Khoi and San Religion
KHOI AND SAN RELIGION. The Khoi and San are the aboriginal peoples of southern Africa. The appellations formerly applied to them (Hottentot and Bushmen, respectively) have gone out of use because of their derogatory connotations. Properly, the terms Khoi and San refer to groups of related languages characterized by click consonants and to speakers of these languages, but they are frequently applied in a cultural sense to distinguish between pastoralists (Khoi) and foragers (San). In historical time (essentially, within the past 250 years in this region), these people were found widely distributed below the Cunene, Okavango, and Zambezi river systems, that is, in the modern states of Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Smaller numbers were, and are, to be found in southern Angola and Zambia. The once large population of San in South Africa has been completely eliminated; perhaps 20 percent of contemporary Khoi still live in that country. Accurate censuses of these people are available only for Botswana, where today about half the estimated forty thousand San live. The fifty thousand Khoi (except as noted above) are concentrated in Namibia.
Archaeological and historical evidence document the coexistence in these areas of herding and foraging economies for at least the past fifteen centuries.
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