Introduction

The various Southern Bushman peoples are diverse and scattered. They have contributed substantially to the genetic and linguistic makeup of South Africa's majority population, but in recent centuries they have been very few in number. Their way of life was already subject to pressure of warfare and assimilation at the time their existence was first recorded, by transient explorers and government agents (e.g., Burrow 1801–4; Lichtenstein 1928–p30 [1811–12]; and John Campbell 1815; 1822). Schapera (1930) and Stow (1905) presented distillations of the early travellers' reports, but the details of Southern Bushman life and customs are nevertheless sparse in comparison with what is known anthropologically of other Khoisan peoples.

What we do know of the Southern Bushmen comes partly from these accounts, but much more comes from in-depth studies of the few remnant populations which have been available to Western scholars. The tradition of ‘scientific’ ethnography among the Southern Bushmen began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the classic ‘Bushman’ of European imagination was not a Bushman of the Kalahari. He was a Cape Bushman – or rather, a caricature of a Cape Bushman – physically paedomorphic and steatopygous, and intellectually mystical and animistic. These stereotypes are perpetuated today through the works of Sir Laurens van der Post (e.g., 1958; 1961; van der Post and Taylor 1984) and others. Although the ethnographic data behind such stereotypes was good for its time, it is nevertheless poor on most aspects of social organization and biased towards mythology and folklore.