Khoisan

Khoisan (/ˈkɔɪsɑːn/ KOY-sahn) or Khoe-Sān (pronounced [kʰoɪˈsaːn]) is an umbrella term for the various indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples. Khoisan populations traditionally speak click languages. They are considered to be the historical communities throughout Southern Africa, remaining predominant until Bantu expansion and European colonisation. The Khoisan have lived in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu (sorghum-based) agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, where Khoekhoe populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups. Considerable mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click phonemes in many Southern African Bantu languages, including Xhosa.

Many Khoesan peoples are the descendants of an early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago. (However, see below for recent work supporting a multi-regional hypothesis that suggests the Khoisan may be a source population for anatomically modern humans.) Their languages show a limited typological similarity, largely confined to the prevalence of click consonants. They are not verifiably derived from a single common proto-language, but are split among at least three separate and unrelated language families (Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kxʼa). It has been suggested that the Khoekhoe may represent Late Stone Age arrivals to Southern Africa, possibly displaced by Bantu expansion reaching the area roughly between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.

Sān are popularly thought of as foragers in the Kalahari Desert and regions of Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa. The word sān is from the Khoekhoe language and refers to foragers ("those who pick things up from the ground") who do not own livestock. As such, it was used in reference to all hunter-gatherer populations who came in contact with Khoekhoe-speaking communities, and largely referred to their lifestyle. It made distinction from pastoralist or agriculturalist communities, and had no ties to any particular ethnicity. While there are attendant cosmologies and languages associated with this way of life, the term is an economic designator rather than a cultural or ethnic one.

The compound term Khoisan / Khoesān is a modern anthropological convention in use since the early-to-mid 20th century. Khoisan is a coinage by Leonhard Schultze-Jena in the 1920s and popularised by Isaac Schapera. It entered wider usage during the 1960s, based on the proposal of a Khoisan language family by Joseph Greenberg.

During the Colonial/Apartheid era, Afrikaans-speaking persons with partial Khoesān ancestry were historically also grouped as Cape Blacks (Afrikaans: Kaap Swartes) or Western Cape Blacks (Afrikaans: Wes-Kaap Swartes). This was done to distinguish them from the Bantu-speaking peoples, the other indigenous African population of South Africa who also had significant Khoe-San ancestry.

The term Khoisan (also spelled KhoiSan, Khoi-San, Khoe-San) was also introduced in South African usage as a self-designation after the end of apartheid in the late 1990s. Since the 2010s, there has been a Khoisan activist movement, demanding recognition and land rights from the government and the white minority which owns large parts of the country's private land.

However, the term is also seen as problematic by many, for several reasons. Mellet argues that Leonhard Schultze-Jena, who first coined the term, was driven by a racist framing which needs to be confronted. Secondly, San people tend to reject this appellation, as expressed by a collective of San authors supported by WIMSA, who explain that: "The San object to being grouped together with the presently more powerful pastoralist KhoeKhoen for academic and linguistic reasons". A third reason is that the relationship between Khoekhoe and San people in history has been complex with evidence that commandos with Khoekhoe participation or even Khoekhoe leadership played an important role in the genocide against the Cape San people in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is suggested that the ancestors of the modern Khoisan expanded to southern Africa (from East or Central Africa) before 150,000 years ago and possibly as early as before 260,000 years ago. By the beginning of the MIS 5 "megadrought" 130,000 years ago, there were two ancestral population clusters in Africa; bearers of mt-DNA haplogroup L0 in southern Africa, ancestral to the Khoi-San, and bearers of haplogroup L1-6 in central/eastern Africa, ancestral to everyone else.^{[citation needed]} This group gave rise to the San population of hunter gatherers. A much later wave of migration, around or before the beginning of the Common Era, gave rise to the Khoe people, who were pastoralists.