Hottentot (English and German language /ˈhɒtənˌtɒt/ HOT-ən-TOT) is a term that was historically used by Europeans to refer to the Khoekhoe, the indigenous nomadic pastoralists in South Africa.

Use of the term Hottentot is now considered offensive, the preferred name for the non-Bantu speaking indigenous people of the Western Cape area being Khoekhoe (formerly Khoikhoi).[a]

Hottentot originated among the "old Dutch" settlers of the Dutch Cape Colony run by United East India Company (VOC), who arrived in the region in the 1650s,[5] and it entered English usage from Dutch in the seventeenth century.[6] However, no definitive Dutch etymology for the term is known. A widely claimed etymology is from a supposed Dutch expression equivalent to "stammerer, stutterer", applied to the Khoikhoi on account of the distinctive click consonants in their languages. There is, however, no earlier attestation of a word hottentot to support this theory. An alternative possibility is that the name derived from an overheard term in chants accompanying Khoikhoi or San dances, but seventeenth-century transcriptions of such chants offer no conclusive evidence for this.[6]

An early Anglicisation of the term is recorded as hodmandod in the years around 1700.[7] The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form hotnot has also been borrowed into South African English as a derogatory term for black people, including Cape Coloureds.[8]

In seventeenth-century Dutch, Hottentot was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with Kaffir, which was at times likewise used for Cape Coloureds and Khoisans), but at least some speakers used the term Hottentotspecifically for what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned people referred to as Kaffirs. This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" or "Cape Coloureds" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by the French anthropologist François Bernier.[9] The idea that Hottentot referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples of southern Africa was well embedded in colonial scholarly thought by the end of the eighteenth century.[10]

The main meaning of Hottentot as an ethnic term in the 19th and the 20th centuries has therefore been to denote the Khoikhoi people specifically.[11] However, Hottentot also continued to be used through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in a wider sense, to include all of the people now usually referred to with the modern term Khoisan(not only the Khoikhoi, but also the San people, hunter-gatherer populations from the interior of southern Africa who had not been known to the seventeenth-century settlers, once often referred to as Bosjesmannen in Dutch and Bushmen in English).[12][13]

In George Murdock's Atlas of World Cultures (1981), the author refers to "Hottentots" as a "subfamily of the Khoisan linguistic family" who "became detribalized in contact with Dutch settlers in 1652, mixing with the latter and with slaves brought by them from Indonesia to form the hybrid population known today as the Cape Coloured."[14] The term Hottentot remained in use as a technical ethnic term in anthropological and historiographical literature into the late 1980s.[15] The 1996 edition of the Dictionary of South African English merely says that "the word 'Hottentot' is seen by some as offensive and Khoikhoi is sometimes substituted as a name for the people, particularly in scholarly contexts".[16] Yet, by the 1980s, because of the racist connotations discussed below, it was increasingly seen as too derogatory and offensive to be used in an ethnic sense.[17]

From the eighteenth century onwards, the term hottentot was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to barbarian or cannibal.[18] According to James Boswell's The Life of Johnson, Samuel Johnson was parodied in Lord Chesterfield's Letters of 1737 as "a respectable Hottentot".

In its ethnic sense, Hottentot had developed its connotations of savagery and primitivism by the seventeenth century; colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygiaand elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian" and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial".[19] Thus, it can be said that the European, colonial image of "the Hottentot" from the seventeenth century onwards bore little relation to any realities of the Khoisan in Africa, and that this image fed into the usage of hottentotas a generalised derogatory term.[20] Correspondingly, the word is "sometimes used as ugly slang for a black person".[21]

Use of the derived term hotnot was explicitly proscribed in South Africa by 2008.[22] Accordingly, much recent scholarship on the history of colonial attitudes to the Khoisan or on the European trope of "the Hottentot" puts the term Hottentot in scare quotes.[23]

In its original role of ethnic designator, the term Hottentot was included into a variety of derived terms, such as the Hottentot Corps,[24] the first Coloured unit to be formed in the South African army, originally called the Corps Bastaard Hottentoten (Dutch; in English: "Corps Bastard Hottentots"), organised in 1781 by the Dutch colonial administration of the time.[25]: 51 

The word is also used in the common names of a wide variety of plants and animals,[26] such as the Africanis dogs sometimes called "Hottentot hunting dogs", the fish Pachymetopon blochii, frequently simply called hottentots, Carpobrotus edulis, commonly known as a "hottentot-fig", and Trachyandra, commonly known as "hottentot cabbage". It has also given rise to the scientific name for one genus of scorpion, Hottentotta, and may be the origin of the epithet tottum in the botanical name Leucospermum tottum.[27]

The word is still used as part of a tongue-twister in modern Dutch, "Hottentottententententoonstelling", meaning a "Hottentot tent exhibition".[28]

In the 1964 film Mary Poppins, Admiral Boom mistakes the rooftop-dancing chimney sweeps for an attack by "Hottentots". In 2024, the BBFC raised the film's age rating from U to PG due to this instance of "discriminatory language".[29]

The name of Reiner Knizia's game "Schotten-Totten" is a portmanteau of the German words "Schotten" (Scottish people) and "Hottentotten" (Hottentots).[citation needed]

The Shakespears Sister song "I Don't Care", from the 1992 album Hormonally Yours, includes the lines: "In a boreolic iceberg came Victoria; Queen Victoria, sitting shocked upon on the rocking horse of a wave, Said to the Laureat, this minx of course, Is sharp as any lynx, and blacker, deeper Than the drinks, as hot as any hottentot."

• Hottentot Venus
• The Hottentot (1922 film)
• Terre Haute Hottentots

The indigenous people of Africa are groups of people native to a specific region; people who lived there before colonists or settlers arrived, defined new borders, and began to occupy the land. This definition applies to all indigenous groups, whether inside or outside of Africa. Although the vast majority of Native Africans can be considered to be "indigenous" in the sense that they originated from that continent and nowhere else (like all Homo sapiens), identity as an "indigenous people" is in the modern application more restrictive. Not every African ethnic group claims identification under these terms. Groups and communities who do claim this recognition are those who by a variety of historical and environmental circumstances have been placed outside of the dominant state systems. Their traditional practices and land claims have often come into conflict with the objectives and policies promulgated by governments, companies, and surrounding dominant societies.

Marginalization, along with the desire to recognize and protect their collective and human rights, and to maintain the continuity of their individual cultures, has led many to seek identification as indigenous peoples, in the contemporary global sense of the term. For example, in West Africa, the Dogon people of Mali and Burkina Faso,[1][2] the Jola people of Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, and Senegal,[3] and the Serer people of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Mauritania, and formally North Africa,[4][5] have faced religious and ethnic persecution for centuries, and disenfranchisement or prejudice in modern times (see Persecution of Serers and Persecution of Dogons). These people, who are indigenous to their present habitat, are classified as indigenous peoples.[1][2][3][4]

The history of the indigenous African peoples spans thousands of years and includes a complex variety of cultures, languages, and political systems. Indigenous African cultures have existed since ancient times, with some of the earliest evidence of human life on the continent coming from stone tools and rock art dating back hundreds of thousands of years. The earliest written records of African history come from ancient Egyptian and Nubian texts, which date back to around 3000 B.C. These texts provide insight into the societies of the time, including religious beliefs, political systems, and trade networks. In the centuries that followed, various other African civilizations rose to prominence, such as the Kingdom of Kush in northern Sudan and the powerful empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhaiin West Africa. Arab colonization of Northern Africa displaced and dispossessed indigenous African peoples. In the late 15th century, European colonization began, leading to the further displacement of many indigenous cultures. Since the end of World War II, indigenous African cultures have been in a state of constant flux, struggling to maintain their identity in the face of Westernization and globalization. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in traditional cultures and many African countries have taken steps to preserve and promote their indigenous heritage.

In the post-colonial period, the concept of specific indigenous peoples within the African continent has gained wider acceptance, although not without controversy. The highly diverse and numerous ethnic groups which comprise most modern, independent African states contain within them various peoples whose situation, cultures, and pastoralist or hunter-gatherer lifestyles are generally marginalized and set apart from the dominant political and economic structures of the nation. Since the late 20th century, these peoples have increasingly sought recognition of their rights as distinct indigenous peoples, in both national and international contexts.

The Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee (IPACC) was founded in 1997. It is one of the main trans-national network organizations recognized as a representative of African indigenous peoples in dialogues with governments and bodies such as the UN. In 2008, IPACC was composed of 150 member organisations in 21 African countries. IPACC identifies several key characteristics associated with indigenous claims in Africa:

• "political and economic marginalization rooted in colonialism;
• de facto discrimination often based on the dominance of agricultural peoples in the State system (e.g. lack of access to education and health care by hunters and herders);
• the particularities of culture, identity, economy and territoriality that link hunting and herding peoples to their home environments in deserts and forests (e.g. nomadism, diet, knowledge systems);
• some indigenous peoples, such as the San and Pygmy peoples, are physically distinct, which makes them subject to specific forms of discrimination."

With respect to concerns that identifying some groups and not others as indigenous is in itself discriminatory, IPACC states that it:

• "... recognises that all Africans should enjoy equal rights and respect. All of Africa's diversity is to be valued. Particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state-system and underrepresented in governance... This is not to deny other Africans their status; it is to emphasize that affirmative recognition is necessary for hunter-gatherers and herding peoples to ensure their survival."

At an African inter-governmental level, the examination of indigenous rightsand concerns is pursued by a sub-commission established under the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), sponsored by the African Union (AU) (successor body to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU)). In late 2003, the 53 signatory states of the ACHPR adopted the Report of the African Commission's Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities and its recommendations. This report says in part (p. 62):

• "... certain marginalized groups are discriminated in particular ways because of their particular culture, mode of production and marginalized position within the state[; a] form of discrimination that other groups within the state do not suffer from. The call of these marginalized groups to protection of their rights is a legitimate call to alleviate this particular form of discrimination."

The adoption of this report at least notionally subscribed the signatories to the concepts and aims of furthering the identity and rights of African indigenous peoples. The extent to which individual states are mobilizing to put these recommendations into practice varies enormously, however. Most indigenous groups continue to agitate for improvements in the areas of land rights, use of natural resources, protection of environment and culture, political recognition and freedom from discrimination.

On 30 December 2010, the Republic of Congo adopted a law for the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples. This law is the first of its kind in Africa, and its adoption is a historic development for indigenous peoples on the continent.[6]

• African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights
• Black people
• Hizetjitwa Indigenous Peoples' Organization (2007), an organisation operating in Namibia and Angola
• List of ethnic groups of Africa
• List of indigenous peoples of Africa
• Recent African origin of modern humans
• Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA)
• United Nations Environment Programme
• United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)

The Kalahari Debate is a series of back and forth arguments that began in the 1980s amongst anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians about how the San people and hunter-gatherer societies in southern Africa have lived in the past. On one side of the debate were scholars led by Richard Borshay Leeand Irven DeVore, considered traditionalists or "isolationists." On the other side of the debate were scholars led by Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, considered revisionists or "integrationists."[citation needed]

Lee conducted early and extensive ethnographic research among a San community, the !Kung San. He and other traditionalists consider the San to have been, historically, isolated and independent hunter/gatherers separate from nearby societies. Wilmsen, Denbow and the revisionists oppose these views. They believe that the San have not always been an isolated community, but rather have played important economic roles in surrounding communities. They claim that over time the San have become a dispossessed and marginalized people.[citation needed]

Both sides use both anthropological and archaeological evidence to fuel their arguments. They interpret cave paintings in Tsodilo Hills, and they also use artifacts such as faunal remains of cattle or sheep found at San sites. They even find Early Stone Age and Early Iron Age technologies at San sites, which both sides use to back their arguments.[citation needed]

The San are a relatively small group of people whose communities are scattered throughout the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. They are well known for practicing a hunter/gatherer subsistence strategy (also known as a "foraging" mode of production).[1] Traditionalists, including Richard Lee and other anthropologists, view the San as maintaining this old but adaptable way of life, even in the face of changing external circumstances.

These anthropologists view the San as isolates who are not, and have never been, part of a greater Kalahari economy. The traditionalists believe that the San have adapted over time but without help from other societies. Emphasis is thereby placed on the cultural continuity and the cultural integrity of the San peoples.[2]

In Lee's 1979 book The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, his main goal was to be fully immersed in the !Kung San culture so that he could fully understand their way of life. He was puzzled as to how these people seemed to be living such an easy and happy life that relied heavily on hard work and the availability of food. Most of his studies of the San took place in the Dobe area, near the Tsodilo Hills. He was adopted into a kinship and given the name /Tontah which meant “White-Man.” He claims that the San were an isolated hunter-gatherer society that changed to farming and foraging at the end of the 1970s. Most of Lee's historical data comes from oral stories told by the !Kung San because they did not have anything written down. According to Lee the San were originally afraid of contact with outsiders.[citation needed]

Lee reports that the men did the hunting and hard labor while the women did housework. He later found out that the San weren't just hunter-gatherers, but also herders, foragers, and farmers. In his book he states, “I learned that most of the men had had experience herding cattle at some point in their lives and that many men had owned cattle and goats in the past.”[3] He claims that they have learned all of this on their own. The San wanted wage pay for farming and taking care of cattle, goats, and sheep. This was their new way of life.[clarification needed]

Edwin Wilmsen's 1989 book Land Filled With Flies kicked off the Kalahari Debate.[citation needed] Wilmsen made several remarks attacking anthropologists’ view of the San people. Most of his attacks were at Richard Lee and his work. Wilmsen made claims about the San such as, “Their appearance as foragers is a function of their relegations to an underclass in the playing out of historical processes that began before the current millennium and culminated in the early decades of this century.”[4] This statement upsets the traditionalists because it says that the San are not isolates but have been an underclass in a society throughout history. Wilmsen makes another statement against the traditionalists when he says, “The isolation in which they are said to have been found is a creation of our own view of them, not of their history as they lived it.”[4] He is beginning to say that anthropologists’ judgment is clouded because they already have a predisposed view of the San and hunter-gatherer societies as being isolates. Wilmsen states that the terms “Bushmen,” “Forager,” and “Hunter-Gatherer” contribute to the ideology of them being isolates. He says this is because these terms are commonly associated with isolated groups but his main claim is that for the San this is not the case. Wilmsen also goes on to claim that Lee approaches the San as a people without a history, that they have been doing the same thing forever. He states, “they are permitted antiquity while denied history”[4] Wilmsen continues the argument that anthropologists’ goal is to study hunter-gatherer groups who have lived on their own for centuries, which builds a stereotype for hunter-gatherers. He believes this is why Richard Lee's views are flawed, and also why he[clarification needed] is saying that the San are incorporated in a wider political economy in southern Africa.[citation needed]

The revisionists believe the !Kung were associated with Bantu-speaking overlords throughout history, and involved with merchant capital.[1] They believe the San in the Kalahari are a classless society because they are actually the lower class of a greater Kalahari society. The revisionists believe the !Kung San were heavily involved in trade. They believe the San were transformed by centuries of contact with Iron Age, Bantu-speaking agro-pastoralists.[2] This argues against the idea that they were a well-adapted hunter-gatherer culture, but instead advanced only through trade and help from nearby economies.[citation needed]

When it comes to archaeological evidence, much work still has yet to be done. However, artifacts and ecofacts have been found at southern African sites that could help prove the revisionist view of the San people. Their strongest supporting site is in the Tsodilo Hills, where rock art displays San looking over Bantu cattle. In the hills, there are 160 cattle pictures, 10 of which display stick figures near them.[citation needed]

Other evidence revisionists point to includes Early Iron Age products found in Later Stone Age sites. This includes metal and pottery found in the Dobe, Xia, and Botswana regions. Cow bones have also been found in northern Botswana, at Lotshitshi. These products are believed to be payment to the San for labor of caring for or possibly herding Bantu cattle.[citation needed]

The fuel of this debate is the constant back and forth critiquing by various scholars of each other's work. Wilmsen would say Lee is blinded by a pre-destined view of the San as isolates. Lee would counter-argue every point that Wilmsen would make, saying either that he made mistakes in research or presents conclusions with little evidence to support them.[citation needed]

One specific instance is where Lee called out Wilmsen for mistaking the word “oxen” for “onins”, which meant “onions” in an old map of the Kalahari region.[1] This discovery would make the San herders before the arrival of the anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s and not after the 1970s, as Lee believes. This instance gave rise to Lee's article "Oxen or Onions." In the article, Lee points out other flaws he believes he has found in Wilmsen's argument. Critiques of Wilmsen's work say that the cattle paintings could represent San stealing cattle rather than herding them. Another attack on Wilmsen's work was that the amounts of pottery and iron found in Dobe and Botswana regions were so small they could fit in one hand.[2] The small numbers of these artifacts make some scholars believe they are insufficient to be able to make such a claim. The same is true of the cattle bones found in Botswana. The small numbers of cattle bone fragments found on San archaeological sites have made scholars question Wilmsen's argument.[2]

Khoisan languages, a unique group of African languages spoken mainly in southern Africa, with two outlying languages found in eastern Africa. The term is a compound adapted from the words khoekhoe ‘person’ and saan‘bush dweller’ in Nama, one of the Khoisan languages, and scholars have applied the words—either separately or conjoined—to refer to economic, social, physical, and linguistic features of certain aboriginal groups of southern and eastern Africa. Their most distinctive linguistic characteristic is the original and extensive use of click consonants, a feature which has spread through cultural and linguistic contact into a number of Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages—such as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho in South Africa and Gciriku (Diriku), Yei (Yeye), and Mbukushu in Botswana and Namibia—and into Dahalo, a Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic) language of Kenya. The linguistic use of clicks, whether original or borrowed, is restricted to these few African languages, with one exception: Damin. This ritual vocabulary of the Lardil of Australia contains some words with clicks together with other peculiar sounds, but the use of clicks is limited, and they have a symbolic value in addition to their linguistic function.

Overview

The Khoisan languages were once spoken across all of southern Africa from southern Angola in the west to Swaziland in the east and the Cape of Good Hope in the south (see the map). The 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, however, have witnessed the death of many of the recorded languages and dialects, and their distribution is now largely confined to Botswana and Namibia. (Click here for an audio sample of the extinct !Ora language.) The fact that many of the surviving languages are endangered and some are even on the point of extinction bears testimony to inexorable social, economic, linguistic, and demographic forces that continue to marginalize and consume indigenous linguistic and cultural minorities. Hadza (Hatsa), one of the East African Khoisan languages, is a remarkable exception to this, having retained its vitality through a pattern of stable bilingualism with Swahili, the dominant Bantu language in the area. Elsewhere many bilingual Khoisan speakers have tended to shift rapidly to the dominant language, thus ceasing transmission of the mother tongue to children and leaving it to contract and die, sometimes quite abruptly. In South Africa a variation of this process allowed the Khoisan languages to exert a powerful linguistic influence on the dominant languages before they disappeared, leaving Afrikaans and some Bantu languages with a number of distinctive Khoisan features.

The original and unique use of clicks in the Khoisan languages has invited speculation that these unusual sounds might reflect an earlier stage in the evolution of language when sounds were natural vocal adaptations to the environment. In this view Khoisan hunters might have developed clicks to camouflage their presence as they stalked their prey in an environment of insect and other noises or might have responded to various situations with onomatopoetic vocalizations containing clicks. But this line of thinking has proved fruitless. All languages use sound symbolism to some extent, and, while there are indeed examples of clicks functioning in this way (for example, !ã, the word for the clicking noise made by the knee joints of a walking eland [Taurotragus oryx], contains an appropriate click in one Khoisan language), their normal linguistic function is as unremarkable as the function of more familiar consonants such as b or sin any language. The origin of Khoisan click consonants and their peculiarly African provenance therefore remains a mystery.

One puzzling feature of the Khoisan languages is that, despite some uniformity in their use of clicks, they differ considerably among themselves in aspects such as word formation, sentence structure, and vocabulary. In fact, these differences are so pronounced as to suggest that in a linguistic discussion the term Khoisan should be used only in a loose typological sense to refer to a group of languages that share some features of sound structure (mainly involving clicks) and not as the name of a language family in the strict sense—such as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, or Bantu—in which some shared features are found at all levels of structure and these features are assumed to have been inherited from a common ancestral language. Even though the sound structure of the Khoisan languages is unique, their resemblance to each other in this respect has not provided the evidence needed to unravel all their internal genetic affiliations, let alone their relationships to other African languages. The debate about these relationships remains a prominent feature in the linguistic study of Khoisan languages, and the disagreements that sustain it have never been satisfactorily resolved.

Classification of the Khoisan languages

A traditional linguistic classification of the Southern African Khoisan languages divides them into three effectively unrelated groups: Northern, Central, and Southern. Sandawe of Tanzania has a distant relationship to the Central group, but the place of Hadza even in relation to Sandawe has always been unclear; and the status of Kwadi, an extinct language of Namibe (formerly Moçâmedes) in southwestern Angola, remains uncertain. Kwadi may be very distantly related to the Khoe group. Within each group one finds more or less closely related languages and dialects with distinctive grammatical or lexical features, but between groups there are pronounced linguistic differences. In a more refined subdivision of the languages, the geographic adjectives are replaced by the names for ‘person’ in each major cluster of languages, so that Ju replaces Northern, Khoe replaces Central, and !Kwi and Taa expand Southern.

The Ju dialects !Xũ, Ju | hoã, and ǂKx’au ǁ ’eĩ are spoken by about 11,000 people mainly in northeastern Namibia and adjacent parts of Ngamiland in Botswana; there also may be a few speakers in southern Angola. The Khoe languages—notably the Khoekhoe group, consisting of Nama (officially called Khoekhoegowab) of Namibia, with about 230,000 speakers, and !Ora and Gri (both extinct) of South Africa—are the most numerous. The majority of the remaining Khoe languages and dialects of the Non-Khoekhoe (NKK) group, which altogether comprise about 66,000 speakers, are found over the whole of western, central, and northern Botswana. Of the so-called Western NKK languages, Naro is spoken in the west (with a few speakers in adjacent parts of Namibia), | Gui and ǁGana are spoken in the west-central area, and Buga and ǁAni are spoken to the north in the Okavango delta. (Kxoe, which is closely related to the latter, is found in the Caprivi Strip, Namibia, and along the Kwando River in southeastern Angola.) The Shua and Tshua groups of languages are spoken in the eastern parts of Botswana. The Taa dialects of the Southern group, consisting of closely related varieties of !Xóõ, are spoken by fewer than 2,500 people in southwestern Botswana (click here for an audio clip of the !Xóõ language). The extinct !Kwi dialects of the Southern group, such as | Xam, ǁXegwi, ǁNg, and |’Auni, were spoken in South Africa; of the !Kwi dialects, only ǂKhomani is still spoken, by a few individuals in Northern Cape province (click here for an audio clip of the ǂKhomani language). ǂΗuã, a language of southeastern Botswana with fewer than 100 speakers, shares features with both the Southern and the Ju groups. In East Africa, Sandawe is spoken by 70,000 people in Tanzania northwest of Dodoma, and Hadza is spoken by some 800 in north-central Tanzania near Lake Eyasi. Click here for an audio clip of the | Gui language and here for a clip of Ju.

The hypothesis of a genetic relationship between all these languages leads to the postulation of a Macro-Khoisan family represented in the form of the family tree. The dotted line connecting Hadza to the root reflects uncertainty about its membership in the family, and the alignment of Sandawe’s and Kwadi’s separate branches alongside the Khoe group posits a possible but remote connection between those branches. The evidence for a subgroup of genetically related Southern African Khoisan languages in the tree is, however, very thin and of such uneven quality that the reality of a Macro-Khoisan family has been questioned. Conventional methods of linguistic comparison applied between the main groups of the Khoisan languages have failed to yield regular sound correspondences, which would allow common roots to be reconstructed; and shared innovations in grammatical structure, which are regarded as the best source of evidence for postulating linguistic relationships are, frustratingly, absent. The Click Here to see full-size tabletable illustrates this problem with a few basic words from the main subdivisions. The overwhelming impression is of radical differences between the groups. The word for ‘buffalo’ shows Sandawe’s link to the Khoe group, but the similar form in Ju is most probably a borrowing from a neighbouring Khoe language rather than an inherited form from a common ancestor. The similarity between the Khoe and !Xóõ forms for ‘drink’ and ‘laugh’ hints at possible sound correspondences between the vowels and the consonants, but this similarity fails to extend to other words in the two groups. The congruent differences between the Ju forms for ‘drink’ and ‘laugh’ on the one hand and the Khoe/!Xóõ forms on the other are intriguing, but, because they fail to generalize, they remain merely tantalizing. Ultimately, linguistic comparisons have led to far too few reasonable correspondences to establish secure family relationships between the languages.

Grammar

Word and sentence structure varies markedly between the major groups of languages and even within the Southern group. Word structure in the Ju languages is extremely simple, with a dearth of suffixes and no prefixes. Nouns are assigned to five classes determined entirely by the pronouns they select, and the semantic basis of the different classes is vague: one class includes nouns referring to humans, most animals are assigned to a different class, and many inanimate nouns fall into another. The main parts of a sentence follow the order subject–verb–object (SVO), as in English. The Khoe languages are distinguished by a system of noun genders based on the categories masculine, feminine, and common, which are present to different degrees in the form of distinctive singular, plural, and dual (pair of) suffixes. Thus the Nama root khoe-‘person’ appears as khoe-s ‘woman,’ khoe-b ‘man,’ khoe-i ‘person.’ In Khoe languages of the Non-Khoekhoe branch these suffixes may be dropped when the gender is clear from the context. While the assignment of animate nouns to such sex-based classes is fairly obvious, the assignment of inanimate nouns is quite arbitrary. However, because the genders are also associated with rough semantic distinctions of shape (masculine with long, narrow objects and feminine with short, broad, round objects), specificity, and countability, inanimate nouns may be more naturally assigned to one rather than the other gender.

In certain cases these semantic distinctions can be seen clearly when the same root for an inanimate noun appears in the different genders. Thus, in Naro, tsa-ba (masculine) is a borehole, tsa-sa (feminine) is a pan or water in a (geographic) pan, and tsa-ne(common) is water; |’e-ba (masculine) is a match or piece of firewood, |’e-sa(feminine) is a fire, and | ’e-ne (common) is firewood; tsau-ba (masculine) is a finger, but tsau-sa (feminine) is the whole hand. In addition to affecting the singular, dual, and plural forms, nominal genders control agreement (known as concord) on dependent forms in the sentence. For example, in  ǁAni the singular and dual forms for masculine ‘leopard’ control the italicized suffixes of the numeral and the object marker in the sentences | ui-m !’ui-ma ti mũ-m-ta (literally ‘one-[masculine singular] leopard [masculine singular] I-see [masculine singular]’; i.e., ‘I see one male leopard’) and | am-tsa !’ui-tsa ti-mũ-tsa-ta (literally ‘two-[masculine dual] leopard [masculine dual] I-see [masculine dual]’; i.e., ‘I see a pair of male leopards’). Unlike that of the Ju group, the order of the major parts of the sentence in the Khoe languages is commonly subject–object–verb (SOV).

The word and sentence structures of the two branches of the Southern group of languages differ in some major respects. Whereas suffixes are few in the !Kwi languages, they are prolific in the Taa dialects, and there is even a remnant of a prefixal system in some of the latter. Nouns fall into five classes, some of which have distinctive suffixes that—as in Ju—are associated with vague semantic classes but not ones based on the Khoe gender principle; the singular and plural forms of a noun may be marked by a change of suffix but not necessarily by a change of class. By contrast, a common way of forming plurals in | Xam, a !Kwi language, is through reduplication of the stem: ǁnáin ‘house,’ ǁnáin-ǁnáin ‘houses.’ Nouns in the Taa dialects govern suffixal agreement on dependent forms in a way reminiscent of Khoe agreement. This rule requires that adjectives, transitive verbs, and third-person pronouns bear an appropriately agreeing suffix, as can be seen in the demonstrative pronouns in the following examples: tâa té’e (literally ‘person this’; i.e., ‘this person’); tùu tú’u (literally ‘people these’; i.e., ‘these people’); |ûma tá’ã (literally ‘python this’; i.e., ‘this python’); tàli tí’i (literally ‘blood clot this’; i.e., ‘this blood clot’); tháa tán’n (literally ‘thing this’; i.e., ‘this thing’). A grammatical feature common to many of the Khoisan languages is the use of verb compounds where English would use a preposition or a single verb. Thus ‘go in’ is ‘go enter’ and ‘trample’ is ‘stand squash’ in !Xóõ; ‘send away’ is ‘send go off’ and ‘touch’ is ‘feel sense’ in Ju.

Vocabulary and writing

As may be expected, Khoisan vocabulary reflects the cultural adaptations of the hunter-gatherers who speak the languages. In !Xóõ, for example, there is an extensive anatomic vocabulary reflecting their scientific knowledge of the animals they hunt; all botanical species, whether functional or not, are named; and there is an elaborate set of terms to describe ecological niches where particular plants and trees grow, niches that attract specific game animals and provide edible berries, seeds, and tubers or arrow poison and herbal medicines. Nine verbs for ‘squeeze’ express the subtleties of extracting edible material from intestines, insects, and the pulp of moisture-bearing tubers. Drinking hot or cold liquid, whether kneeling or not, from an ostrich egg or through a straw, from the rumen of an antelope or the pulp of a tuber, to quench one’s thirst or not, needs 10 different verbs. Stalking prey unsighted, sighted, at a run, or as a feline requires 4 different verbs. More than 20 words describe subtle differences in the taste or texture of food, testifying to a gourmet sensitivity to the hunter-gatherer menu. At the same time there are elaborations in vocabulary that are not obviously functional, such as the 13 verbs for ‘carry’ and the 26 verbs for ‘sit’; the attention to the vertical or horizontal orientation of one as opposed to many things leads to 25 different verbs for ‘put.’ Finally, a rich and colourful vocabulary of insults provides some verbal lubrication for the workings of the social categories of respect and familiarity and the obligations, generosity, and meanness of the participants.

There is a rich and well-documented folklore of the Khoisan languages. Most of the languages are unwritten, but Nama, Naro, and Ju have practical orthographies and teaching materials. Nama has a long tradition of literacy, and it even boasts a radio service. Click here for an audio clip of a news report in the Nama language.

The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region.[2] They are thought to have diverged from other humans 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.[a][4] Their recent ancestral territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho,[5] and South Africa.

The San speak, or their ancestors spoke, languages of the Khoe, Tuu, and Kxʼa language families, and can be defined as a people only in contrast to neighboring pastoralists such as the Khoekhoe and descendants of more recent waves of immigration such as the Bantu, Europeans, and South Asians.

In 2017, Botswana was home to approximately 63,500 San, making it the country with the highest proportion of San people at 2.8%.[6] 71,201 San people were enumerated in Namibia in 2023, making it the country with the second highest proportion of San people at 2.4%.[1]

The term "San" comes from the Khoekhoe language, where it has a long vowel and is spelled Sān. It means "foragers" and is used in a derogatory manner to describe people too poor to have cattle. Based on their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the term has been applied to speakers of three distinct language families living between the Okavango River in Botswana and Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, extending up into southern Angola; central peoples of most of Namibia and Botswana, extending into Zambiaand Zimbabwe; and the southern people in the central Kalahari towards the Molopo River, who together with the Khoekhoe are the last remnants of the previously extensive indigenous peoples of southern Africa.[7]

The designations "Bushmen" and "San" are both exonyms. The San have no collective word for themselves in their own languages. "San" comes from a derogatory Khoekhoe word used to refer to foragers without cattle or other wealth, from a root saa "picking up from the ground" + plural -n in the Haiǁom dialect.[8][9]

"Bushmen" is the older cover term, but "San" was widely adopted in the West by the late 1990s. The term Bushmen, from 17th-century Dutch Bosjesmans, is still used by others and to self-identify, but is now considered pejorative or derogatory by many South Africans.[10][11][12][13][14] In 2008, the use of boesman (the modern Afrikaans equivalent of "Bushman") in the Die Burgernewspaper was brought before the Equality Court. The San Council testified that it had no objection to its use in a positive context, and the court ruled that the use of the term was not derogatory.[15]

The San refer to themselves as their individual nations, such as ǃKung (also spelled ǃXuun, including the Juǀʼhoansi), ǀXam, Nǁnǂe (part of the ǂKhomani), Kxoe (Khwe and ǁAni), Haiǁom, Ncoakhoe, Tshuwau, Gǁana and Gǀui (ǀGwi), etc.[16][17][10][18][19] Representatives of San peoples in 2003 stated their preference for the use of such individual group names, where possible, over the use of the collective term San.[20]

Adoption of the Khoekhoe term San in Western anthropology dates to the 1970s, and this remains the standard term in English-language ethnographic literature, although some authors later switched back to using the name Bushmen.[7][21] The compound Khoisan is used to refer to the pastoralist Khoi and the foraging San collectively. It was coined by Leonhard Schulze in the 1920s and popularized by Isaac Schaperain 1930. Anthropological use of San was detached from the compound Khoisan,[22] as it has been reported that the exonym San is perceived as a pejorative in parts of the central Kalahari.[11] By the late 1990s, the term San was used generally by the people themselves.[23] The adoption of the term was preceded by a number of meetings held in the 1990s where delegates debated on the adoption of a collective term.[24] These meetings included the Common Access to Development Conference organized by the Government of Botswana held in Gaborone in 1993,[18] the 1996 inaugural Annual General Meeting of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) held in Namibia,[25] and a 1997 conference in Cape Town on "Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage" organized by the University of the Western Cape.[26] The term San is now standard in South African, and used officially in the blazon of the national coat-of-arms. The "South African San Council" representing San communities in South Africa was established as part of WIMSA in 2001.[27][28]

The term Basarwa (singular Mosarwa) is used for the San collectively in Botswana.[29][30][31] The term is a Bantu (Tswana) word meaning "those who do not rear cattle", that is, equivalent to Khoekhoe Saan.[32] The mo-/ba- noun class prefixes are used for people; the older variant Masarwa, with the le-/ma- prefixes used for disreputable people and animals, is offensive and was changed at independence.[26][33]

In Angola, they are sometimes referred to as mucancalas,[34] or bosquímanos (a Portuguese adaptation of the Dutchterm for "Bushmen"). The terms Amasili and Batwa are sometimes used for them in Zimbabwe.[26] The San are also referred to as Batwa by Xhosa people and as Baroa by Sotho people.[35] The Bantu term Batwa refers to any foraging tribesmen and as such overlaps with the terminology used for the "Pygmoid" Southern Twa of South-Central Africa.

The hunter-gatherer San are among the oldest cultures on Earth,[36] and are thought to be descended from the first inhabitants of what is now Botswana and South Africa. The historical presence of the San in Botswana is particularly evident in northern Botswana's Tsodilo Hills region. San were traditionally semi-nomadic, moving seasonally within certain defined areas based on the availability of resources such as water, game animals, and edible plants.[37] Peoples related to or similar to the San occupied the southern shores throughout the eastern shrubland and may have formed a Sangoan continuum from the Red Sea to the Cape of Good Hope.[38] Early San society left a rich legacy of cave paintings across Southern Africa.[39]: 11–12 

In the Bantu expansion (2000 BC - 1000 AD), San were driven off their ancestral lands or incorporated by Bantu speaking groups.[39]: 11–12  The San were believed to have closer connections to the old spirits of the land, and were often turned to by other societies for rainmaking, as was the case at Mapungubwe. San shamans would enter a trance and go into the spirit world themselves to capture the animals associated with rain.[40]

By the end of the 18th century after the arrival of the Dutch, thousands of San had been killed and forced to work for the colonists. The British tried to "civilize" the San and make them adopt a more agricultural lifestyle, but were not successful. By the 1870s, the last San of the Cape were hunted to extinction, while other San were able to survive. The South African government used to issue licenses for people to hunt the San, with the last one being reportedly issued in Namibia in 1936.[41]

From the 1950s through to the 1990s, San communities switched to farming because of government-mandated modernization programs. Despite the lifestyle changes, they have provided a wealth of information in anthropologyand genetics. One broad study of African genetic diversity, completed in 2009, found that the genetic diversity of the San was among the top five of all 121 sampled populations.[42][43][44] Certain San groups are one of 14 known extant "ancestral population clusters"; that is, "groups of populations with common genetic ancestry, who share ethnicity and similarities in both their culture and the properties of their languages".[43]

Despite some positive aspects of government development programs reported by members of San and Bakgalagadicommunities in Botswana, many have spoken of a consistent sense of exclusion from government decision-making processes, and many San and Bakgalagadi have alleged experiencing ethnic discrimination on the part of the government.[37]: 8–9  The United States Department of State described ongoing discrimination against San, or Basarwa, people in Botswana in 2013 as the "principal human rights concern" of that country.[45]: 1 

The San kinship system reflects their history as traditionally small mobile foraging bands. San kinship is similar to Inuit kinship, which uses the same set of terms as in European cultures but adds a name rule and an age rule for determining what terms to use. The age rule resolves any confusion arising from kinship terms, as the older of two people always decides what to call the younger. Relatively few names circulate (approximately 35 names per sex), and each child is named after a grandparent or another relative, but never their parents.

Children have no social duties besides playing, and leisure is very important to San of all ages. Large amounts of time are spent in conversation, joking, music, and sacred dances. Women may be leaders of their own family groups. They may also make important family and group decisions and claim ownership of water holes and foraging areas. Women are mainly involved in the gathering of food, but sometimes also partake in hunting.[46]

Water is important in San life. During long droughts, they make use of sip wells in order to collect water. To make a sip well, a San scrapes a deep hole where the sand is damp, and inserts a long hollow grass stem into the hole. An empty ostrich egg is used to collect the water. Water is sucked into the straw from the sand, into the mouth, and then travels down another straw into the ostrich egg.[46]

Traditionally, the San were an egalitarian society.[47] Although they had hereditary chiefs, their authority was limited. The San made decisions among themselves by consensus, with women treated as relative equals in decision making.[48] San economy was a gift economy, based on giving each other gifts regularly rather than on trading or purchasing goods and services.[49]

As of 1994, about 95% of San relationships were monogamous.[50]

Villages range in sturdiness from nightly rain shelters in the warm spring (when people move constantly in search of budding greens), to formalized rings, wherein people congregate in the dry season around permanent waterholes. Early spring is the hardest season: a hot dry period following the cool, dry winter. Most plants still are dead or dormant, and supplies of autumn nuts are exhausted. Meat is particularly important in the dry months when wildlife cannot range far from the receding waters.

Women gather fruit, berries, tubers, bush onions, and other plant materials for the band's consumption. Ostrich eggs are gathered, and the empty shells are used as water containers. Insects provide perhaps 10% of animal proteins consumed, most often during the dry season.[51] Depending on location, the San consume 18 to 104 species, including grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars, moths, butterflies, and termites.[52]

Women's traditional gathering gear is simple and effective: a hide sling, a blanket, a cloak called a kaross to carry foods, firewood, smaller bags, a digging stick, and perhaps, a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby.

Men, and presumably women when they accompany them, hunt in long, laborious tracking excursions. They kill their game using bow and arrows and spears tipped in diamphotoxin, a slow-acting arrow poison produced by beetle larvaeof the genus Diamphidia.[53]

A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BC was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012.[54]

In 2006, what is thought to be the world's oldest ritual is interpreted as evidence which would make the San culture the oldest still practiced culture today. [55][56] [57][58]

Historical evidence shows that certain San communities have always lived in the desert regions of the Kalahari; however, eventually nearly all other San communities in southern Africa were forced into this region. The Kalahari San remained in poverty where their richer neighbours denied them rights to the land. Before long, in both Botswana and Namibia, they found their territory drastically reduced.[59]

Various Y chromosome studies show that the San carry some of the most divergent (earliest branching) human Y-chromosome haplogroups. These haplogroups are specific sub-groups of haplogroups A and B, the two earliest branches on the human Y-chromosome tree.[60][61][62]

Mitochondrial DNA studies also provide evidence that the San carry high frequencies of the earliest haplogroupbranches in the human mitochondrial DNA tree. This DNA is inherited only from one's mother. The most divergent (earliest branching) mitochondrial haplogroup, L0d, has been identified at its highest frequencies in the southern African San groups.[60][63][64][65]

In a study published in March 2011, Brenna Henn and colleagues found that the ǂKhomani San, as well as the Sandawe and Hadza peoples of Tanzania, were the most genetically diverse of any living humans studied. This high degree of genetic diversity hints at the origin of anatomically modern humans.[66][67]

A 2008 study suggested that the San may have been isolated from other original ancestral groups for as much as 50,000 to 100,000 years and later rejoined, re-integrating into the rest of the human gene pool.[68]

A DNA study of fully sequenced genomes, published in September 2016, showed that the ancestors of today's San hunter-gatherers began to diverge from other human populations in Africa about 200,000 years ago and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago.[69]

According to professors Robert K. Hitchcock, Wayne A. Babchuk, "In 1652, when Europeans established a full-time presence in Southern Africa, there were some 300,000 San and 600,000 Khoekhoe in Southern Africa. During the early phases of European colonization, tens of thousands of Khoekhoeand San peoples lost their lives as a result of genocide, murder, physical mistreatment, and disease. There were cases of “Bushman hunting” in which commandos (mobile paramilitary units or posses) sought to dispatch San and Khoekhoe in various parts of Southern Africa.[70]

Much aboriginal people's land in Botswana, including land occupied by the San people (or Basarwa), was conquered during colonization. Loss of land and access to natural resources continued after Botswana's independence.[37]: 2  The San have been particularly affected by encroachment by majority peoples and non-indigenous farmers onto their traditional land. Government policies from the 1970s transferred a significant area of traditionally San land to majority agro-pastoralist tribes and white settlers[37]: 15  Much of the government's policy regarding land tended to favor the dominant Tswana peoples over the minority San and Bakgalagadi.[37]: 2  Loss of land is a major contributor to the problems facing Botswana's indigenous people, including especially the San's eviction from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.[37]: 2  The government of Botswana decided to relocate all of those living within the reserve to settlements outside it. Harassment of residents, dismantling of infrastructure, and bans on hunting appear to have been used to induce residents to leave.[37]: 16  The government has denied that any of the relocation was forced.[71] A legal battle followed.[72] The relocation policy may have been intended to facilitate diamond mining by Gem Diamonds within the reserve.[37]: 18 

Hoodia gordonii, used by the San, was patented by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR) in 1998, for its presumed appetite suppressing quality, although, according to a 2006 review, no published scientific evidence supported hoodia as an appetite suppressant in humans.[73] A licence was granted to Phytopharm, for development of the active ingredient in the Hoodia plant, p57 (glycoside), to be used as a pharmaceutical drug for dieting. Once this patent was brought to the attention of the San, a benefit-sharing agreement was reached between them and the CSIR in 2003. This would award royalties to the San for the benefits of their indigenous knowledge.[74]During the case, the San people were represented and assisted by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), the South African San Council and the South African San Institute.[27][28]

This benefit-sharing agreement is one of the first to give royalties to the holders of traditional knowledge used for drug sales. The terms of the agreement are contentious, because of their apparent lack of adherence to the Bonn Guidelines on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing, as outlined in the Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD).[75] The San have yet to profit from this agreement, as P57 has still not yet been legally developed and marketed.

The San of the Kalahari were first brought to the globalized world's attention in the 1950s by South African author Laurens van der Post. Van der Post grew up in South Africa, and had a respectful lifelong fascination with native African cultures. In 1955, he was commissioned by the BBC to go to the Kalahari desert with a film crew in search of the San. The filmed material was turned into a very popular six-part television documentary a year later. Driven by a lifelong fascination with this "vanished tribe," Van der Post published a 1958 book about this expedition, entitled The Lost World of the Kalahari. It was to be his most famous book.

In 1961, he published The Heart of the Hunter, a narrative which he admits in the introduction uses two previous works of stories and mythology as "a sort of Stone Age Bible," namely Specimens of Bushman Folklore' (1911), collectedby Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend. Van der Post's work brought indigenous African cultures to millions of people around the world for the first time, but some people disparaged it as part of the subjective view of a European in the 1950s and 1960s, stating that he branded the San as simple "children of Nature" or even "mystical ecologists." In 1992 by John Perrot and team published the book "Bush for the Bushman" – a "desperate plea" on behalf of the aboriginal San addressing the international community and calling on the governments throughout Southern Africa to respect and reconstitute the ancestral land-rights of all San.

John Marshall, the son of Harvard anthropologist Lorna Marshall, documented the lives of San in the Nyae Nyae region of Namibia over a period spanning more than 50-years. His early film The Hunters, shows a giraffe hunt. A Kalahari Family (2002) is a series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Juǀʼhoansi of Southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. Marshall was a vocal proponent of the San cause throughout his life.[76] His sister Elizabeth Marshall Thomas wrote several books and numerous articles about the San, based in part on her experiences living with these people when their culture was still intact. The Harmless People, published in 1959, and The Old Way: A Story of the First People, published in 2006, are two of them. John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer documented the lives of the ǃKung San people between the 1950s and 1978 in Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman.[77][78] This film, the account of a woman who grew up while the San lived as autonomous hunter-gatherers, but who later was forced into a dependent life in the government-created community at Tsumkwe, shows how the lives of the ǃKung people, who lived for millennia as hunter gatherers, were forever changed when they were forced onto a reservation too small to support them.[79]

South African film-maker Richard Wicksteed has produced a number of documentaries on San culture, history and present situation; these include In God's Places / Iindawo ZikaThixo (1995) on the San cultural legacy in the southern Drakensberg; Death of a Bushman (2002) on the murder of San tracker Optel Rooi by South African police; The Will To Survive (2009), which covers the history and situation of San communities in southern Africa today; and My Land is My Dignity (2009) on the San's epic land rights struggle in Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

A documentary on San hunting entitled, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000), directed by Damon and Craig Foster. This was reviewed by Lawrence Van Gelder for the New York Times, who said that the film "constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem."[80]

Spencer Wells's 2003 book The Journey of Man—in connection with National Geographic's Genographic Project—discusses a genetic analysis of the San and asserts their genetic markers were the first ones to split from those of the ancestors of the bulk of other Homo sapiens sapiens. The PBS documentary based on the book follows these markers throughout the world, demonstrating that all of humankind can be traced back to the African continent (see Recent African origin of modern humans, the so-called "out of Africa" hypothesis).

The BBC's The Life of Mammals (2003) series includes video footage of an indigenous San of the Kalahari desert undertaking a persistence hunt of a kudu through harsh desert conditions.[81] It provides an illustration of how early man may have pursued and captured prey with minimal weaponry.

The BBC series How Art Made the World (2005) compares San cave paintings from 200 years ago to Paleolithic European paintings that are 14,000 years old.[82] Because of their similarities, the San works may illustrate the reasons for ancient cave paintings. The presenter Nigel Spivey draws largely on the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams,[83] whose PhD was entitled "Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings". Lewis-Williams draws parallels with prehistoric art around the world, linking in shamanic ritual and trance states.

A 1969 film, Lost in the Desert, features a small boy, stranded in the desert, who encounters a group of wandering San. They help him and then abandon him as a result of a misunderstanding created by the lack of a common language and culture. The film was directed by Jamie Uys, who returned to the San a decade later with The Gods Must Be Crazy, which proved to be an international hit. This comedy portrays a Kalahari San group's first encounter with an artifact from the outside world (a Coca-Cola bottle). By the time this movie was made, the ǃKung had recently been forced into sedentary villages, and the San hired as actors were confused by the instructions to act out inaccurate exaggerations of their almost abandoned hunting and gathering life.[84]

"Eh Hee" by Dave Matthews Band was written as an evocation of the music and culture of the San. In a story told to the Radio City audience (an edited version of which appears on the DVD version of Live at Radio City), Matthews recalls hearing the music of the San and, upon asking his guide what the words to their songs were, being told that "there are no words to these songs, because these songs, we've been singing since before people had words." He goes on to describe the song as his "homage to meeting... the most advanced people on the planet."

In Peter Godwin's biography When A Crocodile Eats the Sun, he mentions his time spent with the San for an assignment. His title comes from the San's belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun.

Laurens van der Post's two novels, A Story Like The Wind (1972) and its sequel, A Far Off Place (1974), made into a 1993 film, are about a white boy encountering a wandering San and his wife, and how the San's life and survival skills save the white teenagers' lives in a journey across the desert.

James A. Michener's The Covenant (1980), is a work of historical fictioncentered on South Africa. The first section of the book concerns a San community's journey set roughly in 13,000 BC.

In Wilbur Smith's novel The Burning Shore (an instalment in the Courtneys of Africa book series), the San people are portrayed through two major characters, O'wa and H'ani; Smith describes the San's struggles, history, and beliefs in great detail. San characters also appear in many of his other books, often working as trackers and guides for Smith's main c