In southern Africa numerous small hunter-gatherer populations
still
survive, or did so until recently. In the open country are the Bushmen,
brown rather than black populations such as the G/wi of Botswana—the
"/" in their name is a dental click, such as English-speakers use to
express annoyance. These groups are widely scattered, but much more
frequent in the desert areas of the center and west than in the
grasslands of the east. Their languages share the frequent use of
clicks like "/"—a phenomenon unknown outside southern Africa. This is
reminiscent of the common features of the languages of Australia; and
in the same way, the languages of the Bushmen cannot convincingly be
reduced to a single family. This suggests that Bushmen have been in the
region for a long time, and from any historical perspective we can
think of them as aborigines. To the north of the Bushmen are the
Pygmies, the equally aboriginal hunter-gatherers of the tropical
forest. Some twenty different groups are known; presumably they once
had languages of their own, but they now speak those of farming
populations with whom they have or once had relations. To the east are
numerous small hunter-gatherer populations in the East African
highlands. Taken as a whole, these scattered hunter-gatherer
populations of southern Africa look like residues of a time when the
region was as much a preserve of hunter-gatherers as Australia before
the eighteenth century. As we will see, that time, though not so recent
as in the case of Australia, was not more than two or three thousand
years ago. Against this southern pattern we can set the virtual absence
of hunter-gatherers from northern Africa, even in ecologically similar
regions. They hardly existed in modern times, and they have not been
conspicuous for some thousands of years.
