After the Sahara desert, the great spaces of southern Africa include more land that is too dry for cultivation than any other region of the continent. In most of southern Angola, in virtually all of Namibia and Botswana and in much of the old Cape Province of South Africa, rainfall is less than 20 inches a year. River valleys apart, all this is at best ranching country for sheep or cattle. It is only the eastern third of the region, from the present Botswana–Transvaal border southwards across the highveld to the Indian Ocean in the vicinity of Port Elizabeth, that offers the possibility of dense agricultural settlement. Such is the geoclimatic logic underlying the distribution of South Africa's language-families, which were, to the west, the old Khoisan languages of the surviving hunting and gathering peoples and the nomadic pastoralists of sheep and cattle; and, to the east, the Bantu languages of the Iron Age farmers.

HUNTERS AND HERDERS

Of the two families Bantu was the intruder, in a process that had begun to occur early in the first millennium ad. Well into the second millennium, however, late Stone Age hunters and herders were still occupying most of the fertile east as well as the drier west, with the newcomers settling among and interacting with the older inhabitants.