Around two thousand years ago, tall, dark-skinned people who practised mixed farming - raising both crops and livestock - crossed the Limpopo River into South Africa. San paintings from some time in the intervening period depict small ochre people and larger black ones in a variety of hostile and harmonious relationships, indicating contact between the two groups. These Bantu-speaking farmers were the ancestors of South Africa's majority African population, who gradually drifted south, to occupy the entire eastern half of the subcontinent as far as the Eastern Cape, where they were first encountered by Europeans in the sixteenth century.

 

Today there are four main Bantu language groups in South Africa, Nguni (comprising Zulu, Swazi and Xhosa) and Sotho (Sotho and Tswana) being by far the largest. The other two are Venda and Tsonga . Apart from highly developed farming know-how and a far more sedentary life than the Khoisan, the early Bantu speakers were skilled craftworkers and knew about mining and smelting metals, including gold, copper and iron, which became an important factor in the extensive network of trade that developed.

The picture painted by the British of them as bloodthirsty Africans engaged in endemic internecine conflicts probably said more about the white colonizers than the Bantu speakers themselves. The nineteenth-century traveller Ludwig Alberti underlined this fact when he observed that the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape "cannot be regarded as a warlike people; a predominant inclination to pursue a quiet cattle-raising life is much more in evidence amongst them"