Douglas Schorr

The brutal truth of South Africa’s tribal past uncovered.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is spinning a yarn on the campaign trail: a pre-colonial golden age of black unity, complete with borders, customs unions, and officials—a paradise ripe for reclaiming. It’s a fairy tale so detached from reality it makes you wonder what else he’s gotten wrong. Pre-colonial South Africa wasn’t a utopia; it was a war zone of fractured tribes fighting to survive.

The earliest inhabitants of what we now call South Africa were the Khoi and San, small bands of hunter-gatherers scattered across the landscape. Then came the Bantu migrations, pushing the Khoi and San southward until they reached the Western Cape—a winter rainfall region with unfamiliar geology that held little appeal for the Bantu cattle herders. Beginning as early as 800 CE, the Bantu were trickling through Zimbabwe, where a few stayed to eventually become tribes like the Shona and Manica, crossed the Limpopo.

Ramaphosa’s tale of unity stops making sense after the Bantu crossed the Limpopo. From then on, they splintered—new families staked claims to land and formed rival groups. Anecdotal evidence suggests that certainly by around 1500, the Xhosa and Zulu had taken root, and soon thereafter, long before the time Europeans began venturing inland, there were other units establishing themselves. They weren’t part of a harmonious, collective society!

They were centralized clusters of villages—mud and thatch and cattle “kraal” cities in the case of the Zulu and Xhosa-—ruled by chiefs or kings. They were separated by vast, empty expanses stretching hundreds of kilometers. These no-man’s-lands weren’t empty—they were buffers, watched by lookouts trained from youth to spot threats and warn their villages. Why the vigilance? Why such vigilance?

Because Bantu society had evolved beyond simple hunting and gathering into something more predatory: raiding neighbours for cattle, food, and people. Cattle were wealth, and though some were killed for special occasions, they were not a managed food resource. Capturing ‘seed stock’ mattered because life expectancy lingered around 22 years, barely allowing tribes to grow without new blood. That growth also depended on wild game—90% of their diet—which roamed shrinking buffer zones tribes fought to control. By the 1700s, “great expanses” was a misnomer; wildlife dwindled as tribes competed for the same depleting stocks.

I was lucky enough, as a teenager, to sit with elderly Matabele men in Zimbabwe and hear their stories. Under Mzilikazi, who founded Bulawayo in the early 1800s, the Matabele were a powerhouse—30% of their population were “integrating” slaves taken from weaker groups. Mzilikazi ruled with a spear toss: when unrest brewed, he’d summon his generals, announce an expedition, and hurl his weapon. West meant Botswana; north targeted the Mashona; east hit the Manica near Mozambique’s Chimanimani Mountains. South was off-limits—crossing the Limpopo risked clashing with the Afrikaners, busy taming their own harsh frontier, or encroaching on Zulu territory under his former overlord, Shaka. This wasn’t land stewardship; it was a roving, plunder-driven economy that had been thriving for, I guess, at least 200 years.

Then the Europeans arrived, unknowingly breaking the cycle. They didn’t ‘steal’ land—they filled the buffer zones, stopping the raids that fuelled tribal life. Suddenly the tribes could no longer get at each other. Ironically, the benefits of this enforced separation—cessation of conflict, improvements in trade, agriculture, health education, and first-time jobs—only deepened animosities over what might have been! The hatred festered for past injustices even as towns and cities sprang up under colonial and later separate development rules. In places like the Rand’s gold mines, employers had to enforce separation policies to manage rivalries, but they weren’t foolproof. Hostels housing different tribes often erupted into brutal, bloody clashes.

In everyday life when mixing went wrong, tensions flared. When 10-seater minibuses replaced municipal buses in the 1980s, the rule was simple: pay the exact fare, take your seat, and stay silent. In cosmopolitan areas, naive white passengers being ‘nice’ and trying to chat could spark spontaneous violence. Tribes didn’t mix easily.

Ramaphosa’s claim that blacks united under the ANC to liberate South Africa is another stretch. In the transit camps of Zambia, rival South African factions clashed so often that the World Council of Churches threatened to cut funding unless order was restored. Down in Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park, the same infighting plagued exiles. Sure, it wasn’t a South African “thing.” During their war, when Zimbabwe’s ZAPU met ZANU, fists flew. But nothing matched the horror of Mugabe’s post-independence slaughter of the Matabele.

What’s to say this won’t happen in South Africa—not over land itself but over Ramaphosa’s rhetoric of ‘taking back OUR land’?” Whose land? And contrary to what’s implied, it won’t solve poverty.

It won’t; alone, it can’t, but sure, the Chinese could. Among South Africa’s black population, there are no farmers in the traditional sense. Bantu culture is centuries of hunting, raiding, and recently migrating from rural homelands to continue the competition in the urban sprawl, leaving little room for setting agricultural roots. For a deeper dive, I’d urge Ramaphosa, Malema, and Zuma to read my post, “From Hunter to Handout: The Truth About African Agriculture.” The land they’re fighting over was never the pastoral paradise they imagine—it was a battleground, and its scars still shape the future unfolding before us.

Future? Well, err, yes. Since the last elections, even as more job-creating and mediating non-blacks leave, the ANC, EFF, and MK are again carving up influence, fracturing the country along lines eerily reminiscent of 1780. Tribal boundaries are being reborn in modern politics. Ramaphosa’s “take back the land” rhetoric rings hollow.