Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit A Tapestry of People: The Growth of Population in the Province of the Western Cape by Dudley Horner and Francis Wilson WORKING PAPER SERIES Number 21 About the Authors and Acknowledgments Professor Francis Wilson and Dudley Horner are both SALDRU Honorary Research Fellows and were previously respectively director and deputy-director of the research unit. We acknowledge with thanks the Directorate for Social Research & Provincial Population in the Department of Social Development within the Provincial Government of the Western Cape, and particularly Mr Gavin Miller and Dr Ravayi Marindo, who commissioned this study as part of the project on the state of population in the Western Cape Province. We thank, too, Mrs Brenda Adams and Mrs Alison Siljeur for all their assistance with the production of this report. While we have endeavoured to make this historical overview as accurate as possible we would welcome any comments suggesting appropriate amendments or corrections. Recommended citation Horner, D. and Wilson, F. (2008) E A Tapestry of People: The Growth of Population in the Province of the Western Cape. A Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper Number 21. Cape Town: SALDRU, University of Cape Town ISBN: 978-0-9814123-2-0 © Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, UCT, 2008 Working Papers can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format from www.saldru.uct.ac.za. Printed copies of Working Papers are available for R15.00 each plus vat and postage charges. Contact: Francis Wilson - [email protected] Dudley Horner - [email protected] Orders may be directed to: The Administrative Officer, SALDRU, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7701, Tel: (021) 650 5696, Fax: (021) 650 5697, Email: [email protected] A Tapestry of People: The Growth of Population in the Province of the Western Cape by Dudley Horner & Francis Wilson Long Before Van Riebeeck. The best place to begin a study of human settlement is with climate. Most of the Western Cape province--- the land lying north of a line running parallel to the southern coast approximately 100 kilometers inland, from Worcester to Uniondale---is too dry for arable farming. And the rain which does fall south of the long range of mountains tends to come in the winter months which is suitable for wheat but not for tropical cereals. Thus when iron- working, Bantu-speaking, people began to move east and then south from the Niger-Congo area in a great wave of migration that began some 2000 years ago they moved into the wetter eastern part of what is now South Africa where there was good grazing for their cattle and where the crops they knew---sorghum, millet and, later maize, --- would grow (Mostert, N:184). Fifteen hundred years later when Portuguese-, and later Dutch-, speaking people began to move south down the Atlantic sea along the coast of West Africa they found land on the shores of Table Bay where there was no malaria but where there was water and they could grow vegetables and wheat. As Jared Diamond put it in his stimulating study on the fates of human societies, ‘(T)he problems of modern South Africa stem at least in part from a geographic accident. The homeland of the Cape Khoesan happened to contain few wild plants suitable for domestication; the Bantu happened to inherit summer-rain crops from their ancestors of 5,000 years ago; and Europeans happened to inherit winter-rain crops from their ancestors of nearly 10,000 years ago.’ (Diamond: 397) Added to this, the dryness beyond the mountains that ran parallel to the southern coast meant that the Khoekhoen tended to keep to those coastal parts where there was grazing for their cattle and sheep whilst the San, who lived by hunting and gathering, kept to the mountains when they were not pushed into the harsh, dry interior. Up the west coast, the dividing-line between winter and summer rainfall (such as it was) was to become a hotly contested zone of struggle on the ‘Forgotten Frontier’ (Penn, 2005: 82) and in due course the boundary line between the provinces of the Western and the Northern Cape. All of this was against a back-drop of human settlement which pre-dated the Europeans, or even the Bantu-speakers, by centuries. For the overwhelming mass of current archeological and DNA evidence suggests that human beings, homo sapiens, emerged somewhere in southern or eastern Africa.(Cavalli-Sforza). Quite where is a matter of intense debate and there are those who would argue that the very first people lived within sight of Table Mountain. Others believe they were more likely to have been in or near the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, or even somewhat further west, in Chad. (Blundell). Be that as it may, there is 1 plenty of evidence of human beings in what is now the Western Cape, going back 100 000 years and more. In their book on The Story of Earth and Life: A southern African perspective on a 43.6 billion-year journey McCarthy & Rubidge provide an up-to-date and graphic account of the evolution of the earth, including humans, from the beginning of time. The route map to chapter 10, on the arrival of humans, begins 65 million years before the present (BP) with the extinction of Dinosaurs and ends with the emergence, circa 200 000 BP, of homo sapiens sapiens and the global dispersion of the species from Africa. (McCarthy, T. & Rubidge, B: 276) This emergence was preceded by the Early Stone Age which lasted from about 2.6 million to 200 000 years ago during which time rough stone tools, with a few flakes removed to make simple choppers, were used by Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The Middle Stone Age lasted from ca. 200 000 to 35 000 BP and was marked by stone flakes that ‘were struck off the core …(and) used as tools’ And sometimes homo sapiens sapiens ‘hafted the tools to make spears and knives.’ (McCarthy,T & Rubidge,B: 290) The Later Stone Age began some 40 000 years BP and is marked by the use of much smaller tools, many of which were made of bone and ivory. Hand axes made by homo erectus 750 000 years ago, thus dating from the Early Stone Age, are in the Wellington museum, near where they were found. Fast forward half a million years and there are stone tools and bones dated somewhere between 400 000 and 200 000 years before the present at the Duinefontein sites near Cape Town. Another quarter of a million years later we come to the hominid fossils at Hoedjiespunt near Saldanha Bay. Just beyond the eastern border of the Western Cape lie the Klasies river caves on the Tsitsikamma coast near Humansdorp where South African archeologists have been patiently digging away since the 1960s and where they have found some of the earliest known humans in the world, dating back some 100 to 125 thousand years. Closer to home are the ‘footsteps of Eve’, fossilised modern human footprints---the oldest yet discovered--- dating back over 117 000 years, found at Langebaan in 1995 and now housed in the South African Museum in Cape Town.(Mountain,A:13) According to Schapera, the stone implements and rock art associated with the San, ‘all belong to the Later Stone Age’. Schapera goes on to argue that those living in the Earlier and Middle Stone Age Cultures must have been there before the San who, he suggests, ‘came with their culture from the north-east.’(Schapera,I: 26-27) One of the most exciting of the more recent finds dates back ‘only’ 77 000 years. This is the ‘jewelry’---pierced sea shell beads as well as two pieces of ochre marked with complex design markings---found in 1991 in the Blombos cave not far east of Arniston on the southern coast(Mountain,A: 15; McCarthy,T & Rubidge,B:293; Henshilwood: 78-86). For some years this was, and may still be, the oldest known human art work in the world--- roughly twice as old as the paintings in the Lascaux caves in France. But work that may be even older has recently been discovered in Morocco, although it remains controversial. Although much further historical work needs to be done, it would seem that by the time the Bantu-speakers arrived south of the Limpopo some 1500 years ago, South Africa was already well---albeit sparsely---populated by small bands of hunters and gatherers, the San, who had themselves originally come in from the north-east and replaced earlier stone age people. In the mid-17th century they numbered perhaps 10 000 people (Schapera,I: 27 & 39). The San tended to live in more mountainous areas and left a record of their presence in innumerable paintings on rocks and in caves. In addition to the hunters were those, possibly distantly related to the San, who had become pastoralists owning sheep and cattle but who left no records of painting. They tended to live in the plains where grazing was more plentiful. It was they, the Khoekhoen, whom the first sea-farers from Europe met when they, led by 2 Bartholemew Diaz, first landed at Mossel Bay and Table Bay at the end of the 15th. and beginning of the 16th centuries. Both San and Khoekhoen spoke languages with marked clicks which after several centuries of interaction with the southernmost of the Nguni speakers rubbed off on the Xhosa in a way that did not happen to the same extent further north.