SOUTH AFRICA The natives of Africa south of the Kunene, Okavango and Zambezi rivers fall into three main divisions, known respectively as Bushmen, Hottentots and Bantu. These divisions represent a series of successive waves of southerly migration by which the peopling of the country has been effected. The Bushmen, a race of short yellowish-brown nomad hunters, are the earliest human inhabitants of South Africa of whom there is any re liable historical record. Recent archaeological research, however, has established clearly that they were not the first to occupy the country, but are an invading people who superseded the orig inal inhabitants of this part of South Africa. From the evidence afforded by their cultural remains it seems likely that at a very early time they occupied the hunting grounds of tropical East Africa and gradually passed southwards until, when the written history of the country begins, they were roaming all over the territory south of the Zambezi river.
By this time they were already being encroached upon by the Hottentots, who resemble them greatly in racial characters and in language, but are a pastoral people with a more complex material culture and social organization. The Hottentots seem to have sprung out of a mixture of the old Bushman population of East Africa with an early migration of Hamites from whom they ob tained their cattle and certain elements of their language. They migrated south later than the Bushmen, and after crossing the upper waters of the Zambezi passed on to the west coast and down to the south coast, where they were found by the first Europeans to touch at the Cape.
The Bantu peoples are the latest of the native inhabitants to have entered South Africa. They all speak languages belonging to the characteristic Bantu language family of Africa (see AFRICAN LANGUAGES), but in racial characters they vary considerably, though certain negro characteristics predominate. They seem to have originated as a distinct variety somewhere in the neighbour hood of the Great Lakes and to have migrated South at various times between about the 12th and 15th centuries, each of their main groups (see below, Principal Groups) representing a differ ent series of tribal movements.
The impacts upon one another of all these different peoples, and the later advance inland from the Cape of the European settlers, resulted in a complicated series of wars, migrations and ex terminations, in which the Bushmen and the Hottentots were al most completely broken up, while the original distribution and condition of the Bantu were profoundly disturbed (see SOUTH AFRICA, History).