ABSTRACT
The Khoikhoi and San (Khoisan) were the first pre-colonial peoples of southern Africa to experience the impact of European-directed settlement and territorial expansion. In the mid seventeenth century, when the Dutch founded a fort and garden at the Cape, Khoisan pastoralists and hunter-gatherers were in sole possession of vast stretches of south-western Africa. The area of south-western Africa that the Khoisan had inhabited for centuries before European colonisation is a rugged, immense and largely arid land of imposing mountains and vast plains. The Cape Khoikhoi, numbering perhaps 50,000 people in the mid-seventeenth century, were divided into several autonomous groups each with its own political leader and roughly demarcated territory. The hard-working and self-sustaining small holders Van Riebeeck envisaged as the basis for a flourishing colonial agriculture did not materialise. The defeat of Cochoqua leader, Gonnema, gave Europeans continued access to Khoikhoi territory on favourable terms.
