Khoikhoi

The Khoikhoi ("people people" or "real people") or Khoi were a division of the Khoisan ethnic group of south-western Africa, closely related to the Bushmen (San in the Khoi language). Khoikhoi is sometimes spelt KhoeKhoe. At the time of the arrival of white settlers in 1652 the Khoikhoi had lived in southern Africa for about 30,000 years, and practised extensive pastoral agriculture in the Cape region.

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They were traditionally - and are still occasionally in colloquial language - known to white colonists as the Hottentots, a name that is nowadays described as "offensive" by the Oxford Dictionary of South African English. The word "hottentot" meant "stutterer" in the colonists' northern dialect of Dutch, although the Dutch use the word "stotteraar" more to describe the clicking sounds typically used in the Khoisan languages. The word lives on, however, in the names of several African animal and plant species, such as the Hottentot Fig or Carpobrotus Fig, Carpobrotus edulis.

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Khoikhoi social organisation was profoundly damaged and, in the end, destroyed by white colonial expansion and land seizure from the late seventeenth century onwards, which ended traditional Khoikhoi pastoral life. As social structures broke down, some Khoikhoi people settled on farms and became bondsmen or farmworkers; others were incorporated into existing clan and family groups of the Xhosa people.

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Although there is no longer an ethnic group in southern Africa with an exclusively Khoikhoi identity, mixed race groups such as the Coloured people of the Cape area; the Griqua people of the Western Cape and the Oorlams people of Namibia all possess Khoikhoi heritage or ancestry, as do many Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape, and some people of Afrikaans descent.

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Khoisan: :This article is about the Khoisan ethnic group. For the Khoisan language group, see Khoisan languages....

Africa: Africa is the world's second-largest continent and second most populous after Asia. At about 30,244,050 km² (11,677,240 mi²) including its adjacent islands, it covers 20.3 percent of the total land area on Earth. With over 800 million human inhabitants in 54 countries, it accounts for abou...

Bushmen: The Bushmen (also known as Khwe (Khoe), Basarwa, or San) peoples of South Africa and neighbouring Botswana and Namibia, who live in the Kalahari, are part of the Khoisan group and are related to the Khoikhoi. However, they have no collective name for themselves in any of their languages, all of whi...