Dr Peter Baker was historically completely accurate in his statement that black Africans colonised SA from north of the Limpopo (Africans were colonisers, March 22). However, this needs to be elaborated on. The Bantu, a subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, migrated from their ancestral homeland in what is now Cameroon/Nigeria. They went on to achieve one of history’s great population movements by colonising the bottom two-thirds of the African continent. This is arguably a greater area than all the European colonies put together. The Khoisan and Pygmy peoples were engulfed through conquest, expulsion, interbreeding, killing or epidemics during their movement southwards, until they were stopped at the Fish River because they did not possess winter-rain crops for the Mediterranean climate. Virtually every part of earth has been colonised, often many times over. Why are we South Africans making an issue of this, especially when the ancestral owners — the Khoisan — are not invol...
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