In the last couple of weeks especially last week, the social media was awashed with news from South Africa, of white folks in South Africa calling Black folks monkeys and claiming Blacks were let into South Africa and they are trying to take over everywhere or that it was the white folks that owned South Africa.

Am really not surprised by this, going by the events occurring in United States of Blacks been killed extra judicially by people who are meant to protect the people, the Police, and the start of the movement #Black lives Matter.

Well, while i won’t be too pre-occupied with the United States, am much more concerned with the claim by the descendants of Boer migrants in  South Africa that they own the place.

History has always been the best judge of events, claims and counter claims. The whites, (The Boers) where from the Dutch Republic in modern day Netherlands and they stumbled accidentally on  South Africa in 1648 after sailors from the Dutch East India Company were were shipwrecked in Table Bay, a natural bay on the Atlantic Ocean overlooked by Cape Town. They were so impressed by the resources there and they decided to set up a colony there, under the administration of the Dutch Republic (Netherlands).

But before their arrival, was the place now known as South Africa, an empty land with no inhabitants there?? NO!  Modern humans have inhabited Southern Africa for at least 170,000 years.

Settlements of Bantu-speaking peoples, who were iron-using agriculturists and herdsmen, were already present south of the Limpopo River (now the northern border with Botswana and Zimbabwe) by the 4th or 5th century CE. They displaced, conquered and absorbed the original Khoisan speakers, the Khoikhoi and San peoples. The Bantu slowly moved south. The earliest ironworks in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal Province are believed to date from around 1050. The southernmost group was the Xhosa people, whose language incorporates certain linguistic traits from the earlier Khoisan people. The Xhosa reached the Great Fish River, in today’s Eastern Cape Province. As they migrated, these larger Iron Age populations displaced or assimilated earlier peoples. In Mpumalanga, several stone circles have been found along with the stone arrangement that has been named Adam’s Calendar.

At the time of European contact, the dominant ethnic group were Bantu-speaking peoples who had migrated from other parts of Africa about one thousand years before. The two major historic groups were the Xhosa and Zulu peoples.

Now interestingly, before the Dutch, the Portuguese had led an exploration there in 1487 and named the place Cape of Good Hope. It was with the decline of Portuguese Power that the Dutch and English merchants moved in and took over from them.

While i won’t want to bore you with all these historical origins as its available for everyone to read, its quite crucial for us to know where we are coming from and how we got here.

To Be Continued