Origins 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. 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. Due to their early expansion and separation, the populations ancestral to the Khoisan have been estimated as having represented the "largest human population" during the majority of the
anatomically modern human timeline, from their early separation before 150
kya until the
recent peopling of Eurasia some 70 kya. They were much more widespread than today, their modern distribution being due to their decimation in the course of the
Bantu expansion. They were dispersed throughout much of southern and southeastern Africa. There was also a significant back-migration of bearers of L0 towards eastern Africa between 120 and 75 kya. Rito et al. (2013) speculate that pressure from such back-migration may even have contributed to the dispersal of East African populations out of Africa at about 70 kya. Recent work has suggested that the multi-regional hypothesis may be supported by current human population genetic data. A 2023 study published in the journal
Nature suggests that current genetic data may be best understood as reflecting internal admixtures of multiple population sources across Africa, including ancestral populations of the Khoisan. The contemporary
San and
Khoi peoples resemble those represented by the ancient Sangoan skeletal remains. Against the traditional interpretation that find a common origin for the Khoi and San, other evidence has suggested that the ancestors of the Khoi peoples are relatively recent pre-Bantu agricultural immigrants to southern Africa who abandoned agriculture as the climate dried and either joined the San as hunter-gatherers or retained pastoralism. With the hypothesised arrival of pastoralists and Bantoid
agro-pastoralists in southern Africa around 2,300 years ago, linguistic developments later became evident in the adoption of
click consonants and loanwords from ancient Khoe-San languages. These influenced the evolution of blended agro-pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities, which would eventually give rise to the modern, amalgamated native linguistic communities found today in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia (e.g., in South African
Xhosa,
Sotho,
Tswana,
Zulu people). Today these groups represent the quantitative majority of extant admixed ancient Khoe-San descendants by the millions.
Historical period The
Khoikhoi entered the historical record with their first contact with Portuguese explorers, about 1,000 years after their displacement by the Bantu. Local population dropped after the Khoi were exposed to
smallpox from Europeans. The Khoi waged more frequent attacks against Europeans when the
Dutch East India Company enclosed traditional grazing land for farms. Khoikhoi social organisation were profoundly damaged and, in the end, destroyed by colonial expansion and land seizure from the late 17th century onwards. As social structures broke down, some Khoikhoi people settled on farms and became bondsmen (bondservants) or farm workers; many were incorporated into existing Khoi clan and family groups of the
Xhosa people. Georg Schmidt, a
Moravian Brother from
Herrnhut, Saxony, now Germany, founded
Genadendal in 1738, which was the first mission station in southern Africa, among the Khoi people in Baviaanskloof in the
Riviersonderend Mountains. Early European settlers sometimes intermarried with Khoikhoi women, resulting in a sizeable
mixed-race population now known as the
Griqua. The Griqua people would migrate to what was at that time the frontierlands of the Xhosa native reserves and establish Griqualand East, which contained a mostly Xhosa population. settlement in
Table Bay, as depicted in an engraving in
Abraham Bogaert's
Historische Reizen, 1711
Andries Stockenström facilitated the creation of the "Kat River" Khoi settlement near the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. The settlements thrived and expanded, and Kat River quickly became a large and successful region of the Cape that subsisted more or less autonomously. The people were predominantly
Afrikaans-speaking Gonaqua Khoi, but the settlement also began to attract other Khoi, Xhosa and mixed-race groups of the Cape. The so-called "Bushman Wars" (1673–1677) were largely a response by San communities to their dispossession and colonial expansion by Dutch settlers. At the start of the 18th century, the Khoikhoi in the Western Cape lived in a state dominated by the Dutch. By the end of the century the majority of the Khoisan operated as 'wage labourers', not that dissimilar to slaves. Geographically, the further away the labourer was from Cape Town, the more difficult it became to transport agricultural produce to the markets. The issuing of grazing licences north of the Berg River in what was then the Tulbagh Basin propelled colonial expansion in the area. This system of land relocation led to the Khoijhou losing their land and livestock as well as dramatic change in the social, economic and political development. After the defeat of the Xhosa rebellion in 1853, the new Cape Government endeavoured to grant the Khoi political rights to avert future racial discontent. The government enacted the
Cape franchise in 1853, which decreed that all male citizens meeting a low property test, regardless of colour, had the right to vote and to seek election in Parliament. The property test was an indirect way by the British Cape Government (who took over from the Dutch in 1812) to retain a racist based system of governance because on average only white people owned property adequate to meet the test. In the
Herero and Nama genocide in
German South-West Africa, over 10,000 Nama are estimated to have been killed during 1904–1908. The
San of the
Kalahari were described in
Specimens of Bushman Folklore by
Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and
Lucy C. Lloyd (1911). They were brought to the globalised world's attention in the 1950s by South African author
Laurens van der Post in a six-part television documentary. The
Ancestral land conflict in Botswana concerns the
Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), established in 1961 for wildlife, while the San were permitted to continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In the 1990s, the government of Botswana began a policy of "relocating" CKGR residents outside the reserve. In 2002, the government cut off all services to CKGR residents. A legal battle began, and in 2006 the High Court of Botswana ruled that the residents had been forcibly and unconstitutionally removed. The policy of relocation continued, however, and in 2012 the San people (Basarwa) appealed to the United Nations to force the government to recognise their land and resource rights. Following the end of
apartheid in 1994, the term "Khoisan" has gradually come to be used as a self-designation by South African Khoikhoi as representing the "first nations" of South Africa vis-a-vis the ruling Bantu majority. A conference on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" was organised by the
University of the Western Cape in 1997. and "Khoisan activism" has been reported in the South African media beginning in 2015. File:Sameul Daniell - Khoisan besig om sprinkane te braai - 1804.jpg|"Bosjemans frying locusts", aquatint by
Samuel Daniell (1805). File:In Search of the San 08.jpg|San woman in Namibia (1984 photograph) File:Bushman camp.jpg|Bushman camp 2005 In 2025, representatives of the Khoisan community sought greater recognition as a First Nation of
South Africa, advocating for the acknowledgment of their traditional leadership structures and their rights to ancestral land. In this context, Regent Xami Thomas has been recognized as a representative of the Khoisan people. He has highlighted the indigenous connection of the Khoisan people to the land of South Africa, drawing a parallel to the indigenous ties of the Jewish people to the land of IsraelAs part of their efforts to claim indigenous and territorial rights, the Khoisan people submitted a memorandum to the
South African Parliament, urging formal recognition of their unique status. == Violence against the Khoisan ==