South Africa: Who Was Here First?

1. What the Myth Says

Some white South Africans, especially within the Afrikaner nationalist tradition, argue that their ancestors reached the southern tip of Africa “at roughly the same time” as Bantu-speaking farmers. From that premise they conclude that:

1. Only Khoisan peoples are truly autochthonous;
2. Afrikaners are therefore just as — or even more — “African” than today’s Black majority;
3. Land restitution demands are morally void.

This argument collapses once the archaeological, linguistic, genetic and documentary record is examined.

2. The Archaeological Clock: Bantu Farmers 1 500 – 2 000 Years Ago

• 200 – 500 CE | Kalundu tradition (northern Botswana) — earliest iron-smelting and mixed farming in the Kalahari basin. ResearchGate
• 600 – 1000 CE | KwaGandaganda (Mngeni Valley, KwaZulu-Natal) — four centuries of continuous Early Iron-Age settlement by Bantu speakers. Academia
• 750 – 950 CE | Ndondondwane (Tugela Basin, KZN) — intensive agriculture, cattle herding, and ivory-trade evidence. UJ Press Journals
• 900 – 1300 CE | Mapungubwe (Limpopo Valley) — first indigenous Southern-African state with long-distance commerce links.

Bottom line: By the 7th century CE — a full 1 000 years before the Dutch erected a fort at the Cape in 1652 — Bantu-speaking Africans had settled, farmed, smelted iron and built towns across today’s South Africa.

3. Genetic & Linguistic Corroboration

• Genome studies show Khoisan populations absorbed Bantu ancestry ~1 200 years ago, fixing the latest plausible arrival of Bantu speakers to the 8th century CE. PMC
• Linguistic phylogenies trace Southern Bantu languages to branches that diverged well before the 10th century, consistent with archaeological horizons. Wikipedia

Thus three independent datasets — bones, genes, words — converge on the same early-first-millennium timeline.

4. Europeans Enter, a Millennium Later

• 1488 → Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape; no settlement.
• 1652 → Jan van Riebeeck establishes a refreshment station for the VOC at Table Bay.
• 1680s → Trekboer expansion begins beyond the Cape Peninsula, encroaching on Khoekhoe territory.

European farming communities therefore appear at least 1 100 years after the first Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists. South African History OnlineWikipedia

5. The Afrikaner Identity Contradiction

During apartheid, the state codified race via the Population Registration Act of 1950, which placed Afrikaners firmly in the European/White category, legally segregated from “Bantu” and “Coloured” populations. WikipediaEncyclopedia Britannica

Afrikaner cultural heritage is undeniably part of South Africa’s mosaic, but the legal and ideological foundation of Afrikaner nationalism explicitly rested on European descent. The claim flips only when it becomes tactically useful against land reform.

6. Why “Khoi Only” Arguments Fail

1. Continuous Bantu presence: Iron-Age farmers did not displace Khoisan everywhere; interaction, trade and inter-marriage created hybrid communities well before 1652.
2. Shared indigeneity is not zero-sum: Multiple waves of settlement can be indigenous relative to much later colonial conquest.
3. UN definition: Indigeneity hinges on pre-colonial occupation and cultural continuity — criteria Bantu-language communities meet and European settlers do not.

7. Conclusion

• Bantu-speaking societies have a documented 1 000-plus-year head-start over any European group in what is now South Africa.
• Assertions that Afrikaners and Black South Africans arrived “together” are ahistorical propaganda designed to delegitimise land restitution.
• Afrikaners’ 20th-century self-classification as Europeans under apartheid starkly contradicts today’s rhetoric of indigeneity.

Recognizing these facts does not diminish anyone’s citizenship; it simply places the land question back on a foundation of historical truth rather than revisionist mythology.