Khoisan

Khoisan is an umbrella term for the various non-Bantu indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, grouping together the pastoralist Khoekhoe communities, including the Nama and Damara, and the hunter-gatherer San peoples, all of whom traditionally speak non-Bantu languages. Khoisan communities live across climatically difficult parts of Southern Africa, from the Cape region through Namibia and Botswana, areas generally unsuited to the sorghum-based agriculture that Bantu-speaking farmers brought with them. Despite sharing the Khoisan label, these peoples' languages are not a single family but span at least three separate and unrelated groups, the Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kxa languages, unified mainly by their unusual use of click consonants. Numbering only around 400,000 people as of about 2010, Khoisan communities descend from some of the earliest human populations to reach Southern Africa, with ancestry that can be traced back more than 150,000 years, and they were the region's predominant inhabitants until Bantu expansion and later European colonization reduced their numbers and territory. Since the 1990s Khoisan groups have organized to seek recognition as South Africa's first nations and to press land rights claims.