The South African topography readily culminates in an eyes gratifying scenery. Marked with touches of slopes connecting valleys to mountains and rivers such as the Limpopo confluencing to finally flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
The climatic variances in its environments present each community with conditions that readily complement the others. Succinctly put, South Africa presents to the geographer an area of natures completeness.
The original indigenes of the South African society are the Bushmen (or SAN), the Hottentots (or Khoi-Khoi) and the Bantu speaking peoples.
The Bushmen are credited to have been the earliest known human inhabitants of South Africa. They are from historical records described as crude, in lifestyle and fierce in social relations even within their own circle. They posed a great threat to the trekboers and the Hottentots who later had to diminish their numbers through incessant fightings roused by the struggle for control of economic resources, mainly land.
The Hottentots on the other hand, were more advanced in their socio-economic way of life, having structured judicial and family systems. They unlike the dominantly nomadic Bushmen were partly nomadic. They usually had clashes over grazing lands for their stock.
The Bantu speaking people are majorly grouped into the Nguni Sotho, Herero and Ovambo sub tribes. They are the most recent of the major tribes of South Africa. Though different in characteristics and features, they were mainly Negroes and spoke a common language – the Bantu.
They also had a very developed political and judicial system. The smallest social unit is the family. The Bantu, like the Khoisans perform the initiation rights for young boys and girls only with little variations in manner of ceremony.
The South African Economy
It serves the purpose of clarity to discuss the economy of the native people of South Africa before the coming of the white settlers. This would enable the reader understand what would have drawn the interest of the settlers to the economy of the aborigines.
The mainstay of the natives’ economy had been grazing land, livestock, water, fish, forest resources.
The personal estates of each group were based on the dominant lifestyle. Personal properties ranged from pots, arrows, bows, mats, fishing nets, etc. The mode of trade until the coming of the British was by barter. Each community exchanged its products for its neighbours products in other to satisfy it needs.
The nature of the South African economy explains why the Dutch East Indian Company must have established a stopping station in the Cape to replenish the food and water supplies of its ship going to and coming from the West Indies.
This is also helpful in helping the scholar conclude that the Southern African soil is fertile and its rivers rich in resources. The supplies were initially sufficient to sustain the barter trade between the Hottentots and the Dutch.
If we then accept that the products supplied to the Dutch were satisfactory, the Dutch were then stimulated to cultivate the fertile land for their own purpose alone. At least temporarily, the aborigines saw no harm in this.
The satisfaction derived from this “social consummation” must have made the Dutch conclude in establishing ports at the Cape and to drawing the Policy of Confinement, believing that all things being equal, the Cape would only be cultivated to serve their consumption and refueling needs, and that this would in no way cause any form of socio-political intermingling with the Hottentots.
However, as the story of man from inception has been premised on economics which studies the behaviour of man, in relationship to scarce means which have alternative uses. Man’s insatiable wants would make him ask for more and more and more. This singular concept when put into motion among and between the Dutch and the natives snowballed into events that forever reshaped the history of Southern Africa.
In sequential order, the Dutch, the French and the British are the main invaders and later settlers of South Africa. The Dutch were the first settlers, while the British, who are the last were the longest colonists and the largest settlers in the area.