ABSTRACT
Throughout South Africa’s recorded past, migration has been a socially constructed strategy both to exploit and to cope with the challenges of the region’s environment. However, around the middle of the 18th century, a significant change occurred. Whereas, until then, migration had largely been voluntary, peaceful, and economically motivated, after 1750, centralized, aggressive, migrating polities increasingly became the norm, producing violent confrontations, uprooting whole communities, and forcing people to flee to areas of greater safety. This chapter uses the lens of evolutionary game theory, particularly the Hawk-Dove model, to explore the reasons for these changes. We argue that the rising value of resources, greater competition between centralized entities, and more effective means to perpetrate violence can explain both why the nature of polity formation changed and, relatedly, why the nature of migration transformed.
