The Dutch arrived in the Cape to set up a refreshment station. Photo: File
African hunter gatherers, prior to the arrival of domesticates and the first colonists, tended to be organised in small egalitarian groups, known as immediate-return foragers, such as Bushmen in open country or Pygmies in forests. This meant they hunted and gathered for daily use and did not accumulate resources that could be used in status-seeking. Such social organisation, along with adequate food resources, would have prevented massive population growth.
The long period of human development in Africa meant that these hunters were able to adapt to any diseases or negative influences from epizootics (animal diseases) in the environment. Thus, Africa was virgin soil for diseases brought in from the outside.
The benefit
In spite of fluctuating environmental conditions during the Pleistocene (before 10 000BP), stone tools from the Early, Middle and Later Stone Ages are to be found throughout Africa. This demonstrates the ability of early humans to adapt to all the environments of the continent from before 400 000 years ago and even expand eastwards out of Africa towards India during the Early Stone Age.
Why people moved out of Africa is not clear but demonstrates the ability to push the edges of any changing environment, rather than purely population growth. Such widespread development of humans would only have been possible due to amenable conditions that would have benefitted their growth.
When the sea level dropped as much as 140m at the end of the Pleistocene, as the water was trapped in the polar ice caps, this would have opened up a grassland plain at the southern end of the continent 100km from today’s coastline, beneficial to hunters of large antelope. Contact between Africa and the east would also have been facilitated by low sea levels, particularly across the Persian Gulf, which has a depth of only 36m.
It is now more than a half-century since British archaeologist John Sutton coined the phrase “African Aqualithic”. Sutton was tying together a post-palaeolithic vision of the high productivity on lakes and rivers across the middle of Africa used by fishers. This was probably not a single culture, as David Phillipson says, even though there was a commonality in bone harpoons and pottery, these groups had distinct local traditions.
At the end of the Pleistocene, in the 18th millennium BP, the Nile Valley and its tributaries were occupied by hunter-fishers, as seen, for example, in Wadi Kubbaniya in what is now Egypt. They made good use of the wild grains available to them at that time, as well as bivalve shellfish. Shellfish middens are to be found throughout Africa.
Around the Fayum Lake in Egypt there is mention of shells being collected. Shellfish continued to be a part of the diet of herding people, although they are often ignored in archaeological reports. Around Lake Victoria in Kenya, shell middens have been described in association with Kansyore fisher-herders. The incidence of shellfish collectors continues on to Southern Africa, with middens being found along the Fish River, just south of Grassridge Dam and north of Craddock.
Fishing was already well established in northern Egypt by the time of the arrival of the earliest domesticates from South-West Asia. The aquatic way of life might well have been adopted by the first herders in Africa and continued down to the 20th century, as seen among the Nuer and Dinka on the Sudan Nile and its tributaries.
A simple indicator of fishing has been the bone harpoons which occur over a large area of Africa. An intensive study of these was done by Nicole Petit-Maire and J Riser showing not only variation in form across space, but materials used in their fabrication. They list sites in the Sahara (Algeria, Niger, Mali, Chad, Mauretania), West Africa (Ghana, Senegal), East Africa (Sudan, Kenya), North Africa (Maghreb, Egypt) and Central Africa (Congo).
These were found along rivers and lakes, some of which have subsequently dried up. They range in time from 12 000 to 5 200BP. Petit-Maire and Riser’s sample from the Sahara of harpoons shows 112 with points. Of these 110 (98.2%) are unilaterally barbed and only two are bilateral. These figures are probably close to an overall average across the continent.
The points often have a groove at the base or a hole. This would have been where a line would have been attached, which could have been used to bring any fish caught back to land. This meant that the point was meant to become unattached from the spear once a fish had been impaled. Such a technique would have been similar to how the Bushmen of Southern Africa hunted with bows and arrows. The arrow was made in three pieces: a point of metal (or stone in the earlier times) which was poisoned, a link shaft into which the point was stuck and the main shaft.
Once an animal had been shot, it would run into the bush and the shaft would disentangle, allowing the poisoned point to stay in the animal until it died. The arrow could then be re-loaded using points kept in the hunters’ headbands.
The Curse: Arrival of colonists
The climatic shift of the Younger Dryas (13 000 to 11 550BP) appears to have been a major impetus for the development of grain agriculture in the Near East. The Late Natufian culture took opportune advantage of this wetter period to harvest wild sorghum and millet, even to the extent of being able to store some of these grains. This led to a semi-sedentary life-style with stone dwellings being built.
Even the dry central Negev of what is now southern Israel was occupied by hunters who at this time had access to wild grasses. Such experimentation in lifestyle allowed the spread of early domestication and the spread of livestock over a wide area, from sheep and goats in Afghanistan and Iran to cattle in Turkey, into the Fertile Crescent and around the Eastern Mediterranean along the Gaza coast. The spread of edible grasses into the Negev some 7 000 to 9 000 years ago would have been an extension of the “Green Sahara”.
These were the first “colonists” taking advantage of this window of opportunity to make use of grasses around lakes and rivers that would have allowed an aquatic exploitation of Africa as seen in the Fayum.
A wide range of fish, such as Nile perch and catfish, were caught throughout the sequence from 8 000BP, with domestic animals, beginning with sheep, somewhat later (6 684 BP). Such a large freshwater lake would have been welcome to herders coming through the Negev. There has been considerable debate over when this actually took place, but it would seem that the Early Pastoralist phase of Salvino di Lernia (1999) 7 400 to 6 400BP would be the most acceptable.
These first herders spread south with the drying up of the Sahara in about 4 500BP, as tsetse distribution also moved south in Mali. They also moved south-east to the Sudan and Ethiopian highlands, entering northern Kenya around 4 000BP. They then moved on to Southern Africa, reaching the Kalahari by 2100BP and quickly on to the Western Cape down the west coast.
This means that the direct ancestors of the Khoekhoen were the first colonists to reach Southern Africa. Presumably their language was that spoken in East Africa. The closest surviving language is probably Khoi-Kwadi, spoken in southern Angola. The only surviving Khoe language is Nama ,spoken in north-west South Africa, but is not recognised as a formal official language, so has been virtually silenced.
Those descendants of Khoe who live in the Western Cape today almost all speak Afrikaans — a hybrid that developed out of Khoekhoen intermixed with Dutch among the working classes in the colonial Cape of the 17th and 18th centuries. It gradually replaced Dutch and became a formal language.
The next “colonists” were farmers taking advantage of the domestication of sorghum and millet around 4 500BP in the Sahel of West Africa and expanding to Cameroon, around the equatorial forest to the north towards East Africa and to the west along the coast of Angola, then south-east towards Botswana.
These became known as Bantu speakers who were in contact with herders coming down the eastern side of Africa and who took up cattle herding becoming agro-pastoralists. They did not migrate to the Western Cape as it is a winter rainfall area, so incapable of growing the summer rainfall crops basic to the farmer diet: sorghum and millet. This left the Western Cape to the Khoekhoen.
All of this precedes the arrival of European settlers in Central and Southern Africa: slave entrepots (Gorée Island, Senegal; Ghana; Angola) and refreshment stations for Dutch ships at the Cape and Portuguese in Mozambique. These European colonists had limited use of African resources until gold and diamonds, and later coal, were found in Southern Africa, which needed labour for extraction. More recently it is minerals used in the IT industry that has caught foreign interest. Regardless of the materials, most are exported to the First World, and little processed in Africa, limiting local industrialism.
Can Africa rebound?
In the article by Ahmet Salt Akray, Taking back Africa’s wealth, a review of Chitonge (2025) in the Mail & Guardian of 22 to 28 August 2025, he focuses on the need for industrialisation of the continent, using its own natural resources, to make it competitive in a globalised world. “Soft power” has become widely recognised, especially in the growing IT sector.
Perhaps what the continent needs is to also focus on “taking back Africa’s soul”, lost to European colonialism — “soul” includes language, culture and a heritage which is the longest in the world.
Instead of assuming that “wealth” means historical value, Africa can show its place in the beginning of human evolution. The children of the continent need to know the depth of humanity which is their heritage. They do not need the bombast of the narcissistic leader of another colonial country, who ignores that his family were immigrants from Europe, forcing “tariffs” to perpetuate dominance.
Africa has its own, increasing, economic value which should be taught in schools and institutions of higher learning — some of which, like Timbuktu, are older than many a European college.
Andrew B Smith is in the department of archaeology at the University of Cape Town.