that the addition of organized hunting to gathering and scavenging transformed human society. The large number of distinctive Late Stone Age (30,000 to 2,000 years ago) industries that emerged reflect increasing specialization as hunter-gatherers exploited different environments, often moving seasonally between them, and developed different subsistence strategies. As in many parts of the world, changes in technology seem to mark a shift to the consumption of smaller game, fish, invertebrates, and plants. Late Stone Age peoples used bows and arrows and a variety of snares and traps for hunting, as well as grindstones and digging sticks for gathering plant food; with hooks, barbed spears, and wicker baskets they also were able to catch fish and thus exploit rivers, lakeshores, and seacoasts more effectively.
Despite the ever-increasing number of radiocarbon dates available for the many Late Stone Age sites excavated in Southern Africa, the reasons for changed consumption patterns and variations in technology are poorly understood. Until the 1960s, population explosion and migration were the common explanations; subsequent explanations have stressed adaptation. Yet the reasons for adaptation are equally unclear and the model equally controversial. Environmental changes do not seem to have been directly responsible, while the evidence for social change is elusive. Nevertheless, the appearance of cave art, careful burials, and ostrich-eggshell beads for adornment suggests more sophisticated behaviour and new patterns of culture. These developments apparently are associated with the emergence between 20,000 and 15,000 bce of the earliest of the historically recognizable populations of Southern Africa: the Pygmy, San, and Khoekhoe peoples, who were probably genetically related to the ancient population that h evolved in the African subcontinent.
Although many scholars attempt to deduce the nature of Late Stone Age societies by examining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, this method is fraught with difficulties. Evidence from Botswana and Namibia suggests that many contemporary hunter-gatherers recently have been dispossessed and that their present way of life, far from being the result of thousands of years of stagnation and isolation, has resulted from their integration into the modern world economy; this hardly provides an adequate model for reconstructions of earlier societies.
During historic times hunter-gatherers were organized in loosely knit bands, of which the family was the basic unit, although wider alliances with neighbouring bands were essential for survival. Each group had its own territory, in which special importance was attached to natural resources, and in many instances bands moved seasonally from small to large camping sites, following water, game, and vegetation. Labour was allocated by gender, with men responsible for hunting game, women for snaring small animals, collecting plant foods, and undertaking domestic chores. These patterns are also evident in the recent archaeological record, but it is unclear how far they can be safely projected back.
Contrary to the popular view that the hunter-gatherer way of life was impoverished and brutish, Late Stone Age people were highly skilled and had a good deal of leisure and a rich spiritual life, as their cave paintings and rock engravings show. While exact dating of cave paintings is problematic, paintings at the Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia appear to be some 26,000 to 28,000 years old. Whereas the art in the northern woodlands is stylized and schematic, that of the savanna and coastlands seems more naturalistic, showing scenes of hunting and fishing, of ritual and celebration; it vividly portrays the Late Stone Age cosmology and way of life. The motives of the artists remain obscure, but many paintings appear linked to the trance experiences of medicine men, in which the antelope (eland) was a key symbol. In later rock paintings there is also the first hint of the advent of new groups of herders and farmers.
The Khoisan
In the long run these new groups of herders and farmers transformed the hunter-gatherer way of life. Initially, however, distinctions between early pastoralists, farmers, and hunter-gatherers were not overwhelming, and in many areas the various groups coexisted. The first evidence of pastoralism in the subcontinent occurs on a scattering of sites in the more arid west; there the bones of sheep and goats, accompanied by stone tools and pottery, date to some 2,000 years ago, about 200 years before iron-using farmers first arrived in the better-watered eastern half of the region. It is with the origins of these food-producing communities and their evolution into the contemporary societies of Southern Africa that much of the precolonial history of the subcontinent has been concerned.
When Europeans first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, they encountered herding people, whom they called Hottentots (a name now considered pejorative) but who called themselves Khoekhoe, meaning “men of men.” At that time they inhabited the fertile southwestern Cape region as well as its more arid hinterland to the northwest, where rainfall did not permit crop cultivation, but they may once have grazed their stock on the more luxuriant central grasslands of Southern Africa. Linguistic evidence suggests that the languages of the later Khoekhoe (the so-called Khoisan languages) originated in one of the hunter-gatherer languages of northern Botswana. In the colonial period, destitute Khoekhoe often reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence; herders and hunters were also frequently physically indistinguishable and used identical stone tools. Thus, the Dutch, and many subsequent social scientists, believed they belonged to a single population following different modes of subsistence: hunting, foraging, beachcombing, and herding. For this reason the groups are often referred to as Khoisan, a compound word referring to Khoekhoe and San, as the Nama called hunter-gatherers without livestock (Bushmen, in the terminology of the colonists, is now considered pejorative).
The archaeological remains of nomadic pastoralists living in impermanent polities are frustratingly sparse, but in the upper Zambezi River valley, southwestern Zimbabwe, and Botswana, herding and pottery appear late in the 1st millennium bce. Cattle and milking appear somewhat later than small stock and were perhaps acquired from iron-using farmers in western Zimbabwe or northeastern South Africa. The loosely organized herders expanded rapidly, driven by their need for fresh grazing areas. Along with pastoralism and pottery came other signs of change: domestic dogs, changes in stone tool kits, altered settlement patterns, larger ostrich-eggshell beads, and the appearance of marine shells in the interior, which suggests the existence of long-distance trade.
Most of Southern Africa’s early agricultural communities shared a common culture, which spread across the region remarkably quickly from the 2nd century ce. By the second half of the 1st millennium ce, farming communities were living in relatively large, semipermanent villages. They cultivated sorghum, millet, and legumes and herded sheep, goats, and some cattle; made pottery and fashioned iron tools to turn the soil and cut their crops; and engaged in long-distance trade. Salt, iron implements, pottery, and possibly copper ornaments passed from hand to hand and were traded widely. Some communities settled near exceptionally good salt, metal, or clay deposits or became known for their specialist craftsmen.
The spread of Bantu languages
Archaeologists are divided over whether all these cultural and economic attributes arrived with a single group of new immigrants speaking a new language or resulted from a more piecemeal development of different skills and the adoption of new techniques by indigenous hunter-gatherers, as has already been suggested in the case of herding among the Khoekhoe. Moreover, archaeologists disagree about the routes and modes of dispersal as well as its timing. It seems likely, however, that a movement of immigrants into Southern Africa occurred in two streams and was part of a wider expansion of populations speaking Bantu languages that ultimately derived from the Niger-Congo languages of western Africa some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.
“Eastern-stream” Bantu speakers, associated with the earliest farming communities in the well-watered eastern half of Southern Africa, date from the 2nd to the 5th century ce. Similar pottery has been found stretching from northeastern Tanzania and coastal Kenya through southern Zimbabwe into eastern South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. These early farmers settled on arable soils along coastal dunes, rivers, and valley basins. Where possible, they exploited marine resources, planted cereals, and worked iron; cattle and long-distance trade were insignificant.
“Western-stream” Bantu speakers were initially more familiar with fishing, oil palms, and the cultivation of vegetables than with cereals or cattle. Even before the 1st millennium ce, pottery similar to that of the eastern stream was being made in the upper Zambezi valley, and pottery of a slightly more recent date has been found in parts of northern Angola. It was probably from these communities that the Bantu speakers spread into the more arid western half of the subcontinent, northwestern Zambia, southwestern Zimbabwe, along the eastern margins of the Kalahari into Botswana, and later into eastern South Africa and Mozambique. Like their counterparts in the east, western-stream Bantu speakers cultivated cereals, worked metal, and made pottery, but the evidence of livestock is far more clear-cut; at first they primarily raised sheep and goats, slightly later cattle. While some argue that the shift to livestock raising merely reflects the human impact on the environment as new lands were opened up for grazing animals, others associate the appearance of domestic stock with the emergence of a different and distinctive tradition of ceramics and a characteristic settlement pattern—known as the Central Cattle Pattern—that embodied both the new centrality of cattle and the different nature of hierarchy in these communities.
Food production
Although at first the impact of food production was probably less momentous than is often assumed, agriculture combined with pastoralism and metallurgy could support far larger settled communities than previously had been possible and enabled a more complex social and political organization to develop. Cattle raising led to increased social stratification between rich and poor and established new divisions of labour between men and women; the accumulation of cattle and the continuous site occupation inherent in cereal production enabled the storage of wealth and the deployment of more organized political power. Archaeologists argue about how easily groups made the transition from a way of life based on hunting and gathering to one centred on herding or agriculture, but an increasing number of excavations suggest that these boundaries were often permeable. The relationships established among hunters, herders, and agriculturalists over more than 2,000 years of socioeconomic change ranged from total resistance to total assimilation. For the indigenous people of Southern Africa the frontiers between different modes of subsistence presented new dangers and opportunities.
As the new culture spread, larger, more successful farming communities were established; in many areas the new way of life was adopted by the hunter-gatherers. Even in the apparently inhospitable and isolated Kalahari it is now clear that there was intense interaction and exchange between hunter-gatherers and food producers, leading to the development of hybrid amalgams of pastoralism, agriculture, and foraging. Contemporary Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa are genetically very similar to the Late Stone Age people of Africa; their close relationship also is evidenced by the presence of Khoisan “click” sounds (in Xhosa, Zulu, and Shona) and loanwords in southeastern Bantu and from the iron and stone tools, cattle and wild animal bones, pottery, and ostrich-eggshell beads on early farming sites such as Broederstroom in east-central South Africa and Hola-Hola in Mozambique.
The rise of more complex states
From about the turn of the 1st millennium ce, in some areas of what are now central Zambia, southeastern Zimbabwe, Malawi, and eastern South Africa, changes in ceramic style were paralleled by a change in the location and nature of settlements. More sophisticated techniques of ironworking, more extensive gold and copper mining, and a great increase in stone building suggest the evolution of more complex state structures, the growth of social inequalities, and the emergence of new religious and spiritual ideas. These changes were, however, neither simultaneous nor evenly spread.
The nature of these transitions and the differences among the sites are still poorly understood, and, again, archaeologists disagree as to whether the changes can be explained by local developments or are best explained by the arrival of migrating populations. In part the controversy may reflect regional differences. In most of Zambia and Malawi a sharply distinguishable pottery style appears at this time, probably from southeastern Congo (Kinshasa), and forms the basis of the ceramics made by several different societies. Farther west, however, there are greater continuities with the earlier wares, while in southeastern Africa locally driven increases in population and cattle—which led to expansion into less favourable environments but which also brought new ideas and new methods of political control—may hold the key.
Toutswe
Whatever the explanation, many of the changes appear for the first time at Toutswe in eastern Botswana with the appearance about the 7th century ce of a new ceramic tradition, new technology, and new forms of social and economic organization. There, larger, well-defended hilltop capitals probably dominated a series of smaller sites with access to water over a wide region. Toutswe may provide evidence for a new population; on the other hand, the evidence of its large cattle herds provides insight into the way in which the natural buildup of herds in a favourable environment could stimulate social change and territorial expansion. Cattle underpinned both material and symbolic power in Southern Africa and served to cement social obligations through bridewealth and loan arrangements. Cattle were also an ideal medium for exchange, and the increase in herding necessitated increased specialization and the extension of trading networks. Patrilineal and polygynous cattle-keeping farmers thus had immense advantages over communities that lacked these new forms of wealth and social organization. Similarities between Toutswe and the material culture of later sites in the Limpopo valley and Zimbabwe suggest that Toutswe also may have inspired new forms of social and economic organization for peoples further afield.
Swahili culture
Greater stratification and more complex social organization were also probably accelerated by the growth of trading with the outside world and by competition for access to it. In the early centuries ce the northeastern African coast was well known to the traders of the Greco-Roman world. These contacts diminished with the rise of Islam, and the east coast became part of the Indian Ocean trading network. By the 8th century Arab traders had begun to visit more southerly harbours, and between the 11th and 15th centuries they founded some three dozen new towns. Although they never united politically, these towns developed a common Afro-Arabic, or Swahili, culture and a splendour that amazed the first European arrivals.
The Limpopo and Save rivers were early arteries of the trade from the southernmost Arab trading posts, with African intermediaries initially bringing ivory and perhaps animal skins, and later copper and gold, to the coast. In the 8th century the presence of Persian potsherds at Chibuene on the coast of Mozambique and snapped cane glass beads at various locations—Kruger National Park, Schroda on the Limpopo, Botswana, the Zimbabwe plateau, and the Mngeni River near Durban—all attest to the influence of this long-distance trade in the region and its early integration into the Indian Ocean networks.
Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe
At 9th- and 10th-century sites such as Schroda and Bambandyanalo in the Limpopo valley, the ivory and cattle trade seems to have been of major importance, but later sites such as Mapungubwe (a hilltop above Bambandyanalo), Manekweni (in southwestern Mozambique), and Great Zimbabwe, which date from the late 11th to the mid 15th century, owed their prosperity to the export of gold. Farther north the 14th-century site of Ingombe Ilede (near the Zambezi-Kafue confluence) probably also owed its prosperity in copper and gold—and its social stratification—to the rise of the east coast trade. Although they do not typify the later Iron Age as a whole, the conspicuous consumption at these sites and the bias in oral sources toward centralized states means they have attracted perhaps a disproportionate share of scholarly attention.
In Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe a wealthy and privileged elite built with stone and were buried with gold and copper ornaments, exotic beads, and fine imported pottery and cloth. Their homes, diet, and ostentatious burials are in stark contrast to those of the common folk, whose dwellings cluster at the foot of the sites where they probably laboured. Large quantities of stone were brought to build walls on these hilltop sites, which suggests considerable labour. All were centres of political authority, controlling trade and cattle movement over a wide area stretching from eastern Botswana in the west to Mozambique in the east. Cattle, gold, and copper came in trade or tribute from settlements hundreds of miles away. Skilled craftsmen made elegant pottery, sculpture, and fine bone tools for local use and for trade, while the presence of spindle whorls suggests local weaving.
In the past, fierce controversy raged concerning the racial identity of Mapungubwe’s occupants, and, as in the case of Great Zimbabwe, early excavators refused to accept that it could have been built by Africans. Mapungubwe’s skeletal and cultural remains are, however, identical to those found at other Iron Age settlements in the subcontinent, and there is little reason to doubt the African origin and medieval date of both sites.
Torwa, Mutapa, and Rozwi
In the second half of the 15th century Great Zimbabwe came to an abrupt end. Its successor in the southwest was Torwa, with its centre at Khami; in the north it was replaced by the Mutapa state. The new culture at Khami developed both the stone building techniques and the pottery styles found at Great Zimbabwe and seeded a number of smaller sites over a wide region of the southern and western plateau. The Torwa kingdom seems to have lasted until the end of the 17th century, when it was replaced by the Rozwi Changamire dynasty from the central plateau, which lasted well into the 19th century. The domination of the Mutapa state extended into Mozambique. Contrary to earlier historical opinion, there is little evidence to link the origins of Mutapa directly to Great Zimbabwe, and Mutapa did not reach the magnitude suggested in some accounts. It was, nevertheless, of considerable size by the beginning of the 16th century; the capital alone contained several thousand people. Like the rulers of Great Zimbabwe, the Torwa, Mutapa, and Rozwi dynasties maintained the coastal gold and ivory trade, although cereal agriculture and cattle remained the basis of the economy.
Small-scale societies
In the first half of the 2nd millennium ce the majority of Southern Africa’s peoples were probably relatively unaffected by the formation of these larger trading states. Most lived in small-scale societies, based on kinship, in which political authority was exercised by a chief who claimed seniority by virtue of his royal genealogy but who may have risen to power through his access to mineral resources, hunting, or ritual skills. By 1500 most of the farming communities had stabilized in roughly their present-day habitats, reaching their ecological frontier on the dry southern Highveld of South Africa and gradually clearing the coastal forests.
While in many areas ceramic evidence suggests cultural continuity over many centuries, within these boundaries there was considerable movement as populations expanded and found available resources inadequate. Thus, between the 17th and 19th centuries there was migration of northern and eastern Shona speakers into the centre and south of the plateau, while in South Africa new land was colonized by cattle-raising peoples, as the stone-walled sites in the southern Highveld indicate. In some areas the expansion inevitably led to conflict as the newcomers came up against settled communities; in others the indigenous inhabitants were gradually absorbed, while elsewhere sparsely inhabited, colder, and more arid mountain lands were colonized.
In most of these farming communities land was relatively plentiful, while labour was not, and control over people was therefore of the essence. Those societies in which cattle were important were patrilineal, polygynous, and virilocal; men herded, while women were the major agricultural producers. The labour and reproductive power of women was transferred from father to husband through the circulation of cattle in the form of bridewealth. Where cattle were meagre, societies were matrilineal and usually matrilocal; men still depended on women for agricultural labour and for bringing young men and children into the household. Wealthy homes were those with large numbers of women, and even before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade it had become customary for men to take slave wives who would work in exchange for protection.
By the time coastal peoples were first encountered by literate European observers in the 15th century, many were the recognizable forebears of Southern Africa’s contemporary population. This does not mean, however, that these societies were static and unchanging. New kingdoms and chiefdoms were formed and older ones disintegrated, the result of both internal and external agency, while new ethnic and cultural identities began to be forged in the hazardous new world resulting from Africa’s incorporation into the Atlantic economy.