San people in the context of "Skeleton Coast"

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its borders include the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south; in the northeast, approximating a quadripoint, Zimbabwe lies less than 200 metres (660 feet) away along the Zambezi River near Kazungula, Zambia. Namibia's capital and largest city is Windhoek.

Namibia is the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa, and has been inhabited since prehistoric times by the Khoi, San, Damara and Nama people. Around the 14th century, immigrating Bantu peoples arrived as part of the Bantu expansion. From 1600 the Owambo formed kingdoms, such as Ondonga and Oukwanyama.

The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, with each ethnicity generally having their own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan populations.

The official population count of the various ethnic groups in Africa is highly uncertain due to limited infrastructure to perform censuses, and due to rapid population growth. Some groups have alleged that there is deliberate misreporting in order to give selected ethnicities numerical superiority (as in the case of Nigeria's Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples).

Khoisan (/ˈkɔɪsɑːn/ KOY-sahn) or Khoe-Sān (pronounced [kʰoɪˈsaːn]) is an umbrella term for the various indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples. Khoisan populations traditionally speak click languages. They are considered to be the historical communities throughout Southern Africa, remaining predominant until Bantu and European colonisation. The Khoisan have lived in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu (sorghum-based) agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, where Khoekhoe populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups. Considerable mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click phonemes in many Southern African Bantu languages, especially Xhosa.

Many Khoesan peoples are the descendants of an early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago. (However, see below for recent work supporting a multi-regional hypothesis that suggests the Khoisan may be a source population for anatomically modern humans.) Their languages show a limited typological similarity, largely confined to the prevalence of click consonants. They are not verifiably derived from a single common proto-language, but are split among at least three separate and unrelated language families (Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kxʼa). It has been suggested that the Khoekhoe may represent Late Stone Age arrivals to Southern Africa, possibly displaced by Bantu expansion reaching the area roughly between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.

Khoikhoi (/ˈkɔɪkɔɪ/ KOY-koy) (or Khoekhoe in Namibian orthography) are the traditionally nomadic pastoralist indigenous population of South Africa. They are often grouped with the hunter-gatherer San (literally "foragers") peoples, the accepted term for the two people being Khoisan. The designation "Khoikhoi" is actually a kare or praise address, not an ethnic endonym, but it has been used in the literature as an ethnic term for Khoe-speaking peoples of Southern Africa, particularly pastoralist groups, such as the Inqua, Griqua, Gonaqua, Nama, Attequa. The Khoekhoe were once known as Hottentots, a term now considered offensive.

The Khoekhoe are thought to have diverged from other humans 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. In the 17th century, the Khoekhoe maintained large herds of Nguni cattle in the Cape region. They mostly gave up nomadic pastoralism in the 19th to 20th century.

The Khoisan languages (/ˈkɔɪsɑːn/ KOY-sahn; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates.

All but two Khoisan languages are indigenous to southern Africa; these are classified into three language families. The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoekhoe and the San (Bushmen). Two languages of eastern Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, were originally also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoekhoe nor San.

The theft of fire for the benefit of humanity is a theme that recurs in many world mythologies, symbolizing the acquisition of knowledge, or technology, and its transformative impact on civilization. Its recurrent themes include trickster figures as the thief, and supernatural heroic guardians who hoard fire from humanity, often out of mistrust for humans. These myths reflect the significance of fire in human history, which is considered a major milestone in the development of human society.

In African mythology, the San peoples tell of ǀKaggen, stealing fire from the ostrich and bringing it to people. In the Americas, Native American and First Nations tribes attribute the gift of fire to animals.In Eurasian cultures, fire theft takes on various forms. The Vedic Rigveda narrates hero Mātariśvan recovering hidden fire. Greek mythology recounts Prometheus stealing heavenly fire for humanity and suffering greatly as punishment for doing so. In Oceania, Polynesian myths often feature Māui as the fire thief, with diverse variations across regions.

Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing British Crown colony in Southern Africa, established in 1923 and consisting of British South Africa Company (BSAC) territories lying south of the Zambezi River. The region was informally known as South Zambesia until Britain annexed it at the behest of the British South Africa Company. The colony was then renamed for that company’s founder, Cecil Rhodes. The bounding territories were Bechuanaland (Botswana), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Portuguese Mozambique (Mozambique) and the Transvaal Republic (for two brief periods known as the British Transvaal Colony; from 1910, the Union of South Africa and, from 1961, the Republic of South Africa). Since 1980, the colony's territory is the independent nation of Zimbabwe.

This southern region, known for its extensive gold reserves, was first purchased by the BSAC's Pioneer Column on the strength of a mineral concession extracted from its Matabele king, Lobengula, and various majority Mashona vassal chiefs in 1890. Though parts of the territory were laid-claim-to by the Bechuana and Portugal, its first people, the "Bushmen" (or Sān or Khoisan), had possessed it for countless centuries beforehand and had continued to inhabit the region. Following the colony's unilateral dissolution in 1970 by the Republic of Rhodesia government, the Colony of Southern Rhodesia was re-established in 1979 as the successor state to the Republic of Zimbabwe Rhodesia which, in-turn, was the predecessor state of the Republic of Zimbabwe. Its only true geographical borders were the rivers Zambezi and Limpopo, its other boundaries being (more or less) arbitrary, and merging imperceptibly with the peoples and domains of earlier chiefdoms of pre-colonial times.

Angola was first settled by San hunter-gatherer societies before the northern domains came under the rule of Bantu states such as Kongo and Ndongo. In the 15th century, Portuguese colonists began trading, and a settlement was established at Luanda during the 16th century. Portugal annexed territories in the region which were ruled as a colony from 1655, and Angola was incorporated as an overseas province of Portugal in 1951. After the Angolan War of Independence, which ended in 1974 with an army mutiny and leftist coup in Lisbon, Angola achieved independence in 1975 through the Alvor Agreement. After independence, Angola entered a long period of civil war that lasted until 2002.

The Swati or Swazi (Swati: Emaswati, singular Liswati) are a Bantu ethnic group native to Southern Africa, inhabiting Eswatini, a sovereign kingdom in Southern Africa, and South Africa's Mpumalanga province. EmaSwati are part of the Nguni-language speaking peoples whose origins can be traced through archaeology to East Africa where similar traditions, beliefs and cultural practices are found.

The Swati people and the Kingdom of Eswatini today are named after Mswati II, who became king in 1839 after the death of his father King Sobhuza. Eswatini was a region first occupied by the San people and the current Swazis migrated from north East Africa through to Mozambique and eventually settled in Eswatini in the 15th century. Their royal lineage can be traced to a chief named Dlamini I; this is still the royal clan name. About three-quarters of the clan groups are Nguni; the remainder are Sotho, Tsonga, others North East African and San descendants. These groups have intermarried freely. Swazi identity extends to all those with allegiance to the twin monarchs Ingwenyama "the Lion" (the king) and Indlovukati "the She-Elephant" (the queen mother). The dominant Swati language and culture are factors that unify Swatis as a nation.

ǀKaggen (more accurately ǀKágge̥n or ǀKaggən, sometimes corrupted to Cagn and sometimes called Mantis) is a demiurge and folk hero of the San people of southern Africa. He is a trickster god who can shape shift, usually taking the form of a praying mantis but also a bull eland, a louse, a snake, and a caterpillar.

Bushmanland (Afrikaans: Boesmanland) was a Bantustan in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing homeland for the San people (the Bushmen).

The ǃKung (/ˈkʊŋ/ KUUNG) are one of the San peoples who live mostly on the western edge of the Kalahari desert, Ovamboland (northern Namibia and southern Angola), and Botswana. The names ǃKung (ǃXun) and Ju are variant words for 'people', preferred by different ǃKung groups. This band level society used traditional methods of hunting and gathering for subsistence up until the 1970s. Today, the great majority of ǃKung people live in the villages of Bantu pastoralists and European ranchers.