The Khoekhoe and the hunter-gatherers of the Karoo, the |Xam, valued quagga meat, and used their hides and bones too; the |Xam told stories about quaggas and indigenous people portrayed them on rocks. This chapter describes hunting techniques of indigenous people andof the Europeans who settled in the Cape Colony. Hunting provided settlers with meat that they gave to their slaves and laborers and hides that were made into low-value items such as ropes, harnesses, whips, halters, bags, thongs, clothing, and veldschoen (rough shoes). In the nineteenth century, big-game hunters and hide-hunters joined in the killing. Settlers also used quaggas to protect their livestock and to pull wagons but this latter use was probably limited as quaggas were prone to fatigue; nonetheless, other plains zebras were harnessed with domestic equines and used to pull a stagecoach. Domestication of quaggas would have been disadvantageous as they could have harbored African Horse Sickness and this disease is transmissible by insect vectors to horses, donkeys, and mules, where it can be deadly. Quaggas did not need to be domesticated in order to be valued; biophilia could have prevented their extinction.

When the Dutch plunged into the Indian Ocean at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they brought with them both a new form of capitalism and fresh ways of looking at nature. Their sprawling seaborne empire turned Amsterdam and Leiden into centres for the collection of global knowledge. Colonised regions were systematically scoured for valuable natural resources and curiosities. Jan van Riebeeck, Simon van der Stel and Rijk Tulbagh, among other Cape governors, were keen amateur naturalists. The Cape’s natural diversity in plants and animals attracted literate travellers with a scientific bent and the botanical gardens served as a portal to exchange of botanical knowledge. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced a rich literature on South Africa, as scientific interest drew it into the orbit of educated Europeans. Some of the writers became scientists of consequence, including Thunberg, who became the leading botanist in Sweden; Lichtenstein, a professor of zoology in Berlin; and Barrow, a key scientific figure in the British Admiralty. These travellers often reported local knowledge and collectively created a literary tradition about the Cape that helped to define the region’s character and interest to scientists.

In this chapter, using historical records and academic commentaries and research, we trace language contact in Cape Town from as far back as 400 CE. We detail how people indigenous to the area, as well as migrants from the rest of Africa and abroad, adapted their speech for social, political and economic reasons, with the result that Dutch, and later Afrikaans and English, gained prominence. After this diachronic account, we focus on two contemporary speech communities in Cape Town, and through interviews and participant observations confirm that while English is considered a prestige language and the key to future success, people still speak vernacular varieties of their own languages and of English. Examination of the linguistic landscape of the city in a number of research articles shows that English (some of it non-standard) is used far more widely in signage than African languages, which are used primarily for stylistic and affective reasons. Finally, we use research into hip-hop and rap performances in the city to argue that in this domain of music, local languages and mixed codes are preferred over English.

Bushmen are not alone in the Kalahari. They are not even the majority people there. Rather, Bushman communities frequently share their land and its resources with Ovambo, Herero, Khoekhoe, Tswana, whites, ‘Coloured people’, Basters and many others. Even these groups are diverse in several ways, not only in traditional lifestyles (herder, rancher, white-collar worker and so on), but also in terms of social class and education. The Kalahari happens to be one of the least populous regions of the earth. Yet the environments are fragile, water is limited and activities like livestock rearing require lots more land than other existences. My earliest intention as a field researcher had been to study ethnicity, and in this chapter I return to that topic at a theoretical level. There are more than 200 ethnic group names in the literature, and many are synonyms (for example, there are at least 23 labels for the !Xoõ, and one of these, ≠Hoã, is also the name for another small group). My goal here is explore what it means to adhere to any of these labels.