The first European explorers and settlers on the west and south coasts of southern Africa obtained sheep and cattle from people who spoke the Khoe language, and for a long, we assumed that the Khoe-speakers had originally migrated into southern Africa bringing the first livestock with them.
With direct radiocarbon dating of ancient livestock bones from several archaeological sites, we are now certain that the earliest sheep and cattle appeared in southern Africa around 2 000 years ago. Stone Age sites of Africa south of the -10th parallel shows that around 2 000 years ago sheep and cattle were first infiltrated into southern Africa by small groups of hunter-herders on two separate fronts. In the extreme west, sheep were infiltrated southwards along the Atlantic seaboard and as far as the southern tip of Africa by hunter-herders carrying a northern stone toolkit. Contemporary with this event, sheep, and cattle as well as the art of pottery entered the middle Limpopo River Basin with a smaller infiltration of northern hunter-herders who crossed the watershed from the Zambezi River Basin. Rapidly, these innovations diffused among the Limpopo River Basin foragers and then crossed the watershed westwards into the Kalahari Drainage Basin, this time with hunter-herders of the Limpopo River Basin lithic tradition who moved along the Makgadikgadi Pans and up the Boteti River Valley as far as Lake Ngami. A few centuries later Limpopo River Basin hunter-herders were responsible for the further spread of livestock southwards.
 Map of sub-equatorial Africa. Country boundaries are shown with thin white lines and the major watersheds are shown with thick blue lines. |
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Here, we divide our period of interest into two phases. In the first phase, we will look at the archaeological evidence from before the introduction of livestock into southern Africa, a period from around 4 000 – 2 000 years ago; and in the second phase we consider the evidence from after their first introduction, a period from about 2 000 – 1 000 years ago although for now, we are most interested in events that took place before the mid-first millennium AD.
Namibia provides detailed lists of stone tools so they cannot yet be included in our database. In the Western Coastal Basin of South Africa, only two sites, MS3 and KN6-3C, show a clear dominance of backed tools in phase 1 and they are both located in the northern parts of this basin, in today’s arid Namaqualand. Their associated dates suggest an infiltration much earlier than the introduction of livestock: they may represent remnant backed-rich communities from the Mid-Holocene Altithermal (8 000 – 4 000 years ago) in Namaqualand. It seems that warmer and drier periods in Namaqualand correlate with a southward shift of the boundary between the northern and southern lithic traditions. The first livestock here arrived with one of these northern advances.
Further south, in the relatively warm period at the dawn of phase 2, few dated sites are known from Namaqualand but at the site of Spoegrivier Cave, the phase 1 scraper-rich assemblage was replaced with a backed-rich one, accompanied by sheep bones and ceramic vessels. One of the Spoegrivier sheep bones produced the second oldest secure date for livestock in southern Africa.
Later from 1790 to 1800, when Europeans first arrived in South Africa, the raising of fat-tailed sheep was well established over much of the present-day territory. Indigenous sheep breeds, which were raised more for meat than wool, include the Damara, Zulu, and Pedi sheep. During the 1800s, British settlers introduced Merino sheep, which precipitated a brief commercial wool boom in the Cape Colony.
This history stretched back as far as 1789, when the Dutch Government donated two Spanish Merino Rams and four Spanish Merino Ewes to Col. Jacob Gordon, the military commander at the Cape at that time, on an experimental basis. These sheep were initially the property of the King of Spain, who had the sole right to export Merinos. However, the King sent many sheep from his famous Escoriale Merino Stud as a gift to the House of Orange. The sheep could not adjust to the high rainfall in the Netherlands and were therefore sent to Col. Gordon. He immediately realised the possibilities of this breed and decided to keep it pure, grazing them on the Company farm Groenkloof, 55km from Cape Town. By 1830 wool sheep farming in the Western and South Western Cape was already fairly well established. The next expansion was eastwards. The 1820 Settlers played an important role in this extension and development of Merino flocks. In 1834 the Great Trek started and the Voortrekkers took their sheep flocks northwards with them. Within a few years, the Merino had spread to all parts of the country.
Some of the earliest Merino sheep
From 1891 considerable numbers of Merinos of the American Vermont type were brought to South Africa. However, it was found that the Australian Merino, the Wanganella and Peppin type, was best suited to improve our flocks, and large numbers of this breed were imported. With all the different types forming the basis, the South African breeders have succeeded in developing typical Merino on par with the best of the world. These Merinos, which have developed over more than 200 years, form the backbone of South Africa’s Agricultural Industry.
On 24 September 1907, the first 12 sheep, 2 rams and 10 ewes, arrived onboard a freight ship at Swakopmund, in Namibia, which at that time still had a harbour. These sheep were imported to Namibia by the German government. About 750 Karakuls were imported to Namibia from Asia at the beginning of the previous century.
Karakul ewe with her lambs
The karakul sheep is believed to be one of the oldest breeds of domesticated sheep in the world. Originally from the steppes of Turkistan, this broad-tailed sheep gradually spread to other regions of Central Asia. This breed is named after the village Qorako’l, which lies in present-day Uzbekistan.
We find that the Tswana in Botswana is also pastoralist and more importance is attached not only to cattle but also to goats and sheep. Cattle are not merely a source of food, in terms of milk and occasionally meat, but their skin provides them with clothing material, shields, bags and many more. Social importance is acquired through ownership of cattle and a man’s wealth is estimated by the size of his herds. Cattle, and sometimes sheep, are given as bride wealth. Cattle, as well as, sheep and goats, are the standard medium of exchange. Sheep and goats are often killed for eating or sacrificed to ancestral spirits. The Tswana keep their livestock in non-permanent cattle posts several miles away from the villages, where they graze freely upon the available pastures. Owing to the scarcity of water, good pasture areas could not be used during dry seasons. Livestock is generally concentrated near boreholes, dams, wells and standing pools near the river, and at night they are kraaled to prevent them from straying. When the rains come, they have moved away and left unattended.
Some indications recon that the Tswana sheep breed develops out of the fat-tailed sheep of Eastern Africa (Eritrea). They share a common ancestry of European and Asian sheep. These fat-tailed sheep entered Africa through the north-eastern, the Horn of Africa and indications are there that they reached southern African regions and more specifically the area of Botswana as we know it today in 1700.
Tswana ram