There is a significant break in the ceramic sequence south of the Limpopo River, dating to the eleventh century AD in present-day Kwazulu-Natal, and in the fourteenth century in the areas just south of the Limpopo River. New ceramic styles and different settlement preferences mark the appearance of new Bantu-speaking farmers (Figures 4 and 5). The newcomers were ancestral Nguni and Sotho/Tswana-speakers who initiated the history of the majority of contemporary South Africans. On linguistic and cultural grounds, the origins of these new groups are in East Africa.
Figure 5 The central area of Molokwane, a stone wall western Tswana town dating between the eighteenth century and 1827.
By the fourteenth century, ancestral Sotho/Tswana-speakers were established in the Limpopo region. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had expanded southwards to the edge of the southern grasslands. In the north, Sotho combined with Shona-speakers who had moved south across the Limpopo River, and by the sixteenth century had intermarried and melded to develop Venda as a language and an identity. Below the escarpment to the east, ancestral Nguni-speakers, known as Blackburn, had first settled the coastal area by the twelfth century AD. From AD 1300 a second phase had developed known as Moor Park. They moved beyond the mixed habitats of the major river valleys and expanded onto the higher grasslands over the escarpment to the west, as well as southwards along the coast to the edge of the viable summer rainfall zone. These Nguni farmers were the first to use dry stone walls to mark homestead boundaries and internal activity areas. Moor Park settlements are frequently found on steep-sided hills that may indicate the defense of agricultural resources in the harsher climatic conditions at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Climatic downturns may also have encouraged dispersals by Nguni-speakers, one at AD 1600 and another at AD 1700, over the escarpment into the western Sotho/Tswana dominated interior. Here they initially resisted Sotho/Tswana-speakers but were soon culturally assimilated.
From the sixteeenth-century, Sotho-Tswana speakers had pushed further south across the Vaal River and onto the grassland habitats of the Eastern Free State and by the seventeenth century had reached the climatic and environmental limits of sorghum and millet farming. The use of dry stone walls to delineate settlements was widespread by this time, particularly on the treeless habitats of the southern grasslands. There is a relatively direct historic relationship between this archaeology and the ethnographic ‘present’, and analogy allows settlement structure to be ‘read’ in some detail. In addition, as Tim Maggs has shown, this period comes within the reach of oral records which attach specific identities to settlement types and individual settlements. Archaeological evidence, including rock art, ethnohistoric records, and linguistic research show that complex interactions between hunter-gatherers and farmers continued well into the nineteenth century.
In the second half of the eighteenth century a process of political centralization gathered momentum among western and eastern Tswana-speakers. The oral records describe considerable tension between competing chiefdoms. The archaeological correlate is the aggregation of homesteads into large towns, some of which were clearly defensive (Figure 5). The first Europeans to visit some of them recorded populations of up to 20 000 people. The factors responsible for political centralization vary between demographic surges, drought, the introduction of maize, and the colonial frontier pushing from the Cape Colony in the south and from the south east African coast. Toward the end of the eighteenth-century elephant ivory was a major trade item, and competition over ivory, cattle, women, and other resources for local use and trade were intense. The best-known response to colonial pressure came in the early nineteenth century when the Zulu state, under Shaka, rose to power in the east. Colonial historians of early nineteenth-century history blamed Shaka for the mfecane, a period of political instability between the early 1820s and the late 1830s. Revisionist historians see African state formation and increased militarism as a response to colonial pressures of which the Great Trek northwards from the Cape Colony was an inseparable process. With this event, the frontier started to close and by the end of the nineteenth century South African farmers had all but lost their independence.
See also: Africa, Central: Great Lakes Area; Zimbabwe Plateau and Surrounding Areas; Africa, South: Kalahari Margins; Political Complexity, Rise of.
World History
