Long before European ships anchored on the southern coast of Africa, the San people, hunter-gatherers whose ancestors had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, roamed the open plains freely. They were among the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa, moving with the seasons, tracking wildlife, and living in deep harmony with nature. But with the arrival of European settlers in the 1600s, their world was turned upside down. Within two centuries, the San were nearly wiped out, hunted like wild animals and stripped of their land and dignity.
But their way of life began to collapse in the 17th century with the arrival of European colonizers. When Dutch settlers (known as Boers) reached the Cape in the mid-1600s, they viewed the San not as fellow humans but as obstacles to expansion. The settlers wanted land for cattle farming, and the San, who relied on those same territories for hunting, were soon branded as “pests” to be eliminated.
To the settlers, the San were racially stereotyped as among the lowest forms of humanity, they were targeted for mass violence. The Dutch saw them not as people with rights but as pests who stood in the way of colonial expansion. That perception became a license for slaughter.
By the early 1700s, open warfare had erupted as Dutch farmers organized armed commandos to hunt down and kill San men, women, and children in raids that were often sanctioned and rewarded by the colonial authorities. In response, the San fought back with determination, launching guerrilla attacks on isolated farms, ambushing herders, and raiding livestock to survive, but their resistance only provoked even more violent reprisals from the settlers.
The violence quickly escalated into genocide. In just a few decades, thousands of San were massacred across the Cape frontier. Between the early 1700s and 1800s, Dutch forces carried out relentless campaigns that reduced entire communities to near extinction.
According to historian Mohamed Adhikari, in one campaign alone between August and November 1774, commandos killed 503 San and captured 239. Over time, thousands more were wiped out. In some areas, more than 90% of San communities disappeared through killings, starvation, and forced labor.
The San were not the only victims of Dutch colonial violence. The Khoikhoi people, who were pastoralists inhabiting the Cape region, also faced repeated massacres at the hands of the Dutch. They attacked Khoikhoi communities using firearms, killing thousands, confiscating land and livestock, and abducting survivors into forced labor or for exhibition in European zoos. These attacks also disrupted the Khoikhoi way of life, stripping them of autonomy, land, and resources.
When the British seized the Cape Colony in 1795, the Dutch system of raids had already devastated much of the San population. But British rule brought little relief. Settlers under the new administration expanded deeper into San territory, pushing surviving groups into deserts and arid frontiers.
By the mid-1800s, San children were being captured and forced into servitude on colonial farms. Entire families were split up or worked to death. British officials occasionally condemned these acts, but they rarely intervened to stop them.
In 1862–63, British magistrate Louis Anthing investigated conditions in Bushmanland and found that settlers were still openly hunting San people. One man casually told him that during hunting trips, “one portion of the party pursue the game, and the other go to hunt and shoot Bushmen.”
Those who survived the raids were often taken as captives. San children were handed out to farmers as laborers, their identities stripped away. Adults were chained, forced into servitude.
By the mid-19th century, the once-proud San societies of the Cape were nearly gone, destroyed first by Dutch commandos, and finally erased by British neglect and exploitation. Those who survived fled northward into the harsh Kalahari Desert, seeking refuge in lands few outsiders could endure. Today, their descendants still live there, carrying forward their traditions and memories while continuing to face marginalization and displacement.
Today, historians describe what happened to the San as one of the earliest genocides in African history. The Cambridge World History of Genocide calls it a “settler genocide”, a campaign of destruction driven by greed, land hunger, and racial contempt.
Despite the scale of these atrocities, mainstream histories rarely acknowledge them. Their voices were silenced not only by bullets and enslavement but also by the erasure of memory.
Sources:
https://sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files/genocide_mohammed_adhikari.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-genocide/settler-genocides-of-san-peoples-of-southern-africa-c1700c1940/BE4F9A6675BAD77F49378886611D4E08
https://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_bushmen.html
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20941880/
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/dutch-colonization-wreaked-havoc-from-asia-to-africa/1075570
https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0018-229X2012000100010
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2013.793081
