He has no religion, no laws, no government, no recognised authority, no patrimony, no fixed abode . . . a soul debased, it is true, and completely bound down and clogged by his animal nature.7
These views still permeate much of southern Africa's history as it is being written by many historians, as opposed to archaeologists.8 (Although I join others in questioning the validity of this distinction between archaeology and history, it clearly exists in the southern African context.) For decades the Bushmen have been portrayed as simple nomads, wandering aimlessly across a landscape they did not own or manipulate. Living as if in a garden of Eden, 'hunter-gatherers had time and energy for subtle and complex aesthetic expression in rock art and in music'.9 But when some writers consider the leisure time the Bushmen, but not the herding or farming groups, are supposed to have had, the difference is explicable: 'The herding way of life, moreover, required more work than hunting and gathering, so that pastoralists had less time and energy to devote to aesthetic pursuits.'10
Early colonial reaction to the delicate and complex rock art of southern Africa was also one of great surprise, given the low intellectual status then ascribed to the Bushmen. Sir John Barrow, for example, wrote: 'The force and spirit of drawings, given to them by bold touches judiciously applied, and by the effect of light and shadow, could not be expected from savages.'11 Although they allowed aesthetic merit, the early writers denied any intellectual accomplishment. Despite research over the last two decades demonstrating that Bushman art was not the product of idle hours, these early racist attitudes linger in histories produced today. Thus conceived, the Bushmen's stature as human beings capable of creative thought and the control of their own destiny was and still is being obscured.
Attitudes like Moffat's and Tindall's that held the Bushmen in low regard informed early explorers' and missionaries' perceptions of the Bushman peoples' political role in southern Africa, a perception that persists today in both public and academic discourse. Because of their 'animal nature' it was inconceivable that the Bushmen could have had any impact on the colonial history of southern Africa. This perception has given rise to what have become the two most widely held stereotypic images of the Bushmen in history and literature today: the Bushmen as stock raiders and the Bushmen as a vanishing race.
Bushman Raiders
The early written records of events in southern Africa abound with references to Bushmen as raiders – some writers mention little else. For example, Thomas Arbousset makes repeated reference to this, describing how even the Sotho would not use some of the good pastures for their cattle because they were 'exposed to the depredations' of the Bushmen. In one incident during Arbousset's expedition with King Moshoeshoe, for example, their horses disappeared during the night; they immediately assumed it was the Bushmen:
The previous winter, these vagrants had stolen all of Masopo' s horses, and they had eaten them in the bush in the heart of the Maloti. We reckoned that the same thing must be happening to us. But we were wrong. Our horses had simply gone round a mountain, and we found them grazing quietly at the bottom of a valley.12
This kind of incident must have happened more than once. It was supposedly because of these raids that the Boers mounted extensive commandos against the Bushmen, but the hatred ran deeper than this.13 While I would not argue that Bushmen were not involved in raids throughout the subcontinent, I do argue against the importance this activity is given in both popular and academic discourse. These raids have to be placed within a wider, more enquiring social context.14
This outlawed existence, so the reconstruction goes, could not go on for much longer; there could only be one end to it. The 'Bushman as raider' stereotype leads directly to the next.
The Vanishing Bushmen
As a result of contact with Bantu-speaking farmers and white colonists, the Bushmen, supposedly the weakest of the various cultural groups, were said to have disappeared into the more mountainous and less hospitable parts of the country. A view still widely held and promoted in popular local histories is that some Bushman groups were forced to move into the drier areas of the Kalahari, where they still exist today:
The struggle between the [whites and the Bushmen] went on for years, but there could only be one end to it. The Bushmen retreated into the mountains at first, but eventually moved into the desert areas of the Kalahari, Botswana and South West Africa, where they adapted themselves to conditions in which very few other people could have survived – a remarkable achievement in view of their limited equipment.15
Liberal histories, on the other hand, mention some form of economic relationship between Bushmen and the pastoralists or farmers in the different regions.l6 But these are scant and very generalised. Maps drawn to accompany such texts tend to present various Bantu-speaking groups as having displaced Bushman groups.17 Leonard Thompson's map shows 'Khoisan' groups occupying more arid, less hospitable regions to the west of the subcontinent. Again, I do not want to argue that the Bushmen did not occupy these less favourable regions. What I am concerned with is the apparent ease with which Bushman populations are moved about on a map.
Maps like these, besides being demographically incorrect, construct a very simplified picture of the demography of the subcontinent; this in turn influences perceptions of the social dynamics of cultural interaction in the region. No idea of the complexity of the economic and social relations between hunter-gatherers and farmers is given. The impression is created that the Bushmen gave in to these stronger, less 'primitive' farmers and herders or were entirely assimilated, even though we know that some Bushman people developed strong ties with farming and herding communities. Although a different picture is beginning to emerge,18 partly as a result of writers incorporating archaeological research, the principle of the so-called 'weaker' necessarily giving way to the 'stronger' is still firmly entrenched in the academic mind.
This view of the Bushmen vanishing into the mountains where they lived out their last days, carrying out raids from time to time, is produced by the same ideology that led to the notion that Natal was devastated during the 1810s and 1820s and that its population was either exterminated or driven out by the Zulu.19 This idea of a 'devastated Natal' was then appropriated to justify British colonisation of the area and domination over African populations. The whites are thus presented as having put an end to Zulu ravages and having brought peace and stability to the area.
Where groups of Bushmen did remain, in the Drakensberg mountains of Natal and the eastern Cape, they are portrayed as a social nuisance, thus justifying the commandos sent out against them. 'The Bushmen became such a pest that it was necessary to hunt them down.'20 The reinforcement of the idea of Bushmen as bandits in modern popular literature continues to excuse the early settlers for exterminating vast numbers of them.21
The persistence of these two stereotypes results in part from continuing to look at the Bushmen through the prejudices of early writers. Despite recent extensive research on historical and modern Bushmen challenging them, these stereotypes are not easily dislodged from histories of southern Africa. When one reads writers who, though still influenced by European values, were more sympathetic towards the Bushmen, a different image of the Bushmen and their political role in southern Africa begins to emerge.22
Of course, an even more dramatically different image would have emerged if a history had been written by a Bushman and from a Bushman's perspective. In the absence of such a history, we do nevertheless have a record of another kind that can be used together with other historical sources to recover, at least in part, this Bushman perspective.23 This record consists of archaeological remains.
The Archaeological Record
Although the written archaeological record is not seen from a Bushman perspective, some of