History

Kwena Lodge takes its cue from the historical heritage of the Khoikhoi who lived here and from their simple dome shaped huts with grass roofs.

Between 195000 and 125000 years ago an ice age covered much of the planet. In a milder, sheltered part of the South African coast, conditions sustained those who found themselves there. That place was Mossel Bay. Some of the earliest evidence of intelligent men and women has been found here.

The cave system at Pinnacle Point, now a golf estate about fifteen minutes from Gondwana Game Reserve, was their home. They gathered shellfish between the tides and dug for the nutritious bulbs, tubers and corms of the fynbos and renosterveld plants of the area.

Local people found a way to use fire to refine stone spearheads to sharp blades as far back as 165000 years ago and to set those blades in bone and wood. They also began to use pigment for decoration around that time.

As conditions improved, groups of survivors journeyed north and around the world. Some remained in Africa. In time two groups inhabited the southern tip of the country more than a thousand years before the first European settlers. These were the Khoikhoi and the San, known together as the Khoisan.

Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese discoverer, was the first European known to set foot on South African soil when he arrived at Mossel Bay in 1488. The first indigenous people he met were nomadic herders who had lived in the Cape for over a thousand years, the Khoikhoi.

Misunderstanding arose when the newcomers took water from a water hole. The Khoikhoi considered the water theirs to share with anyone who asked politely and offered a gift. The Europeans did not know that custom. Poor communication hampered relationships for many years.

European travellers gave the name Hottentot to the people already in the Cape. The herders called themselves Kwena or Khoikhoi, meaning real man or real person. Wealthy families owned large herds of long horned cattle, fat tailed sheep and goats. They made use of milk and hunted antelope and other animals of the land around them. Feasts could include red hartebeest, bontebok, eland, grey rhebok, bushbuck, porcupine and other endemic animals. Only when a large wild animal such as a hippo or elephant was taken would they kill a domestic animal as part of a ceremony.

The Khoikhoi moved to find grazing, so their homes had to travel. They still lived in large village groups of more than one hundred people. Men cut flexible young trees, set them in a circle, bent them at the top and fastened them into a dome. Women and children gathered reeds, sewed them into mats and flung the mats over the dome.

Dry reeds let a breeze through in summer heat. In rain the reeds swelled and kept the interior relatively dry. In cold the Kwena lined the huts with animal skins. When they moved they rolled up the mats. Sometimes they moved the dome frames too. If they would return soon they left the frames and built new ones elsewhere.

In 1655 a Dutch expedition described another group of small stature, living without huts or cattle. These were the San, whom the Dutch called Somquaas or Bushmen. The San were hunters, not herders and lived in small groups of fewer than fifty. They shared what they owned and saw themselves as equals. The arrival of the Khoikhoi with animals put pressure on San livelihood and relations were not always friendly.

By the early nineteenth century many Khoikhoi herders had adopted the Dutch language. Cultures mix as time goes by. In the twenty first century people proudly claim Khoikhoi ancestry and understand it as part of their identity. The Kwena live on in their descendants today.

This history of early people in our area draws on The Cape Herders, A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa by Emile Boonzaier, Candy Malherbe, Penny Berens and Andy Smith (David Philip Publishers, Cape Town), with thanks to Mandy Hackland.