Page 20 - Bulletin 2 1998

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and in caves, left by Stone Age ancestors of the Khoisan people. Because of rising sea-levels

after the last Glacial, most of these are younger than 3,000 years old. Some as recent as 400
years old, include evidence of contact with European settlers in the form of stoneware,

porcelain and clay pipe fragments.

Prior to about 2,000 years ago, the region was inhabited by people who moved around,
probably seasonally, following the availability of marine and inland animal and plant foods.

These would have included shellfish, fish, beached seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds,

antelope, tortoises and a variety of other small and large animals, even elephants, and plants
such as ‘Hottentotskool’ (named by the Dutch who associated the Khoekhoe’s regular use of

this food with their own cabbage), sour fig and arum lily, etc., which are common at the

coast, and others, particularly geophytes, such as “uintjies” and Watsonia, which were,
however, more common around wetlands, further inland and in the mountains. A number of

plants are still used as food or medicine.

Reference to these people as ‘strandlopers’, who were considered to be a distinct group, is no
longer accepted, since we now know that they were Khoisan people who were using coastal

resources. Indeed, strandloping is a term that could be applied to anyone who fishes or

collects shellfish along the coasts today.

Slightly after about 2,000 years ago, domesticated sheep, cattle and dogs were introduced to
the region together with other innovations such as the making of pottery and the building of

tidal fish-traps, examples of which existed under what is now the tidal pool at St. James. It is
possible that remnants are still preserved on the southern side of the pool. Competition with

non-pastoralist hunter-gatherers for land and grazing was a natural extension of this, but

appears to have been relatively compatible within a flexible economic system which allowed
interchange of hunter-gatherer and pastoralist lifestyles. The system was unable to cope with

the arrival of Europeans, however, and their relentless settlement and colonization of the

Cape area. The Khoisan people, estimated to then number 17,000 to 18,000 in the western
Cape, rapidly lost their stock, their land and their identity as they were forced into the service

of colonist farmers. The early introduction of epidemic diseases further decimated them.