So basically recently i met with an older Spanish gentleman who has lived all over the world and is now based in South-Africa. At one point we were talking about colonization and about South Africa. He said that it many people do not know but South Africa was empty (except for a few forestmen) and that the colonisers and the Zulu people (or some other African tribes) arrived at roughly the same time.
I searched a bit on the internet and some say it's a myth and some say it's not.
This gentleman is a very educated person, worked internationally and is also an avid traveller. From what I gathered I am also 100% sure he is not racist and he is actually against all racism (which I gathered due to other topics).
So my question is; is what this gentleman said true or is it a false history that people believe?
Thank you, be safe to all.
Cheers
No, it wasn't empty. The area that is today South Africa had a variety of populations; Bantu-speakers in a direct line of ancestry to modern South Africans arrived no later than (and likely much earlier than) 500 CE, but even without them, the rest of the subcontinent had both pastoral (Khoe) and foraging ('San') societies. Their descendants are still there too, though usually under the label 'Coloured.'
The belief that South Africa--one of the cradles of humanity--was somehow 'empty' of its current populations' ancestors when Europeans arrived at the Cape is an old racist canard, used to support the claim of white settlers (of whatever background) to the land. I've written on this before (see thread), though there's always more to say. I can't quite find my other discussion of the origin of the belief, but it's strongly tied to a South African cousin of Manifest Destiny in the US--that the land was meant for the settler, usually by divine right.
Norman Etherington and a few others have written on this aptly-termed Myth of the Empty Land, which is something that a lot of settler societies shared as part of the process John Weaver (The Great Land Rush, 2003) calls 'the uprooting of native title.' If one can pretend that one has equal claim or priority of claim to the land over all others, then their acts gain legitimacy--they claim the title over the whole country, as they constitute it. Logically, it makes no sense, because colonization of that area was a 250+ year long process, so there's no one moment when 'colonizers arrived.' Besides that, amaZulu didn't exist as an entity above the village level until after Shaka's ascent in the 1810s, but the idea that African groups had unchanging unitary 'tribal' identities is also a hallmark of colonialist (and apartheid) racial thought. This is part of why it survives on the internet--but make no mistake, the scholarship clearly says "no, it wasn't empty."
Although your compatriot doesn't espouse racist views, he's taken on one here that was born of that era. It has no advocates in any relevant field of academic study today. It was a disproven article of faith and nationalist fever-dreaming 50 years ago, and it requires one pretend that major complexes like Toutswe, Mapungubwe, Bokoni, and others were made my mysterious extinct people. However, we know from those sites (and others) that their descendants are South Africans (and in Toutswe and Bokoni, sometimes Botswanans and Mozambicans) today. If you want a primer on the archaeology of the region, Mitchell's 2002 Archaeology of Southern Africa is still good, but it's getting on in years. I don't have access to my other works because campus is still closed, I fear.