I was educated in South Africa in the late 90s/early 00s, while the education system was being overhauled, so a lot of the history I learned was still relics of Apartheid that had not been revised by the new government. We learned that there was a famine in Kenya in, I think, the early 1000s, and East Africans migrated down and started populating South Africa from the Northeast. When Europeans landed in the Cape there were indigenous Khoi people but no black/bantu people. I think the books even mentioned that large parts were uninhabited (which sounds like a bit of an excuse..) Is this true? When did Dutch settlers and Bantu people first meet then?
It is false. It is a myth perpetuated by Afrikaner ultra-nationalists and separatists to justify taking land away from the natives. The west half was populated by (mainly) Khoisan peoples, they encountered the Portuguese sailors that landed on the cape. The Bantu speaking Peoples have been in South Africa since at least the 6th century CE, about 8 centuries before any known Europeans set foot in SA. The Lydenburg heads in Mpumalanga date about 500CE. There were documented kingdoms of Bantu peoples, evidence of Ironwork (Bantu in origin since the Khoisan were Stone Age level). Like I said, it’s a myth and the only ones promoting it now are the bitter Boer separatists who can’t accept the apartheid is over.
http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/eebedia/images/6/61/South_African_History_time_line.pdf